Like anyone who’s played their way through the last 30 years (or more) of Hideo Kojima’s work, I’ve come to expect a certain degree of eccentricity from AAA gaming’s most distinctive auteur. Be that as it may, Kojima’s fetishistic cinephilia made “Death Stranding” — its cast partially composed of famous directors whose photorealistic likenesses are embodied by actors via performance capture — a uniquely strange experience for movie people like me.
Heartman, a scientist who dies every 21 minutes (only to get shocked back to life by the battery pack on his chest shortly thereafter), is modeled after Nicolas Winding Refn. Deadman, a researcher whose body has been Frankensteined together from borrowed parts, is naturally made to resemble Guillermo del Toro. A character known as “The Film Director,” seen only in hologram, is a perfect scan of Jordan Vogt-Roberts, whose long-gestating “Metal Gear Solid” adaptation will probably never be seen at all. (Casting the “Death Stranding” movie that Michael Sarnoski is making for A24 will either be very easy, or very, very hard.)
It would be an understatement to say that Kojima has doubled down on that particular strangeness in his latest sequel. The “Naked Raiden” sequence from “Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty” might still be unbeatable for sheer conceptual surreality, but nothing in that game took me out quite like the early bit in “Death Stranding 2: On the Beach” when the living puppet the protagonist now carries around on his waist — a perfect representation of “In the Fade” director Fatih Akin — helpfully suggests that you throw him up in the air so that he can relay the exact location of some nearby smugglers. What’s next, a “Moby Dick”-inspired flashback that swaps out Captain Ahab for “Fury Road” mastermind George Miller? Of course it is.
Moments like these happen every 20 minutes or so throughout this roughly 45-hour adventure (the cast of which swells to include an entire festival’s worth of recognizable filmmakers, to say nothing of the beautiful performances by world-class actors like Norman Reedus, Luca Marinelli, and especially Léa Seydoux), and while the uncanniness of watching Refn get resurrected in the middle of a conversation never quite fades away, the distraction only makes it all the more impressive that Kojima is able to craft his characters into people all their own.
And it’s crucial that he can, because the power of “On the Beach” — which builds on the foundation of its predecessor to create one of the most evocative and involving console games I’ve ever played — depends on your affection for its motley crew of weirdos. And, for that matter, on their affection for each other.
Where the first “Death Stranding,” a post-apocalyptic epic set in the aftermath of a cataclysmic event that saw the world of the dead bleed into the world of the living, was a story about the absence of human connection, this sequel is equally focused on the hardships of navigating it. And where the previous game’s focus on isolation anticipated the COVID pandemic that arrived just a few months after its release (survivors have burrowed themselves inside underground bunkers, leaving the protagonist to fetch them packages as he moves west across the United Cities of America while bringing them all together on the same network), the Australia-set “On the Beach” points forward to a present in which the world is at risk of being undone by the same tools that promised to bring it together.
As is his wont, Kojima asks a simple question in a compelling and hilariously strange fashion: “Should we have connected?” And while I can only pray that the second “Death Stranding” isn’t quite as prescient as the first one, there’s something all too close about its story of staring extinction in the face and searching for reasons to postpone it. Kojima’s sequel may lack the “WTF is a ‘Strand’ game?” novelty of the original, but it one-ups the “Death Stranding” experience on every conceivable level while delivering another uncannily timed quest about grieving the end of one world while standing at the precipice of a new one.
If “On the Beach” does more to refine its franchise than it does to evolve it, that lack of surprise doesn’t do anything to diminish the relevance of the Kōbō Abe quote that pops up along the way: “To live is to imagine ourselves in the future, and there we inevitably arrive. Yet our place in said future may not be the one we envision.” At heart, this is a fantasy about the hard work — and the teamwork — of rescuing Tomorrow from the clutches of today, and I can think of no higher praise for a batshit game I beat the same night that America fumbled its way towards World War III that its hyper-convoluted message of hope and togetherness made a lot of sense to me.
