When Death Stranding came out in 2019, I did what a lot of people apparently did: Played it for an hour, thought it was a bit weird, and didn't pick it up again until years later (in my case, 2022). So when a sequel to the game was announced, I wondered what Hideo Kojima could possibly do in a follow-up to his strangest game yet. After playing Death Stranding 2 for 40-plus hours, he did quite a bit.
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach should have been called Death Stranding 2: Quality of Life, because that's what this game is. From top to bottom, Kojima Productions made so many improvements to the original, making a weird delivery-sim game that is quite relaxing. Those improvements may not be enough to attract people who avoided the original, yet the players coming back are going to find a sense of calmness that you could assume Kojima wanted to deliver with his game.
In the sequel, players are back in the role of Sam Porter, performed once again by Norman Reedus, who has found a place in Mexico to live his life with Lou, the former Bridge Baby who spent her first years in a pod. Fragile, Sam's somewhat love interest and fellow delivery person, seeks out Sam to do some deliveries to re-establish the chiral network within the country. As he's away, something terrible happens to Fragile and Lou, and without spoiling it, months pass, and Sam's services are called upon again. This time, he must travel to Australia and reconnect the entire country, just like he did with America in the first game.
Watch this: Unboxing the Death Stranding 2 PS5 Controller 00:45
Safe to say, if you never played Death Stranding, none of that made any sense, and that's on par with everyone's experience who played the game initially. The whole world of Death Stranding is less about realism and more about vibes. Beached things, voidouts, chiralium, cryptobiotes and so much of this game's world doesn't make a lick of sense if you try to think of it regarding the science of the real world, but when you get to the basic theme of the game, which is reaching out to other people and forming strong bonds with each other, then everything does make a certain sense. There are people who want the world to heal by coming together, while there are others who want to destroy those bonds. Welcome to Death Stranding.
Make it make sense
That whole spiel about Death Stranding 2's story is the gist of it, yet there are new and old characters to meet and more of the world to learn about. That brings to one of the biggest quality of life (QoL) improvements to the game: Corpus. Lots of games have their own in-game encyclopedia, but it's apparent that Kojima Productions knew how confusing the game's story could get. So to help navigate that, the Corpus gets updated all the time, and there will be an on-screen notification about the new info as soon as it's mentioned, and you can jump right into understanding what was said.
Not only does it make Death Stranding 2 easier to understand, it also helps when you did what I and a lot of others did with the original and started it only to never come back to it years later. Now, as soon as you load a save and come back to the game, it will bring up the Corpus to give you a rundown of where you are in the story.
Again, this seems like not a big deal in most games, but the thing that sets apart Death Stranding is this weird world -- where, for instance, babies are extracted from their brain-dead mothers and put in pods that are meant to emulate a womb so that they can be used as a warning system to detect dead souls made up of antimatter that are stranded in the world of the living and can make this pool of tar to capture people thus causing an explosion being enough to decimate a city when they come in contact. It's quite a feat to implement a feature to help a player understand that concept, which is what Corpus helps with.
Higgs is back. Kojima Productions/Screenshot by CNET
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