Death Stranding: everything you need to know about Hideo Kojima’s new game

It has been months since I played Death Stranding, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about some of the details: the satisfying way Sam Bridges packs up metallic cases and then carries them on his back; the nightmarish, tar-like monsters that emerge when you’re spotted by the ghostly BTs that dot the landscape; and the almost adorable robotic arm that does everything from sense ghosts to calm down babies. It’s a weird mix of supernatural and mechanical that’s pretty unforgettable.

That shouldn’t be too surprising, though. Hideo Kojima and his teams are known for their robust world-building and almost fanatical attention to detail, both of which are on full display in the post-apocalyptic realm of Death Stranding. If, like me, you find yourself still thinking about Sam, Fragile, and BB, you’ll probably want to dig into the new book The Art of Death Stranding from Titan Books, which is available today.

One of the first places Joel Corelitz went when he got off the plane from Chicago was a nearby Home Depot. He wasn’t getting wood, supplies, or power tools for a home renovation project. He was shopping for instruments. Anything he could use to make noise: a paint roller without the brush, a sledgehammer, and pretty much anything that was made of metal.

“We were just walking around Home Depot and treating it like it was Guitar Center,” Corelitz, who previously scored games like TumbleSeed and Gorogoa, told me. “We probably looked like we were absolutely insane. We were doing things like putting air vents up to our ear and hitting them. Who goes in there and buys one piece of metal ventilation, a heavy rubber mallet, and all sorts of random crap?”

It’s impossible to miss when BB cries. The unsettling baby is one of the constants of Death Stranding, the latest game from Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima. BB is part equipment, part character; it remains helplessly trapped in a sci-fi jar, where it both bonds with Death Stranding’s lead character Sam, and also serves as a tool that alerts him to deadly, ghostly apparitions that are largely invisible to humans. When BB gets scared, it starts to cry. And on the game’s default setting, that anguished sound comes through the speaker built into the PS4 controller. It’s like you’re holding a tiny, crying baby in your hands. It’s incredibly unsettling at first — but when you hear the creepy thing laugh, it almost makes it worth it.

It’s hard to say what BB really is without spoiling things; and honestly, even if I fully explained it now, it wouldn’t make much sense to you. But that mystery is also part of what makes it so interesting. A large chunk of Death Stranding’s dense lore is dedicated to BBs — there’s more than just one, as they’re a fairly standard tool for travelers — and where they came from. Death Stranding’s post-apocalyptic future is one nearly devoid of history. Most records have been lost or destroyed, but as you slowly rebuild a network that links together America, more details come to light. Throughout the game, Deadman, a scientist with the exact likeness of Guillermo del Toro, regularly shares newly uncovered details about the origin of these weird little babies.

Death Stranding, Hideo Kojima’s long-awaited debut under his new studio, is a large and convoluted game. Most of your time is spent navigating indecipherable terms like “chiral network,” or delivering packages and grappling with goo ghosts. A lot of headspace goes toward balancing your cargo load and building in-game structures like bridges. When you do find downtime, it’s a welcome break — mostly thanks to how interactive and strange these moments can be.

Major hubs in Death Stranding, like cities, include underground private rooms where Sam (Norman Reedus) can relax. Each room includes a spot for his infant companion, BB, to happily hang out in its jar, as well as a combo shower and bathroom for all his toilet needs. On a practical level, these rooms are a place to refresh and recharge things like health or BB’s stress levels. The game makes a point to collect your bodily fluids, from blood to “no. 2” samples for environmentally friendly grenades, and occasionally it’ll force you into a rest to progress a plot point. It’s also full of fourth-wall-breaking moments and jokes that make the experience feel full.

The most implausible thing about Death Stranding is that it exists at all. Hideo Kojima, its writer and director, has been saying that he wants to stop making Metal Gear Solid games for as long as he’s been making Metal Gear Solid games. Now, with a newly independent Kojima Productions receiving what appears to have been carte blanche from Sony to make whatever it wanted to as long as it was a PS4 game, Kojima’s first non-Metal Gear directorial project in decades is here.