If you haven’t played the first “Death Stranding,” there’s very little chance that it will make any sense to you, and the 17-slide recap that players can access from the main menu of “On the Beach” isn’t going to make up the difference. But just to offer some context for the curious: You once play as Sam Bridges (Norman Reedus), the same immortal courier who linked America together with the help of an unborn fetus who allowed him to sense the presence of the dead (and that’s arguably the most normal detail of the first game). After extending the Chiral Network across the UCA and facilitating the potential extinction of all humanity in the process, Sam illegally freed his baby friend from its artificial womb and snuck across the Mexican border in search of a place where he might raise the girl in peace.
Alas, “On the Beach” is only a few hours old before something happens to little Lou. On the one hand, I’m obviously trying to be coy about the details of a story that’s best experienced as you play through it. On the other hand, I say “something” because — until near the very end of the game — exactly what happens to Sam’s one-year-old toddler is extremely unclear and seldom discussed. All I can tell you is that bad guys show up, our old pal Fragile (Seydoux) isn’t able to fight them off, and Lou suddenly reverts back into the “Bridge Baby” that Sam equips on his latest mission.
You see, a warp-like “Plate Gate” has opened between Mexico and Australia, and Sam has been hired by a private company — not the UCA government — to bring the Aussies onto the Chiral Network in the hope that doing so might open up more portals in the ocean of interdimensional tar that has formed between continents. And so, with the help of a rapidly expanding crew that soon grows to include Tarman, Deadman, Heartman, Dollman, Fragile, the President of the Automated Public Assistance Company, a robotic mannequin named Charlie, and a mysterious blonde girl called Tomorrow (Elle Fanning, who emerges from the tar in a chrysalis of silent trauma), Sam heads down under and begins working his way clockwise around the country.
The circularity of the game’s macro design allows for a more organic and palpably interconnected open world than the UCA offered in the original. Not only does that shape allow for a constant sense of accomplishment as you bring Australia back online (in addition to one of the most rewarding moments I’ve ever had playing a video game, when a climbing rope I’d casually planted at the end of the prologue helped save me from a climactic death slog more than 40 hours allow), but it also reinforces the circular nature of Kojima’s storytelling, which this franchise brings to the fore with its focus on the cyclicality of life, death, and extinction. I couldn’t spoil certain revelations if I tried, but it’s safe to say that “On the Beach” mines a rare beauty from history’s penchant for repeating itself — it’s no accident that near-silent bad guy Neil Vana (Marinelli) is a dead ringer for Solid Snake, or that the boss fights against his team of ghost soldiers are largely identical to the first game’s battles with tortured father figure Clifford Unger (Mads Mikkelsen).
“Death Stranding 2: On the Beach”Every hard-won inch of progress in “On the Beach” is haunted by a loss of equal measure, which emphasizes — in a more literal way than most other games possibly could — the extent to which the player’s journey is also their ultimate destination (the story’s delicate whimper of a non-ending similarly lends itself to that feeling, albeit in less satisfying fashion). To that point, anyone who played “Death Stranding” should know to expect a whole lot of journeying.
Trekking around the whole of Australia is significantly more fun than it was to walk across the UCA due to quality-of-life issues, delightful new innovations (including a monorail that I was obsessed with rebuilding, and a sleek black coffin you can ride like a rocket-powered surfboard), and a geographically diverse game world that is somehow even more immersive than that of the original. The improved combat system is still a sore point, if only because its elaborate arsenal and frequent invitations toward stealth are wasted on a game where charging at enemies with a shotgun works great 99% of the time, but navigating the map — and rebuilding its infrastructure — is more addictive than ever, and dominates the majority of the player’s time.
