Death Stranding 2 is too good to be the cult game of Kojima’s dreams

Hideo Kojima is annoyed that people like Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. In a recent interview with Edge magazine, the video game auteur lamented that test scores for the new game were much higher than for the divisive 2019 original, which six out of ten testers said was terrible. “Everyone seems to be positive” about Death Stranding 2, he complained. “I do wish I was a bit more controversial.”

I know what Kojima is saying, but having spent some time with Death Stranding 2, I’m with the testers. It’s a tour de force: a smooth, incredibly accomplished iteration on a true original that has lost maybe a little of its awkward spikiness, but none of its hypnotic power.

That’s despite the fact Kojima made changes to the game in response to the overly positive feedback, according to musician Woodkid, who worked on the soundtrack. Woodkid told Rolling Stone that Kojima said the test results meant “something is wrong.” “I want people to end up liking things they didn’t like when they first encountered it, because that’s where you end up loving something,” Kojima told his collaborator. “You have no idea how much he doesn’t give a shit,” Woodkid added.

The quotes are funny, but they’re hardly a surprise from a ceaselessly ambitious creator who has sometimes seemed frustrated by his own fame and popularity. This, after all, is the man who pulled a bait-and-switch on Metal Gear fans in 2001’s Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, replacing the iconic Solid Snake as playable protagonist with a rookie agent named Raiden for most of the game’s runtime. (True to Kojima’s maxim, everyone ended up loving Raiden in the end — but it took a while.)

The first Death Stranding was Kojima’s declaration of independence from Metal Gear, which may be why he was so pleased it was divisive. A large part of the gameplay consists of hiking from A to B through empty, arid landscapes as porter Sam Bridges (Norman Reedus). Its post-apocalyptic setting is alienating and deeply strange, and Kojima’s script is even more prone to loose philosophizing, arcane lore, and risible nomenclature than Metal Gear ever was — even at its most self-involved.

But Kojima was onto something. The friction and daring flirtation with boredom of Death Stranding’s gameplay combine with lead artist Yoji Shinkawa’s haunting imagery and Kojima’s obsessively detailed simulation design into an experience that gets under your skin in a way more accommodating open-world epics can’t.

When the Covid-19 pandemic struck in 2020, Kojima’s vision was revealed to have been unnervingly prophetic. In the game’s world, a cataclysmic event known as the Death Stranding has torn down the veil between life and death. People isolate themselves in underground bunkers and appear at their front doors only as fuzzy holograms, while Sam labors to reconnect society through a kind of ectoplasmic internet known as the chiral network. Death Stranding acquired a new weight. As the game was released on more platforms and in new versions, its reputation grew, and people came around to it.

Unfortunately for Kojima, the would-be controversial disruptor, this isn’t a process you can really repeat with a sequel — at least, not without pulling a Raiden. (At this point I should confess that after around 20 hours, I’ve nowhere near completed Death Stranding 2’s storyline — like its predecessor, it’s a massive game — and don’t know what surprises it might have in store.) True to the director’s fears after he saw those test results, On the Beach is a familiar, almost comforting experience that slips down easily.

I’m not sure, though, if that’s because the game has been dumbed down and made more welcoming, or if it’s because Death Stranding did such a good job of teaching us all to like it over time. Or, perhaps, if it’s because gaming tastes have changed even over the past six years, and it’s now more common for players to enjoy a game that pushes back and asserts its own identity over the traditions and commonplaces of mainstream gaming. In the years since 2019, Elden Ring happened, Baldur’s Gate 3 happened, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 happened.

In other words, if Death Stranding was ahead of its time then, On the Beach arrives at a perfect moment. In that context, it’s actually a very traditional and unadventurous sequel. Kojima Productions has adjusted the gameplay mix, smoothed off a few corners, and thoughtfully elaborated on some of the many, many systems. The storyline is a direct sequel, extending Sam’s quest to reconnect humanity into new territories (Mexico and Australia), and further exploring the weird cosmology of the Death Stranding and the backstory of Lou — the unborn baby he carried around in a little sarcophagus in the first game, then liberated and has now adopted as an adorable toddler.

