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 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 by 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”
Set 11 months after the events of the original game, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach picks up with Sam and his bridge baby, Lou, living off the grid. Fragile (Seydoux) arrives on his doorstep with a job that pulls the freelance courier back into the field. This time, the mission is to integrate Mexico into the United Cities of America’s ever-expanding chiral network. Essentially, Sam is tasked with lacing up his boots and trekking across the continent, linking his USB dog tag key fob to bunker mailboxes and connecting settlements to their supernatural strand-based Wi-Fi.
The game is self-aware enough to admit its familiar call to action—more trekking, more connecting—but framed with a wink. Rebuilding the world, one footstep at a time, shouldn’t be too difficult since you’ve done it before and came out straight… until it is. Just as Sam nears the end of what seems like a modest fetch-quest, the story swerves dramatically, widening its scope to extend the network to Australia as well. From here, the narrative spirals into something far more ambitious, involving the return of Sam’s rival Higgs (Troy Baker) and his newfound mech-ghost army, as well as a new antagonist not-so-subtly modeled after Metal Gear Solid‘s Snake, Neil (Luca Marinelli).
Joining Sam on this escalating journey are fresh faces like Tarman (modeled after Mad Max director George Miller), Rainy (played by Deadpool Yukio actor Shioli Kutsuna), Dollman (modeled after director Faith Akin and played by Jonathan Roumie), and a mysterious girl named Tomorrow (Elle Fanning), alongside returning allies liked Deadman (modeled after director Guillermo del Toro and played by Jesse Corti) and Heartman (modeled after Nicolas Winding Refn and played by Darren Jacobs).
In Death Stranding 2, managing Sam still feels like you’ve adopted a rugged, soft-spoken post-apocalyptic Tamagotchi. You’re constantly tending to his hygiene with showers and potty breaks to get the blood, dirt, and gunk of the day off his person, recalibrating his loadout in a Tetris-like inventory grid that can quickly collapse like Jenga if a BT±the inky monstrosities that stalk the lands, injecting bursts of pulse-spiking horror into On The Beach‘s walking sim vibes on a dime—knocks him and his tower of cargo off balance.
Between encounters, Sam needs snack breaks—munching stamina-restoring larvae, taking swigs from his canteen, or tapping into blood bags that serve as makeshift health kits during especially sticky scuffles. It’s a loop that’s both ritualistic and irksome, but weirdly intimate. Once I settled back into its rhythm, carefully balancing weight by holding down triggers, preplanning my cargo, and eyeing every lost parcel, and negotiating whether I should add it to Sam’s burden as humanity’s pack mule because it’s destination is “on the way,” I started to embrace the strange zen of it all.
Unlike my first go-around with its predecessor, there’s something endearingly relatable about overloading Sam with gear, teetering under the weight of ambition and generosity like a dad determined to carry all the grocery bags in one go, rather than humoring a second trip. It also didn’t hurt that completing deliveries rewarded me with tools to make traversal less tedious by providing me material to construct roads to make traversal less of a pain in the ass, and tracks to add to a playlist so I can whistle as I work (so long as I was in areas I’ve given chiral network coverage to). This became even more manageable when vehicles and ziplines came into play, turning multi-trip dread into a cross-country trip with a rig built for warfare, or trucker hauls to build more pavement between settlements like I was Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Dollman serves as Sam’s ever-present companion throughout On the Beach, functioning like a clip-on belt charm meets hiking buddy. He fills the silence of On the Beach‘s often monotonous walking with commentary, assists with surveillance when attempts at stealth run sideways, and even offers tips when you get sidetracked hyperfixating on building roads, by reminding you of your main objective. He’s basically to Sam what Mimir was to Kratos in God of War, but filtered through Kojima’s eccentric lens. Whether it’s reconnaissance for combat or providing emotional ballast during the journey, Dollman’s low-frame-rate presence is as functional as it is oddly comforting.
While most of Sam’s allies don’t accompany you physically, they remain present in quieter, digital ways—checking in through social media-like SMS updates and snapshots of their day-to-day while you’re en route to the next locale. These messages arrive as you slog through treacherous terrain, building roads, bridges, and generators across a landscape slowly being shaped by your own hands, like creating natural trails on a nature path, and by the footprints and constructive efforts of other players in the game’s online asynchronous network. You can like their structures, read stray bits of encouraging signs, and even borrow their vehicles, creating a soft echo of camaraderie amid the isolation.
