Open Extended Reactions

Death Stranding 2: On The Beach is Hideo Kojima’s most self-indulgent work yet. The story takes absurdist, spiritual, supernatural turns and blends them with a unique post-apocalypse setting without ever feeling like it owes the player a real explanation. It’s filled with cameos from Kojima’s favorite musicians, actors, and artists, references to his previous games, famous anime, iconic movies, and more. If you read an overview like that, it’s easy to assume that Death Stranding 2 is a mess, but somehow, everything clicks together like a jigsaw puzzle. Death Stranding 2 may be Kojima’s most self-indulgent work, but it’s also his best in more than a decade.

At its heart DS2 is a delivery game, much like the first. You are Sam Porter Bridges, and your job is to deliver packages in a hostile land. Sam is one of the only people who can brave elements like tar and timefall (rainfall that makes you old), and it’s up to him to connect the disparate settlements that hold the last pieces of humanity.

While the first game had Sam going from the East to West coast of America, DS2 starts off in Mexico before moving onto the huge landmass of Australia. It’s not to scale, but from the ground level it can feel endless. The titular apocalyptic event — the Death Stranding — changed Australia’s layout and devastated nature and infrastructure alike, so Sam won’t be able to just drive down Highway 1 to make a lap of the continent. Instead, he’ll have to construct Highway 1.

Using the unique Chiralium element that has emerged since the Death Stranding, Sam can utilize chiral printing technology to make his journey across the continent easier. If a raging river impedes your progress, you can literally print a bridge to drive over with enough chiralium and metals. Or if your battery runs low within the chiral network, you can print a turbine generator to refill your charge — as long as you’ve come prepared with a PCC tool.

Preparation is the name of the game. Sam has ways of making do in the worst of situations, but you don’t want to be forced into them. Sandalweed leaves can be used to fashion makeshift footwear if your shoes fall apart, but you should really be carrying an extra pair or two. If your battery dies with no way to charge it, you might have to abandon excess cargo in order to actually reach your destination. Luckily, the journey is made much easier by other porters.

The modifications you make to Death Stranding 2 are persistent. Every ladder you place and bridge you build is shared with other online players, in addition to materials contributed toward road and monorail construction. They might get broken down by timefall or washed away in floods, but new porters will come along to build their own. Playing offline can feel isolating and lonely, but online you’ll see the traces of other porters and the journeys they’ve taken everywhere you go. Instead of feeling lonely, suddenly you’re part of a silent but dedicated community. With no way to maliciously disrupt other players, it exclusively feels like a helping hand when you’re feeling down.

Navigating Death Stranding 2’s massive open world is loads of fun. Kojima Productions/Sony Interactive Entertainment

Exploring the valleys, mountains, rivers, and deserts of Australia can be difficult, and it’s nearly impossible to take a straight line in any direction, even with bridges and zip lines to help you along. Not that you’ll be taking straight lines anyway, because there are distractions everywhere. A lost package you find on the journey might send you off course, speeding toward another settlement. The thought of repairing the monorail just might tempt you into a several-hour-long marathon of collecting materials, shipping them, mining for more, moving those materials across the continent, and so on. That’s when DS2 truly hits its stride; when it has you setting your own goals and tasks out of curiosity.

Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid V is arguably an unfinished game with some of the best gameplay mechanics ever devised. The story of Kojima’s departure from publisher Konami was well-publicized at the time, as well as how it impacted the development of MGS5. The game had its problems, but the way it tempted you into detouring off-road to source materials and personnel from a hostile camp you were passing by was unlike anything else. Years later, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was heralded as being a masterpiece open-world game thanks to the way it allowed you to carve your own path through the game world, and find your own solutions to almost any problem.

The real magic of both of these games was giving the player distractions within the game. We talk about the second-screen experience now, but these games have players adding to a mental list of primary objectives, secondary objectives, and more, which then translate an initial hour-long game session into an all-nighter. A simple ride to the main destination will have you tearing away to grab items and resources in whatever way you see fit, and Death Stranding 2 does it again in a way that the original DS struggled to achieve.

