When Hideo Kojima—the man fashioned into a video game auteur out of his work on Metal Gear Solid—launched his debut title under the newly formed Kojima Productions in 2019, Death Stranding arrived shrouded in mystery and hype. Every Death Stranding trailer was full of cryptic imagery and spectral apparitions, and its stacked cast featuring Norman Reedus, Léa Seydoux, and Mads Mikkelsen set expectations sky-high. It was also the first title to come from the creator following a messy and public exodus from Konami. Would Kojima once again rewrite the rules of game design?
Upon release, Death Stranding didn’t disappoint so much as it defied prediction. At its core, it was an immersive, slow-burning post-apocalyptic courier simulator. Players took control of Sam Porter Bridges, a pulp comics-esque naming convention of a protagonist suffering from aphenphosmphobia, an extreme fear of being touched, tasked with completing a herculean cross country trek across haunted landscapes by plagued eldritch horrors with the help of a baby in a container on his chest—avoiding environmental hazards and balancing parcels on every available piece of real estate on his body to “reconnect America.” Reductively, Death Stranding is regarded in gaming circles as a “triple-A” indie game, with a weird (but not overly confusingly dense) world-building serving as the connective tissue propelling every careful footstep on Sam’s odyssey. What Death Stranding lacks in conventional thrills, it made up for with sheer conceptual weight.
And yes—it eerily echoed real life in ways no one expected. The game’s premise, centered on isolation, bunkered survivors, and the life-or-death role of delivery drivers, landed eerily close to home mere months before the world locked down due to a global pandemic. It was dubbed “the game that predicted 2020,” not a first for Kojima, and not unfairly.
In the Case of the First Death Stranding
Being a “big idea game” comes with its own set of challenges. Its narrative often gets buried beneath a slow drip of actual story progression, unraveling across long stretches of gameplay that make the usual open-world promise of “you see that mountain, you can go there” feel strangely perfunctory. Former Kotaku writer Tim Rogers once likened it to eating your vegetables before dessert, but I’d argue it’s closer to gaming’s purest example of the carrot-on-a-stick design—except here, the carrot is a 10-minute cutscene stylized as gaming’s navel-gazing at wanting to be cinema, and the stick is a seven-hour hike.
Kojima’s eccentric roster of superpowered, trauma-scarred outcasts occasionally interrupts the lonely, meditative rhythm of traversal with dense lore drops laced in pun-heavy dialogue. At times, it’s profound; at others, it teeters dangerously close to groan-worthy. Much of Death Stranding‘s script leans into Kojima’s newfound signature use of homonyms and wordplay—an approach that often thrives in Japanese, a language rich in double meanings and visual punning through kanji. There, it probably lands with layered nuance; in English, it falls somewhere between a dad joke and a freshman poetry slam stanza.
Still, despite its long stretches of powerwalking monotony, the challengingly Metal Gear-esque moments of tactical espionage, Monster Energy product placement, and the memes about Norman Reedus and his funky fetus that spawned endless parody, there’s a rich, strange beauty to the first Death Stranding. It’s a game worth experiencing once, and then revisiting vicariously through those who have dissected its mythos in in-depth essays and lore videos. Its legacy is secured not just as a bold experiment but as a haunting artifact of the pre-pandemic world—one that resonates differently, and maybe more profoundly, in hindsight.
Personally, while I appreciated the high-concept ambition of Death Stranding, I struggled with it and ultimately lost interest. It felt more like a conceptual art piece than a fully realized game. An intellectual exercise whose ideas overshadowed the experience and gratification of playing it. As someone who values creative works that marry emotional gravity with speculative cultural context, I often found Death Stranding‘s narrative throughlines reaching further than they could fully grasp. The worldbuilding fascinated me far more than the story it was built to support.
Now, six years later, with Death Stranding 2: On The Beach, set to release later this week, I spent 65 hours to hit the credits (with hours left of pending deliveries still in transit, and roads unbuilt) of the highly anticipated sequel and feel nearly the opposite. Where the first Death Stranding felt like a conceptual mood board come to life, this sequel is more narratively grounded. It’s like a musician remixing their greatest hits with a tighter production—fewer self-indulgent lyrical bars, more emotional clarity. Granted, it’s still a story that’s got its foibles. But this time it lands more often than it drifts into the faux profundity of its predecessor.
A Sophomore Effort Redefining “Strand”
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