It transforms what could have been a dreadful, monotonous string of fetch quests into something quietly meaningful. My deliveries and infrastructure work stopped feeling like solo busy work and instead became part of a larger, shared mission—a collective effort tethered to the game’s thematic core. What’s more, unlike the first game’s narrative, which leans more into abstract meditations on connection, Death Stranding 2 is anchored in a leaner, plot-driven momentum, planting seeds of hope as you journey with Sam to his more personal story of overcoming loss and navigating a future for himself. I was reminded, in both subtle story beats and asynchronous multiplayer gestures, that I wasn’t hauling this burden alone. Whether it was an anchor left on the side of a mountain that someone else left behind, or a message warning me of hazards on my route, there’s a persistent sense that others, virtual or otherwise, had my back when a climb began to feel insurmountable.
But among this broader feeling of connection it’s Seydoux’s Fragile who’s the real anchor to On the Beach this time around. She captains Drawbridge, a submersible airship that doubles as the mission’s hub and lifeline for Sam’s motley crew, making her role feel far more central and emotionally resonant than before. And while Sam’s band of allies mostly keep their presence to cutscenes, they’re no longer just digital marionettes of Kojima’s excessive lore dumps. They feel more like an evolving found family—integrated into the narrative and Sam’s mission, not just orbiting around it. There’s a greater sense that they’re in the trenches with him, not standing on the sidelines posing dramatically for motion capture posterity.
If all of the above has sounded overwhelming… it is. Kojima Productions has kept it in mind, with both a recap video that summarizes the broad strokes of its first game to get new and old players up to speed, and the inclusion of an interactive real time glossary that pings on the top right corner of the screen with the introduction of new proper nouns and terms, making it easy for players to keep Death Stranding‘s ever-expanding lexicon and story developments straight by referring back to Corpus, its heavily annotated virtual database tome.
Away from its dense worldbuilding however, from the first frame of Death Stranding 2 Kojima is fully in his cinematic bag. The opening scene of the game is so photorealistic that I had to blink twice trying to decipher when it transitioned from drone footage to an in-engine render of a mountainside, which immediately asked me to walk from the top of a mountain to Sam’s hidden abode.
Death Stranding 2‘s tone is rich and indulgent, often bordering on decadent. There’s a self-aware messiness to how it picks up the narrative shards of its first game. Some characters, like Mama (Margaret Qualley) and Die-Hard Man (Tommie Earl Jenkins), are benched, while others, like Fragile, are further expanded upon. Most prominently, On the Beach‘s plot reimagines its linear progression in favor of crafting a new odyssey that is less “pandemic prophetic” and more centered on connections reinforced by the process of grieving, and rebuilding after suffering a tragic loss. While the game is literally about bringing humanity whole again by your lonesome, this time around its about uniting the entire globe as Sam terraforms Australia and Mexico, building bridges to reconnect the straggling, hikikomori vestiges of humanity.
The Man Who Delivers
Gameplay-wise, On The Beach continues to oscillate between a meditative hiking simulator and a sprawling cinematic spectacle full of hype moments and aura—the latter dangling like a shiny reward at the far end of a grueling pilgrimage. I routinely tiptoed through ruins, mercenary outposts, and ghost-drenched wastelands, cradling Lou with each stumble or misstep as my carefully stacked tower of weaponry threatened to topple over. Its geometric minefield of picturesque terrain is still as oppressive as it could be in the first, if not more so, as I found myself dangling off cliffsides, braving torrential rivers, and inching up icy escarpments, one calculated movement at a time (albeit often followed by an improvised one). On The Beach is sequel-scaled, yes—but purposeful, not padded.
What lands differently this time is Sam himself. He no longer marches forward as the gruff, unflinchingly obedient, and politically agnostic mailman resigned to his fate that he once was. Instead, he surprised me by questioning the very foundation of his mission. Not in intentionally sly (but groanworthy) meta jabs of the first game, where he compares himself to Mario looking for his “Princess Beach,” but with sincere moral unease. Reconnecting the world doesn’t sound as noble when it starts to look like he’s just doing the legwork for post-apocalyptic imperialism for America, which he surprisingly calls into question in the game’s early stages.
The seeds of conflict in On the Beach plant between reconnection and overreach, healing and haunting, and they give it a more chaotic, more human pulse. It’s messier, less abstract, and far more emotionally legible than its predecessor. Moment-to-moment, the traversal remains the core attraction of On the Beach. You’re not just moving, you’re mapping, adapting, and experimenting. Think The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom‘s improvisation meets Phantom Pain‘s stealth improvisations when things break bad, and you’re suddenly cornered without the proper tools to get from point A to point B. The gunplay combat is still there. Crank the difficulty up a notch to the highest difficulty, and the enemy AI gets surprisingly savvy and savage, allowing for Dishonored-style stealth and tense firefights that feel genuinely earned when you defeat waves of enemies.