Longer journeys across the continent just make sense to achieve in segments, transporting a variety of goods between several destinations that happen to be on the way. Then there are the lost packages you come across — picking those up too won’t do any harm. While you’re there, you could always carry some materials to a road or monorail construction point. But if you find a piece of cargo bound for a settlement you haven’t visited yet, that should absolutely take priority.

It’s this ever-cascading list of goals and priorities that you set for yourself that makes DS2 so hard to put down. Just one more delivery, just one more package, just one more road built. Ultimately, it’s a game you play to make playing the game easier, but it’s so satisfying that it’s hard to stop. Some games satisfy you with a powerful sword or legendary loot, but Death Stranding 2 makes you feel powerful by giving you freedom of movement — both on the large, continent-spanning scale, and on the smaller kinetic scale with each of Sam’s subtle movements. Metal Gear Solid V was the pinnacle of third-person action gameplay, and Death Stranding 2’s mechanics have the same free-flowing philosophy, but Sam isn’t supposed to be a war hero.

Despite that, DS2 has a lot more weapons and shooting than the previous title. Enemy camps are more heavily armed than before, and several sections will practically force you into shootouts — approaching stealthily is an option, but enemies are oddly observant and won’t let you sneak unseen for too long. Some other action segments force gunplay, and will literally throw weapons at your feet so you can keep shooting. It’s never too difficult, but it can effectively get your heart rate up. Bigger boss fights are filled with gorgeous spectacle, but they are admittedly more spectacle than substance.

Seemingly all of Kojima’s favorite people — like George Miller — appear in Death Stranding 2. Kojima Productions/Sony Interactive Entertainment

Again, it’s hard to complain when that spectacle is so fulfilling. Death Stranding 2 on PS5 Pro is one of the best-looking console games ever made. This is the first truly new PS5 exclusive to launch since the PS5 Pro arrived on the market, and it shows. Minor details like text on a jacket or the felt texture on a hat are sharply rendered, and panning out reveals grandiose vistas as the dawn breaks over a mountain. Just hanging onto a monorail and watching the world fly by is oddly satisfying thanks to how genuinely gorgeous the visuals are. The world’s most expensive console now officially has the best-looking console game.

But the thread that holds Death Stranding 2 together is, against all odds, its narrative. Kojima weaves together mixed metaphors, wordplay that probably sounds better in Japanese, and references to his past works and favorite media, and somehow it comes together and sticks the landing. He’s either a genius, or you just stop questioning his logic after 20 hours, and I’m tempted to believe it’s the former. While some of his metaphors and analogies are best forgotten, others feel powerful and poignant.

No matter how obtuse the made-up sci-fi jargon in his dialogue gets, the cutscenes are always so beautifully presented and acted that it’s hard to turn away. It mimics film more than any Kojima game prior, and its star-studded cast grounds the experience. Léa Seydoux, Norman Reedus, Elle Fanning, Luca Marinelli, Shioli Kutsuna, and more make each scene hard to turn away from. This is the anti-second-screen experience, where looking away for even a moment will punish you by making the next line of exposition even more baffling than the last one you heard, and you won’t want to miss a moment from these incredible performances anyway.

That’s not to say it’s all serious. Some scenes will have you laugh, groan, and sit in a stunned silence. It will suddenly shift the tone on a dime and it’ll be hard to understand why, or what the purpose was. But then it’ll have one of the most expensive and impressive looking real-time rendered action scenes ever made in any video game. It’s everything Kojima ever liked — or thought about — all at once.

Death Stranding 2: On The Beach feels like the first truly essential PS5 game, period. It is visionary Hideo Kojima at his most unrestrained, filtered through the artistic sensibilities of Yoji Shinkawa and the decades of development and game design talent at Kojima Productions. If you have ever liked a Hideo Kojima game or wanted to know why other people like them, you need to play Death Stranding 2: On The Beach.