And, while I love Metal Gear, the one thing Death Stranding has made me feel above all else is that I wish Kojima had left the series behind sooner.

Hideo Kojima’s long-anticipated game, Death Stranding, is out on the PlayStation 4 on November 8th. The star-studded action game utilizes actors such as Norman Reedus, Guillermo del Toro, Mads Mikkelsen, and Léa Seydoux to tell a long and winding story about the state of mankind and human connection in a post-apocalyptic future.

The buzz around the game, as well as understanding what it’s actually all about, takes a little bit of unpacking for those who haven’t been following along. How do you explain what is definitely the most bizarre game of the year?

In Death Stranding, your character Sam carries a small baby in an orange bottle strapped to his chest. It stays with him at all times. The child, called a BB, is essentially a tool: it alerts Sam to ghostly apparitions called BTs, which dot the post-apocalyptic landscape he must traverse. The whole situation is unsettling. BB cries when it gets scared — whether it’s because of imminent danger or because you keep falling down a slippery mountain — and the haunting sound is piped through the speaker on the PS4 controller. This makes it even more unsettling.

Over the course of the game, which lasts upwards of 50 hours, my feelings toward BB changed. At first, it was an uncomfortable nuisance, but eventually, I became attached to the kid. When it cried, I’d find a safe space to rock it until it calmed down, and I always made sure to check on it when we’d bunk for the night. During the few moments in the game when Sam and BB were separated, it felt like something important was missing.

Death Stranding — the highly anticipated next game from Hideo Kojima and his studio Kojima Productions — will be making its way to PC next year in “early summer,” the studio announced today in a tweet.

The PC port will be published by 505 Games, the same group behind the excellent PC version of Control, so it seems Death Stranding’s port is in good hands. There’s no firm release date for Death Stranding on PC outside of the “early summer of 2020” window, though.

Death Stranding is this year’s big PlayStation 4 exclusive, and that means one thing: a limited edition console. Today, Sony revealed a new version of the PS4 Pro that comes in a basic shade of white that’s covered in dark handprints, which seems to be a theme in Hideo Kojima’s new game. The real standout feature, though, is the DualShock 4 controller. It’s designed to look like a BB pod, those disturbing baby carriers that Norman Reedus carries around in the game. It has the same translucent yellow look as the in-game object, and Sony says “throughout the game, you can gently rock the controller to emulate holding the BB pod in your own hands.”

It’s a decent deal if you’re looking for a new PS4 and a completely bizarre game to go with it. The 1TB console comes with Death Stranding on Blu-ray and the controller for $399.99. It will launch alongside the game on November 8th.

Tokyo Game Show just kicked off, and it started with a bang, with Hideo Kojima showing off a huge amount of footage from his upcoming game Death Stranding. First, there was yet another story trailer, this one titled “Briefing,” which provided a bit more insight on the game’s post-apocalyptic world, in which Norman Reedus’ character Sam is tasked with reconnecting humanity and rebuilding America. It’s basically one long cutscene set inside of the Oval Office, and while I can’t say I understand the story any better, it’s at least an interesting watch.

More exciting, though, was a live gameplay demonstration that showed off around 50 minutes of Death Stranding in action. It’s all in Japanese, unfortunately, but you can watch the entire presentation below. It shows Reedus preparing his massive backpack before heading into what looks like a pretty desolate, empty world. At one point, he deposits something off at a small base, and you can catch a glimpse of the tiny baby he carries around. It’s all very strange, and I encourage you to watch the whole thing.

Since it was announced in 2016, we’ve seen plenty of Death Stranding through trailers, including yesterday’s lengthy new footage. However, over that time it hasn’t been clear what exactly you’ll be doing in the game. And while we still have plenty of questions, the game’s official website has been updated to provide a better idea of what the moment-to-moment experience will be like.

First, here’s the basic premise for Hideo Kojima’s post-Metal Gear Solid world:

After hours of teasing via a cryptic Twitch stream, today, Hideo Kojima revealed his next game, Death Stranding, will be launching on the PS4 on November 8th.