But that’s never really where the heart of On the Beach lies. Where the first game made you slog for hours before it let its story moments rear their head, On the Beach hits its pace faster. While picking up the pieces of global tragedies, such as the pandemic, is still in the DNA of On the Beach‘s pathos, gone is the heavy reliance on it as an allegory. In its place is something more introspective, present-minded, universal, and grounded than it is speculative. Less “look how prophetic and smart we were” and more, “how do we pick up the pieces and properly reconnect?”
Once you get used to the terrain puzzles of each of On the Beach‘s landmarks—when your instincts kick in and the map becomes muscle memory—those fetch quests start feeling therapeutic in a way. The traversal, not the combat, becomes the game’s engine. Sure, the Silent Hill-coded BT encounters and MGS-inspired skirmishes inject tension and excitement, but it’s the quiet rhythm between them that defines the journey.
Sam now feels more like a protagonist in his own story. No longer a cipher for Kojima’s pun-laden essays on connection, he finally clicks into place as he navigates the next steps in his journey alongside the mission he’s been saddled with. The real drama, while compelling, isn’t the firefights with Higgs or sussing out Neil’s deal; it’s whether Sam has the confidence to trust his legs, his gear, and the chart he’s set for his journey.
The Carrot at the End of a Masochistic Stick Is Worth the Pain
In the lead-up to On the Beach‘s release, Kojima confessed that early playtest feedback made him uneasy, not because it was negative, but because it was too positive. He purportedly worried the game might come across too mainstream, so made adjustments, presumably with the intent to make Death Stranding‘s friction more impactful, and occasionally more hostile, to its players. Around the 70 percent mark of the game, I felt the weight of that philosophy first hand, when the somewhat easy sailing of On the Beach‘s gameplay up to that point turned downright oppressive. There was a moment where I hated the game for a solid five-hour stretch, due to how granularly tedious, and outlandish, the delivery demands became.
I still don’t entirely love On the Beach having navigated that momentary frustration, either. However, I do appreciate how it made me value the things I didn’t like about the first, namely the sense of place earned in Death Stranding‘s world by navigating it on your own two feet. I would never have imagined the game would have me go from abandoning a tower of weaponry on my backpack, to carrying an emu across a haunted mountain range, gazing from its crest to catch the sunrise, and hearing a rooster crow as if I had reached a sacred checkpoint. It’s absurd. It’s poignant. It’s Kojima. New tracks to add to your playlist cue when near your destination, like divine applause. I started treating Sam like a Tamagotchi—testing his limits, suffering with him, learning to pivot when everything collapses. Your hubris becomes your strategy. Your journey becomes a ritual that I couldn’t help but love, albeit in a masochistic sense, as a player.
On the Beach‘s narrative speaks louder and clearer than its predecessor. Its story, while still strange, is more coherent—its symbolism less cluttered by its vocabulary. At times, it plays like a proof-of-concept for Kojima’s inevitable foray into filmmaking. But there’s beauty in its broken pacing. After surviving that five-hour gauntlet of pure punishment, the final act delivers in spades. Yes, the game is maddeningly back-loaded—but it’s worth it.
What’s most surprising is how Kojima’s signature penchant for weirdness, once a shield for abstraction, now feels like scaffolding for something more emotionally grounded. It’s tighter, and stronger for it, and even willing to poke fun at itself to show it’s learned from experience, to the point there were times I felt like I was sincerely laughing with Kojima, not at his trademark absurdity.
On the Beach still demands a ton of patience. It still punishes, but it also rewards, with a narrative that feels sculpted rather than splattered. Where its predecessor felt like a rambling, late-night text, On the Beach is what happens when those thoughts are carved into marble for all to see. The glossary breaks, the combat struggles, the endless geometric trek, and, most of all, the exceptional acting on display from its stellar cast—they all contribute to a finale that lands with surprising elegance.
If On the Beach proved anything, it’s that Kojima—eccentric, indulgent, brilliant—still knows how to make the absurd feel resonant. This sequel isn’t just an echo of the first. It’s the payoff. It’s the strange, painstaking journey I hoped for the first time around—and somehow, against all odds, it sticks the landing in spite of it all.
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach releases on PlayStation 5 June 26.
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