Gaming

Exactly What Is Happening In ‘Death Stranding’, Hideo Kojima’s Wild New Game?

The first trailer didn't drop many clues.

by Joseph Earp  31 May 2019
Death Stranding trailer is wild

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For the last few years, we’ve slowly been fed scraps of information about the new game from Metal Gear legend Hideo Kojima, Death Stranding. And because this is Kojima, most of what we’ve been getting has been delicious, depraved nonsense.

First, we heard that the game’s name was cribbed from suicidal whale behaviour. Then, we got a teaser that heavily featured a baby growing in someone’s goddamn throat. And finally, we heard word about the cast, which featured everyone from Walking Dead favourite Norman Reedus to The Shape Of Water director Guillermo Del Toro.

But what we didn’t get throughout any of this process was a general shape of what the game was actually going to play like. And now, following a massive nine-minute trailer dropped yesterday… well, we still don’t know what the hell is going on.

Rather than focus on say, the combat mechanic or worldbuilding, the trailer instead focuses on usual Kojima madness, including but not limited to the extensive use of weightless ladders (which, presumably, will form the backbone of the actual game), a bunch of menacing characters with the world’s wildest names (big shoutout to my friend Die Hardman), a baby in a jar, and what looks like flashbacks to some kind of World War.

A little more illuminating has been a post on Kojima’s Twitter page, which calls Death Stranding a “completely new type of action game.”

According to information cribbed from the game’s website, much of what makes Death Stranding unusual is its reduced focus on murder. Apparently, the game will be completeable “almost” bloodlessly. More than that, there’s actually no ‘game over’ title screen — killed characters will wake up in a dreamlike upside-down world, which they’ll have to navigate their way back through in order to reach reality.

So yeah, so far so Kojima.

Understandably, since the trailer dropped, the internet has reacted with a wave of baffled but deeply affectionate memes.

Of particular attention has been Die Hardman, who, fingers crossed, will become a new shining star in gaming when Death Stranding actually drops.

Death Stranding drops on November 8. If you pre-order the game now, you can get your hands on a plastic toy baby.