Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding 2 Review: A Must-See Return

Hideo Kojima
, creator of
Metal Gear
, returns with a sequel to one of the strangest big budget games ever, but while this one is even weirder it’s also a lot more fun.

If you find Hideo Kojima games to be pretentious and frustrating, that’s not you being a philistine,
that’s how he likes people to respond to his games
. The creator of Metal Gear is one of the very few game creators in the world that gets to make whatever he wants, no matter how bizarre, with a massive budget, and whether you enjoy his games or not it’s hard not to respect him for that alone.

Given his obvious talent it’s a shame his whole career has been almost nothing but Metal Gear titles and even when he left Konami, to form his own studio, his games have continued to riff on similar ideas, from
the original Death Stranding
to the upcoming
Physint
.

Death Stranding 2 is a surprisingly straightforward sequel, which may seem a strange way to describe a game with a talking puppet and a woman with her hand on backwards, but it is a peculiar mix of the surreal and the mundane. Like all of Kojima’s games, it won’t be for everyone but, as he himself pointed out, the more you try to appeal to everyone the less likely it is you’ll make anything interesting.

If you didn’t play the original Death Stranding, we’re not sure there’s any way to explain it to you succinctly. The sequel barely even tries to, going out of its way to avoid any straight answers. The gist of it though, is that spirits from the afterlife – its gateway represented as a beach – have started appearing everywhere and when they touch a dead body they explode in a nuclear-like blast.

At the start of the first game, humanity was heading for extinction, but this was averted by… having your character Sam (played by Norman Reedus) deliver parcels across very rocky terrain, that looked exactly like Iceland even though it was meant to be the US. As the sequel starts, he’s in retirement with his adopted toddler. Her backstory is far too complicated to explain but suffice it to say she’s a sort of chosen one, with special supernatural abilities.

We’re not being facetious about any of this. The primary activity in both games is delivering post and trying not to fall over, although your actual goal is to connect all the cities in the country together in an internet-like network that allows you to 3D print anything you like, by using magic particles in the air. In the first game you were connecting up the US and in the second it’s Mexico.

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