I can’t tell you how many hours of sleep I lost in order to deliver “just one more package,” the unique thrill of which is deepened by two specific factors above all others. The first is the feeling that you’re actually working to create a new world, a feeling again reinforced by the fact that other players can use every road, bridge, and tool you create (and vice versa). I got a little rush of dopamine every time the game informed me that another person had benefited from something I’d done, which is a remarkable sensation for a piece of entertainment to impart at a time of such egocentric selfishness, and a reward that deepens Sam’s more transactional relationship with the various survivors he meets along the way (who give him new tools in exchange for the packages he delivers to them). Eventually, I found an equal joy in pouring my precious resources into mines and monorail tracks that I wasn’t able to complete myself — I would happily schlep resins and “special alloys” halfway up a mountain just for the satisfaction of making life easier for someone I’d never get to meet.
Which brings me to the second factor that makes the new “Death Stranding” so hard to put down: Its nagging sense of precarity. “On the Beach” is not a hard game in the traditional sense (Sam is literally immortal, and most of the boss fights are a cinch), but it’s an extremely arduous one, and the player is never more than a stumble away from losing and/or destroying cargo they may never get back. While the relief of delivering packages intact is palpable enough during the journey’s frictionless early stretches, it blooms into a diabolical kind of paranoia whenever Sam is stripped of his shortcuts and forced to hoof 250 kilograms of crap across an enormous mountain in whiteout conditions. To a significantly more satisfying degree than in the previous chapter, “On the Beach” subverts the typical stakes of a video game; “dying” is irrelevant, but what you’re living for is always top of mind.
That inescapable sense of responsibility, along with the endorphin rush of forging relationships with strangers, allows for a singularly beautiful harmony between form and content, which is rare for a medium in which even the most heroic characters are often required to murder thousands of people (Sam only uses non-lethal ammo, as killing someone would risk a catastrophic “Voidout”). The same could be said of the original “Death Stranding,” which likewise illustrated that a “stick” could prod people into action while a “rope” could be fashioned into a noose. “On the Beach” strikes a more effective chord for its focus on the hard work of making connections in a world where people have the technology to be perfectly isolated.
Without putting too fine a point on things (a rather uncharacteristic show of restraint), Kojima envisions a ruined future where colonization-minded corporations are more powerful than governments, AI is serving its own ends, and humanity’s determination to forestall its own doom is imperilling the basic purpose and possibility of its survival. Like many of Kojima’s stories, “On the Beach” vamps and vamps until it buries players under an avalanche of exposition during its final chapters, but the hours you spend becoming endeared to its characters — an eternally pregnant woman whose womb is frozen in time, an OBGYN who can phase her hands through matter, and, of course, a porter who’s grieving the loss of the only tomorrow he ever believed in — lend backbreaking weight to Kojima’s poptimistic belief that humanity has the potential to emerge stronger from its latest brush with extinction.
So does the time you spend trudging around this spectacular game world, every detail of which betrays the human touch of its design. I awed at the raw spectacle of Kojima’s Australia on a regular basis, but found myself even more impressed by the ambient beauty that he and his collaborators have suffused into every moment. Fellow porters huffing their way up a hillside; the stars twinkling above the desert sand; the layered waves of Caroline Polachek’s staggeringly beautiful title song cresting over the horizon at just the right moment. (The unparalleled soundscape might be the game’s most purely cinematic virtue, even more so than its cast of auteurs and fantastically well-staged cut-scenes.) Some might continue to scoff at a franchise that asks you to play as an Amazon deliveryman, but I found greater — and richer — satisfaction in this glorified walking simulator than I have in just about any other open-world video game I’ve ever played.
“On the Beach” might argue that we can never truly escape extinction, but it makes an even more compelling case that we endure through the bridges we create between the past and the future. Tomorrow, this story insists, is never exactly what you imagined it to be. And by the time players reach the insane final battle of Kojima’s latest plea, the weirdest thing about this mega-bizarre masterpiece is how convincingly it finds a silver lining in the prospect of our self-annihilation.
“Death Stranding 2: On the Beach” will be released for the PlayStation 5 on Thursday, June 26.
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