We open with a scene of touching paternal intimacy. Sam Porter Bridges is sitting with a baby strapped to his chest, at the top of a mountain in northern Mexico. The young child is Lou (BB of the first Death Stranding), no longer attached to Sam in a creepy jar but a regular baby carrier. The pair’s hands touch, one big, one small, the deftly rendered physical contact framed by a gigantic powder-blue sky and a panoramic landscape riven by deep rocky gorges. Sam picks himself up, seeming to dance fleet-footed all the way down the spindly, photorealistic ridges in front of him. As he runs, sometimes bounding, Lou giggles with delight.
So begins Death Stranding 2: On The Beach, the sequel to writer-director Hideo Kojima’s divisive sci-fi epic of 2019. Every inch of the multitudinous original seemed to teem with meaning. It was a critique of the gig economy, a send-up of social media, and a powerful meditation on environmental disaster. The follow-up is both more and less ambitious. Kojima doubles down on the metaphysical strangeness of his storytelling while, somewhat surprisingly, foregrounding more conventional aspects of his work, like the stealth and action scenarios which defined the Metal Gear series. (Whisper it, there are moments when Death Stranding 2 plays like the spiritual successor to 2015’s Metal Gear Solid V: Phantom Pain.)
Make no mistake, though. This game unequivocally embraces its sequel status. It’s bigger, brighter, and more accessible. It also sees Kojima, now in his 60s, stepping into a new role. He’s not just modern video games’ postmodern prophet and arch stylist, he has become its preeminent sentimentalist.
The more overtly emotional tone is immediately apparent. Sam lives with Lou, who is now 11 months old, in the off-grid wilds of Mexico. Their home, a state-of-the-art bunker, is awash with the lower-tech paraphernalia of child-rearing: high chair, cot, furry animals, and building blocks. Sweet photos of father and daughter adorn the walls and fridge door. But within minutes, this picture of domestic bliss is interrupted by Léa Seydoux returning as the enigmatic Fragile. She has a mission for Sam. He needs to connect Mexico to the spooky, supercharged internet known as the chiral network.
However, Mexico is just the prologue. Sam returns soon enough to find his home life completely shattered. The porter withdraws into a state of numb isolation, before Fragile attempts to coax him out of it with one more job. This time she wants him to link up the whole of Australia.
It’s fast-paced stuff. Almost immediately, you’re inhaling esoteric lore and confusing acronyms. Plate Gates, Beach Water, APAS 4000. Don’t worry too much about the details, though, because, similar to Final Fantasy XVI, there is an in-game lore tracker called the Corpus.
Long story short, the private corporation APAC (or the Automated Public Assistance Company) is overseeing the connection of Australia. Fragile’s own organisation, Drawbridge, is the one contracted to carry out the mission. Enter a cast of characters including film director George Miller as the charming and grandfatherly Tarman, Elle Fanning as the displaced teen Tomorrow, and Turkish-German film director Fatih Akin, whose likeness is used for the sweet, supportive stop-motion puppet Dollman. There is a hub, of sorts, the submarine-esque vessel called the DHV Magellan (named after the Portuguese explorer who charted a course east). Gradually your crew expands. This is not the lonesome journey of the first Death Stranding but one of tender togetherness. These people become a second family for the bereaved Sam.
As you wrangle with the key actors, you must also wrestle with the new gameplay additions. The game encourages you to create a Watchtower, a tall structure that allows Sam to enjoy a birds-eye view of his surroundings. Throw one up near an enemy camp and you’re able to start tagging enemies. What happens next is entirely your choice. Pick goons off at a distance, run in all guns blazing, sneak about the long grass and rusting outbuildings. Every aspect of combat is snappy and muscular: each kill (or incapacitation because Sam’s weaponry is non-lethal) causes time to slow down Matrix-style; stealth takedowns, just like the first game, are an anime-esque blur of rope-tying virtuosity.
The greater emphasis on enemy encounters feels like a concession to players who might have felt (with some justification) that combat was an afterthought in the original. Not so in the sequel, which Kojima has compared to James Cameron’s 1986 popcorn action movie Aliens. Now, there are even sword-wielding robo-samurai. And yet, in seeking to give players more tools, more guns, more enemies, and, fundamentally, more ways to express themselves aggressively, something of Death Stranding’s radically slow, radically non-violent design ethos has been lost.
You can argue this both ways. Has Kojima diluted or expanded his vision in a bid to satisfy those who bounced off the uncompromising mechanics of the first game? The question looms throughout, notably with the greater emphasis on vehicular traversal. More so than in the first game, you will speed across the continent, eating up kilometers of dusty outback on a cutting-edge three-wheeled motorcycle (or bruising pick-up truck).
The music player feels like another compromise for the player who expects more control of their experience. You’re able to select any unlocked song or indeed create playlists for Sam. Music in the first game, like the hushed folk-pop of Low Roar, was doled out solely at key moments, usually as you neared a settlement, the camera pulling back with cinematic verve to frame the smallness of Sam against the expansive moss-covered landscape. Now you can have woodsy Americana and chilly synth-pop blaring in your ears at practically all times, should you desire.
Still, for all the ways Death Stranding 2 is snappier, more amenable to players, and, as a result, inarguably less daring from a design perspective, it is still beautifully odd by triple-A standards. Consider the stark and rugged majesty of Australia, which feels no less primordial than the moss-covered U.S. of the original. In many ways, it is an even better setting to explore the space-time havoc wrecked by the titular Death Stranding (the cataclysmic explosive event that opened a portal between the realms of living and the dead).
