Exploring Hideo Kojima's new Perspective as he prepares delivery of the sequel to Death stranding

BY SIMON PARKIN

Game Death Stranding 2: On The Beach Developer Kojima Productions Publisher SIE Format PS5 Release June 24

When Death Stranding arrived in November 2019, several months before the COVID-19 pandemic upended our lives and outlooks, it was widely considered the strangest mainstream videogame we’d ever seen. The first project by Hideo Kojima following a messy divorce from Konami, the company at which he made his name, the game defied convention or easy summary. Its protagonist, portrayed by The Walking Dead’s Norman Reedus, was a courier named Sam Porter Bridges, and the game mainly involved trudging across desolate, ankle-spraining terrain with an infant strapped to his chest, while burdened with luggage and chased by ghosts.

Looking back at the game, Kojima concedes that it was “weird”. One of Bridges’ first tasks was, remember, to hoist the US President’s cadaver on his back, on a cross-country dash to a local incinerator. But beneath the eccentricity there was also something vaguely humorous about its central challenge: to carry heavy cargo upon your back across North America without tripping. The taller the load, the greater the chance you’d topple. It’s the kind of idea you might expect to find in the work of an indie darling such as Bennett Foddy (see p38). And yet, with Sony’s keen backing, and Kojima’s attention-grasping reputation, a game founded on an indie-esque fancy was rendered as an extravagant epic, one featuring celebrities scanned into the game in screamingly high definition, plus a wistful, expensive soundtrack and a story whose looming relevance nobody foresaw.

THE SEQUEL, HE DECIDED, WOULD BE A CAUTIONARY TALE ABOUT THE RISKS OF RELYING UPON DIGITAL CONNECTEDNESS

Sam Bridges is mostly a silent protagonist, acting as an eavesdropper to the interactions that occur around him between the chatty supporting cast

Set in a fragmented America, Death Stranding portrayed a world in which society had collapsed into isolated pockets, connected only by the delivery people who hauled essentials between them. Porters such as Bridges were the new lifeblood of civilisation – not soldiers, not scientists, but logistics workers. At launch, reactions were divided. Some praised the game as visionary, a slow and meditative counterpoint to the combat-heavy overfamiliarity of big-budget games; others derided it as self-indulgent and odd. And then, shortly after its release, everyone entered a world of quarantine, masks and contactless delivery. We were cut off from our friends and family members. Toilet roll became scarce. Death Stranding’s vision of human connection maintained through screens and packages suddenly felt less like speculative fiction and more like an act of prophecy.

Kojima had already written the script for a sequel. Then, during the pandemic, he fell severely ill. He won’t discuss the specifics, but it was serious enough to trigger in him something of an existential crisis, a renewed eagerness to make the kinds of games “that don’t already exist in the world”, ones with resonant messages. When he recovered, he found himself back in his studio’s cavernous office, but almost completely alone. “Everyone else was working remotely,” he says. “I felt that perhaps I would never meet anyone again.”

He watched as the world shifted to online meetings: “We were having drinking parties and school events, but now entirely online, an almost entirely digital existence.” It felt exactly like the chiral network, Death Stranding’s version of the Internet, which protagonist Sam Bridges was tasked with bringing online, city by city. And yet, rather than feeling the satisfaction of a proven prophet, Kojima felt only dismay. “Something had been lost,” he says. “Physically, we weren’t connected any more. Nobody could travel. Humans can’t be fully human if they can’t travel any more.” Yes, Zoom and all the other tools had ostensibly brought us together. But online connection, Kojima realised, was not the catch-all cure that his game had suggested to the global epidemic of isolation and loneliness.

The pandemic passed, but the fragmentation and yearning for reconnection? Those remained. Kojima tore up the story he had written for Death Stranding 2. The sequel, he decided, would instead be a cautionary tale about the risks of relying upon digital connectedness in lieu of physical presence. ‘Should we have connected?’ became Death Stranding 2’s motivating question.