Review Game Death Stranding

Metal Gear maestro Hideo Kojima has announced Death Stranding [official site], the first game from his new studio. It may or may not involve beached whales, crabs with cables coming out their guts, a nude Norman Reedus, a cyberbaby, and mysterious hovermen, going by the cinematic E3 trailer. I am delighted that Kojima’s first game away from Konami seems to be going hard on the weird. Have a gander:


Okay, sure, it’s probably a tone-setting piece. And yes, early looks at Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain were big on a skywhale which proved to be in the game for five seconds but I live in hope. You’ve got to, don’t you?

I like that Norm (him out of The Walking Dead) wears of a gruesome necklace of USB thumbsticks torn from the ports of every computer he’s killed. That’s probably what that is. A mean computer from the sea stole Norm’s baby by caesarian and is flinging sealife at the shores to spite him, so he’s training up to fight it by taking down Apple Macs etc. Those hovermen are just here to watch a good scrap. That’s almost definitely the actual literal plot of this game for sure.

Last we heard, the new Kojima Productions (he took the name with him when he split with Konami) said their first game would come to PC as well as PlayStation – just a little later. They don’t mention PC anywhere around this announcement, and the FAQ which said that has now vanished offline, but… I’ll let you know if there’s bad news.

Norman Reedus, you might remember, was supposed to play the protagonist of Kojima and Guillermo del Toro’s cancelled Silent Hills. It’s nice that they’re still pals. Look at these pals:

At The Game Awards last night, Geoff Keighley introduced the new trailer for his best pal’s bold new take on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1994 comedy, Junior. That’s about the best explanation I could come up with after watching the eight minute trailer for Kojima’s Death Stranding. Enjoy the mishmash of science fiction and horror ideas below.

Enjoyment is probably not what the trailer is going for, mind you. Kojima fills his games with bizarre cutscenes as a matter of course, and Death Stranding — a game we know absolutely nothing about, still — reaches new heights of WTF am I watching? At the same time, it does show us a great deal, though absent context none of it really makes sense.

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There’s a weird pod baby that somehow ends up inside Norman Reedus’ character, invisible monsters, a giant monster, some other monsters and lots of gross muddy, oily water. The trailer really seems to be pushing the idea of vulnerability. There’s the baby, of course, the very definition of vulnerable, but there’s also the fact that Reedus and his pals seem to be powerless to handle the invisible creatures hunting them. All they can do is try to stop breathing.

So despite being utterly nonsensical, I’m still… a bit intrigued? I’m certainly hungry for more. Also, let’s not forget about those weird flappy light-arm thingys. They look like someone crossed a desk lamp with Johnny 5. In what is an otherwise oppressively gloomy trailer, they are a welcome spot of whimsy.

There’s still no release window yet, not even a year, but I wouldn’t hold your breath for a 2018 launch.