One type of scenario lingers in the mind. You’re crouching amid a swarm of BTs, the shimmering, spectral beings attached to another dimension by flickering umbilical cords. You’re enclosed by the ancient red rock of Australia, using cutting-edge gadgets to navigate past these deadly foes (in what feels like another concession to the player, Sam can actually stealth takedown BTs once he has unlocked – wait for it – a blood-powered boomerang). The sense of temporal drift embodied in these images of ghosts, geology, and avant-garde tech is wonderfully uncanny. The game feels as if it stretches into both the prehistoric past and the sci-fi future, all while remaining, undeniably, in the present as Sam gasps for breath, desperately trying to go unnoticed.
The landscape offers more than visual splendour and aching poetry. It affects how you play. The game periodically unleashes mountain-dislodging earthquakes, flash floods, bush fires, and vision-obscuring sandstorms. You will be called on to dodge massive boulders.
Amid this maelstrom of environmental upheaval and extreme weather, Death Stranding 2 is capable – perhaps a little less frequently than the original – of delivering quieter moments whose strangeness causes the brain to jolt. At one point, driving through a vast, Mars-red desert of supersized dunes, I locked eyes on a lone kangaroo. I stopped and so did they. As the creature stared straight back at me, their eyes illuminated by my vehicle’s headlights, time itself seemed to also stop. The kangaroo’s presence felt miraculous in a world where most life has been wiped out (thanks to the meteorological phenomena known as timefall, rain which causes anything it touches to age rapidly). You will encounter other creatures, like emus and echidnas, but the open world is not stuffed, as some post-apocalyptic games are, with wildlife. The emptiness is the point; we should lament the bleeding of nature that has taken place.
That said, Death Stranding 2 isn’t just a game of sadness and wonder. Kojima’s slapstick humour frequently surfaces in cheerily emergent fashion. Late in the game, I embarked on an especially gruelling hike over the Himalaya-sized mountains which have inexplicably risen in Australia’s centre. I plotted my route carefully, sticking to the rocky outcrops along the spine of the mountain range. I was being careful – so careful! – until I misjudged a single foot placement. Sam tripped, the momentum causing him and his entire pack to keel over awkwardly. Before I could course-correct, human and cargo tumbled down a nearly vertical sheet of snow, hundreds of meters of ground lost in one calamitous trip.
Connection, of course, was the first game’s great theme. Second time around, Kojima complicates the idea without greatly altering how you actually connect with other players (you’re still sharing infrastructure and spamming the environment with jingly holographic emojis). It’s no longer a governmental agency handling the assembly of the internet but a private organisation. Sam initially eyes them with suspicion, making the kind of point that you’re more likely to hear on a leftist tech podcast than a blockbuster video game. Is the expansion of the chiral network in Australia just a means of expanding the organisation’s influence? Is the chiral network a front for digital and, by extension, actual colonialism?
Kojima toys with these questions before ultimately subsuming them within a story that smartly centers on the game’s emotional core: Sam’s drastically changed world. His way of coping? Work. The porter gets busy, putting one foot in front of the other to make deliveries – a distraction, yes, but who can blame him? Like the original, Death Stranding 2’s conflict eventually rises to biblical proportions. Troy Baker is gloriously hammy again as Higgs, wielding a flame-thrower electric guitar which squeals as he doles out maximum pain. Bare chests abound; the lonely stomping through the wilderness becomes a distant memory. The final hours of the game are bombastic and, in truth, more than a little messy. Maybe unsurprisingly, the most satisfying narrative payoffs don’t involve the fate of the world but Sam himself. These land like a heavyweight gut punch.
If there was a defining set of images from the first Death Stranding (beyond, of course, the baby in a glass vessel) it was the straining, bulging, sinewy body of Sam. We clapped eyes on it during each shower, every time he heaved to lift his pack, and with every leaden step forward he took.
These images abound in the sequel but they’ve been usurped, if not in regularity, then certainly in importance, by another set of bodily images: that of human contact, not just involving Sam but the cast of supporting characters. Mouths kissing, the aforementioned hands touching, all mo-capped and rendered with the same kind of obsessive eye for detail that is reserved for our hero. During one momentous snog, we see the pair’s noses squidge against one another: it is ungainly, a little awkward, yet perfect in its imperfection.
Fragile sums it up best: “Chiralgrams [the game’s term for holograms] are great but nothing beats a hug.” The line is quintessentially Kojima: clunky, obvious, kind of brilliant. Seydoux, to her great credit, makes it sound like the most natural thing in the world. Fragile’s right, and it’s this committedly touchy-feely quality that feels most radical, even if the overall game is – while undeniably grander – somewhat safer than the original.
For those who rolled their eyes at much of the first game, Death Stranding 2 will likely inspire a similar reaction. But there is no doubt that Kojima remains wide-eyed. This big, absurd game is, in many ways, the ultimate synthesis of the writer-director’s idiosyncrasies and obsessions while containing, amid the noise, perhaps his clearest message yet. The world may be a mess but its problems cannot be solved alone by communicating over the internet – indeed, retreating into it. Go, step outside. Don’t just touch grass; embrace another person.
Code for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach was provided for review by the Sony Computer Entertainment.