Once again, Death Stranding offers a haunting and hypnotic moodscape. Fittingly for the sequel to a game that made the former U.S.A. look like Iceland, Death Stranding 2 recasts Mexico and Australia as the moon, or Mars. These are harsh, denuded landscapes of rocky outcrops, ruins, and swelling rivers, dotted with monumental industrial futurist architecture.

Your job, more often than not, is to load the sturdy Sam up with cargo and trudge across this treacherous terrain to your next destination, navigating the gangs of bandits, the corrosive “timefall” rain that ages everything it touches, and the haunted zones where smoky, sticky black ghosts called BTs (Beached Things) float around or boil up out of lakes of tar. Once again, it’s essential to plan your equipment loadout and your route carefully, balance your cargo, and watch your step. It’s not for everyone, but rarely has any game made the act of the journey itself so dense and engaging.

The first Death Stranding often gives you a choice between longer, more demanding hikes and shorter routes that might bring you into contact with human bandits, bringing the game’s exacting stealth and combat into play. In On the Beach, Kojima Productions is more inclined to parcel up its missions into examples of one gameplay style or the other, occasionally requiring you to clear out bandit outposts as a main mission goal.

Fortunately, combat is much less frustrating, with eased difficulty and more interesting tools, whilst still deploying Kojima’s signature brand of Metal Gear stealth. There’s an excellent suite of training missions, too, in which Sam dons a VR headset, nodding to the old Metal Gear Solid mode. Still, I enjoyed the way the original game encouraged me to follow my own playstyle (which was pure hiking) and challenge myself, and I hope there’s more openness in Death Stranding 2’s late game.

There’s an ease to On the Beach that I would characterize as a game that is more comfortable in its own skin, rather than one whose design has been compromised. I think this comes through in the storytelling, too. As a writer, Kojima’s gonna Kojima, and you are still subjected to unhurried cutscenes filled with long, extemporizing speeches that are somehow both loaded with exposition and leave you no wiser as to what’s really going on. But the game is definitely a little more character-focused and naturalistic than the first, and (as far as I’ve played) more smoothly paced than the original. For an antagonist, it focuses on Troy Baker’s sinister Higgs — who appears to have leveled up from terrorist to undead leader of a scarlet-robed techno death cult — and there’s no equivalent to Death Stranding’s baffling Mads Mikkelsen subplot.

I don’t think I’ll ever completely vibe with Kojima’s storytelling style, but I felt a gentle tug of intrigue from Death Stranding 2’s plot, as opposed to the obstructive wall of abstruse world-building in the first game, or, say, the meta shenanigans and dreary sermonizing of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. The studio’s actor scans performance capture is a genuine marvel — there’s a subtle warmth and humanity to that few other game developers can touch. And I remain in awe of Shinkawa, a one-of-a-kind artist who never gets enough credit for his share in Kojima’s authorship. His sleek technology designs, primal organic imagery, and hazy spectral visions create an unforgettable sci-fi dreamscape where industrial rationality and the deep subconscious collide in ways that are both unsettling and totally compelling.

I could go into far more detail on this expansive game; I could explain the new skill tree, or the talking puppet companion called Dollman who is also a sort of reconnaissance drone, or the fast travel via the tar-submarine base that Sam shares with Fragile (Léa Seydoux) and a pilot wearing the visage of film director George Miller. There is no end to Death Stranding 2’s systems, its idiosyncrasies, its solemn and silly little details. It’s also huge; there are no less than three distinct kinds of subquests to engage with, not to mention the asynchronous social gameplay of helping other players out by delivering packages or building structures for them. (Servers were unavailable for most of the time I was playing the game.)

But the key thing to understand about Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is that it’s a lavish, carefully considered sequel to a complete one-off that couldn’t be imitated — not that anyone has even tried. You can’t complain about its comfortable iteration on the formula when that formula remains startlingly original and absorbing, or the resurrection of a world that is so resonant — especially post-pandemic — and strange. I think Kojima misunderstood the feedback he was getting from those testers. Death Stranding is still Death Stranding. They were just telling him how glad they were to have it back.