There’s an only somewhat facetious running joke in gaming circles about Kojima Hideo as an unwitting Nostradamus, what with Metal Gear Solid 2’s absurdist twist ending foretelling the rise of meme culture—and, now, generative A.I.—with rather striking, chilling accuracy. The first Death Stranding released in November 2019, a mere four months before Covid-19 would lock us behind closed doors, leaving us starving for human contact. It has to do something to a man to see life eerily echo his art on such an immense scale not once, but twice, so Death Stranding 2: On the Beach would be a fascinating piece of work just by virtue of watching Kojima wrestle with what isolation does to the human soul while actually living it.
The answer Kojima comes up with is complicated, and it doesn’t take tangible shape until the later hours, when Sam Porter Bridges (Norman Reedus) finds out who’s bankrolling his new mandate to connect Mexico and Australia to the same afterlife-powered network that sent him from sea to shining sea in the first game. Here, his mysterious benefactor’s motivations lean toward the sneering and cynical—a colonizer’s mindset extending into the realm of the dead. It’s the closest Death Stranding 2 comes to commentary on the state of America post-Covid, and it feels vestigial to the rest of the game. If its predecessor was about human connection on the macro level, Death Stranding 2 is rather pointedly operating on the level of the interpersonal.
A devastating loss early on threatens to shatter Sam’s already tenuous grip on sanity, and it’s only when fellow porter Fragile (Léa Seydoux) shows up that he finds a way to channel his grief into something productive. There’s something to be said for the actual benefits of drowning oneself in work after a tragedy, but Sam having a walkabout in the Australian outback while delivering goods and connectivity to another isolated nation isn’t without poignancy and beauty. The same indescribably gratifying task-based loop of on-foot package delivery that made the first game so captivating is once again at play here, aided immensely by online features that let people around the world contribute to the effort of rebuilding Australia’s infrastructure.
Death Stranding 2, though, is less withholding when it comes to onboarding players. The first game took maybe a dozen hours to finally give Sam a vehicle, and longer than that to grant him access to ziplines and auto-delivery robots. In stark contrast, Sam can start zooming around on a motorized tricycle in the sequel’s prologue area in Mexico, after the third major delivery.
The human marauders that occupy the world and prey on porters show up earlier here, and they’re not much for the tranquilizer sniper rifle that Sam gets in the early going. One of the new online-enabled options involves the community sharing in the task of gathering enough materials to build a monorail system that circles the entire continent. The game is significantly more generous than its predecessor when it comes to giving the player free reign to solve the various problems of traversal, and motivating you to do so.
Death Stranding 2 more or less demands that you be familiar with the first game for any of it to make sense. But even for those who aren’t, a new, ever-evolving glossary feature—greatly reminiscent of the excellent contextual encyclopedia prompts in Final Fantasy XVI—does a surprisingly thorough job of explaining the game’s weirder lore in simple terms.
To the game’s mild detriment, there’s a greater focus on combat compared to its predecessor. The gunplay and Sam’s arsenal have their charms—and having Metal Gear Solid and Ghost in the Shell production designer Shinkawa Y?ji back in the saddle cuts the game a lot of slack—but they often feel incongruous with the more pacifist nature of the narrative. At the very least, Kojima seems self-aware enough to have multiple characters justify the need for combat across the campaign, while condemning how pervasive this sort of violence is in America.
Death Stranding 2 otherwise doesn’t mess too much with the formula of the first game. This is a meditative experience, where Sam saving the world largely comes down to him bringing cloistered communities the supplies they need to survive and thrive. It helps that the great shipping adventure happens in a new biome whose natural—and unnatural—beauty is unique to Australia. Also like its predecessor, Death Stranding 2’s open world feels like a perpetual antagonist that’s only beaten into submission by players walking, driving, climbing, and surfing its crevices and mountains and rivers until wilderness submits, flattening into dusty trails.
Of course, the other major part of the equation is Kojima’s bespoke brand of weird. At his best, his nerdily surreal sensibilities have led him to gift the world with one of the most magnificently curated and implemented licensed soundtracks in any moving medium. They also lead him to cast renowned film directors and actors in parts that Hollywood would never dream of.
Here, Sam and a doll based on Turkish-German director Fatih Akin are piloted by a captain played by George Miller to a survivalist compound, in order to rescue a man played by RRR director S.S. Rajamouli. All the while, you’re waiting for Fragile to teach Elle Fanning’s Tomorrow how to murder robot mechs with her bare hands, and as a Caroline Polachek song plays on your radio. This is a confluence of events that will never happen again.
On the other hand, Kojima’s unassailable weirdness leads him to introduce major characters with robotic dance-offs, punctuate big emotional plot points with social media “like” emojis, and have main antagonist Higgs’s (Troy Baker) weapon of choice be a flame-throwing guitar. Women remain a Kojima problem point. While he’s gotten better at giving them emotional arcs—well-drawn characters like Debra Wilson’s otherworldly OB-GYN and Alissa Jung’s turn as Sam’s wife Lucy are miles away from “the sniper is sexy because she breathes through her skin”—he’s still unable to conceive of women who aren’t mothers or murder dolls.
Even with all of Kojima’s peculiarities and deficiencies as a storyteller on full display, the energy, heart, and soul of Death Stranding 2 are undeniable. If Kojima is indeed gifted (or cursed) with foresight, it says much about his outlook on the world that so much of the game’s focus is on carefully bringing together characters faced with inconceivably sad circumstances, and relishing, unashamed, in every simple, goofy moment they share to cheer each other up. If Kojima is trying to will anything into reality here, it’s hope. And he does it by having his characters repeat, time and again, that “death will not tear us apart.” Family and community will save us. We’ve never needed one of Kojima’s predictions to come true more than right now.
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