The lengthy stream featured a series of handprints covering what appeared to be gameplay footage, though it was hard to tell what was going on, which is fitting for what we’ve seen of the game so far. As the stream went on, and picked up viewers, more of the footage became visible. The stream was coupled with the tagline “the world is in your hands,” and it ended with the release date news along with a new trailer that featured the main cast including — yes — that creepy baby. (The $200 collector’s edition of the game even comes with a “BB pod” figure.)

When PT — a playable teaser for Hideo Kojima’s reboot of Silent Hill — left the PlayStation Store in 2015, it took on an urban legend status. No longer downloadable and with the larger game canceled to boot, only those who already had PT on their system could continue to play it. But after Sony’s E3 press conference earlier this week, some fans think that the legend isn’t entirely dead.

PT originally came out in 2014 and instantly became viral on social media. In a departure from most horror games, PT scared players largely by making them walk through a hallway over and over again; the appeal was in how even the mundane could be terrifying in the right hands. As players dove deeper into the game, they realized that there was a much larger mystery hiding within it. To solve it, fans from around the world had to cooperate and share knowledge about how to keep progressing. Once players reached the end, they were surprised to find that PT was actually a teaser for the upcoming Silent Hills. It was made by Metal Gear Solid designer Kojima and director Guillermo del Toro, and it was going to star Walking Dead actor Norman Reedus. Hype around PT exploded and then turned into disappointment after the game was canceled and Kojima left Konami.

Hideo Kojima and Norman Reedus are back to break our brains with an outlandish new trailer for Death Stranding. It’s still hard to make sense of what Death Stranding actually is, but the imagery sure is evocative. You’ve got babies, terrifying invisible monsters, and maybe something about environmental collapse?

Oh, and there are a couple of new faces here, too: Léa Seydoux, of Blue is the Warmest Color fame, and Lindsay Wagner, who you might know from The Bionic Woman. Better yet, this E3 trailer showed what appeared to be actual gameplay, which feels huge for a game that has largely relied on cinematic trailers. While the PlayStation Blog notes that the camera here will be slightly different than what players experience, “The first half and the last sequence in particular are most representative of the actual gameplay.”

Death Stranding is still here, and it’s still weird. Metal Gear Solid director Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro were at The Game Awards tonight to provide another look at their new PS4 collaboration starring Norman Reedus and Mads Mikkelsen, further confirming that... well, not really confirming anything at all about the game itself. But there is a new trailer, and here it is.

The vibe is kind of Alien-esque sci-fi horror by way of Junji Ito manga, seeing disturbing and inexplicable things happen to some guys in atmospheric suits with vial-encased babies attached to the front. The squad is haunted by invisible monsters and spooky levitating apparitions. At one point Reedus sinks to the bottom of a lake that appears out of nowhere and looks up to see a giant bug skate across or above the surface. Later, the perspective shoots down his throat to reveal a baby sucking its thumb at the camera. Look, you should probably just watch the trailer.

Hideo Kojima took the stage at The 2016 Game Awards to unveil a new cryptic trailer for Death Stranding, the first game from the famous game developer after leaving Konami last year to turn Kojima Productions into an independent studio. Death Stranding is also the first game from the Metal Gear Solid creator since the release of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

The new trailer joins the first footage unveiled at E3 earlier this year, and shows off more of the mysterious world of Death Stranding. It opens with a shot of Guillermo del Toro (who had been collaborating with Kojima and actor Norman Reedus — who also appears in Death Stranding — on the canceled Silent Hills project) hiding from soldiers and tanks, before revealing that the man is carrying a capsule with a glowing fetus inside.

Hideo Kojima made a surprise appearance at Sony’s E3 press conference tonight to unveil a spooky new game called Death Stranding, his first since leaving Konami and turning Kojima Productions into an independent developer. (It’s also his first game since Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.)

Kojima played a trailer for the game with footage that was entirely running in real time, and it was about as creepy and mysterious as you can imagine. A naked man (played by The Walking Dead’s Norman Reedus) held a baby to his chest on a deserted beach before the baby became invisible and turned into oil, and the man looked up at five figures hanging in the sky before the trailer ended.