It took me a long time to appreciate Death Stranding. I’m not even sure I fully got it after my initial playthrough, which was equal parts mesmerizing and dull. The game, in which you play as a postapocalyptic delivery man in a world ravaged by a breach with the afterlife, demands a lot from players. The gameplay is fiddly and frustrating, and the storyline is often inscrutable, at times seeming to make no sense. While it borrows elements from walking sims and stealth games, there’s nothing like Death Stranding, and so it’s hard to calibrate your expectations accordingly.
It really wasn’t until the end of the game that I felt I finally understood what director Hideo Kojima and his team were going for. And with all of that out of the way, playing the sequel was a more rewarding experience.
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is a direct follow-up. You once again control Sam (played by Norman Reedus), who now is living in hiding with his adopted child, Lou, after previously connecting all of America to an internet-like network by walking across the entire country. But it’s not long before his life of domestic bliss is interrupted. At the request of Fragile (Léa Seydoux), Sam agrees to connect Mexico as well, and, after strange gates begin appearing, he eventually heads to Australia to connect them too. Along the way, he continues to gain a deeper understanding of the event known as the death stranding, and does a lot of digging into where Lou actually came from.
Image: Kojima Productions
Structurally, Death Stranding 2 is very similar to the original. It’s all about taking on jobs. As Sam trudges across the continent, he makes lots of deliveries and completes other tasks, in the hopes of getting people on board with this new connected world. The future of Death Stranding is one of isolation; the landscape is bleak and empty, cities exist almost entirely independent of each other, and Sam mostly only encounters other humans through their holograms. Oh, and deadly ghost-like creatures haunt the landscape, which is what makes Sam — who has the rare ability to be able to return from the dead — the one person who can link everyone back up.
Practically, this means that the game is built around walking. Sam must prep for each trek carefully, loading up with weapons, traversal gear, healing items, and precious cargo. Then he walks the long distance from point A to point B, navigating rivers, mountains, and angry ghosts, all while staying balanced to keep the cargo safe. The big change in the sequel is that there is a great variety of missions, and it opens up much more quickly. You rapidly get more weapons (including guns with special bullets for fighting those ghosts, known as BTs) and tools to make things faster and easier, like 3D-printed trucks and trailers for transporting big orders.
The missions are generally more interesting. Sometimes you have to worry about keeping the cargo above a certain temperature; other times you’re tasked with rescuing a hostage. One of my favorite quests involved finding a kangaroo in the middle of a raging brushfire and returning it to a sanctuary. The Australian landscape is much harsher and more diverse, forcing you to also deal with strange creatures that sap your gear’s battery and epic-scale sandstorms. For the most part, the variety is very welcome, and helps break up the monotony that occasionally plagued the original. But some of the missions are a little too much like a typical action game, which Death Stranding does not excel at. Any time things devolve into combat, which is slow and clunky, the game loses a lot of its momentum and unique flavor.
There are other quality-of-life tweaks. Fragile and her crew — which includes a navigator named Tarman who has a pet demon cat and is modeled to look like Mad Max director George Miller — operate aboard a flying craft that can be used for fast travel. There’s also a robust codex for reading up on terms like “timefall” or “stillmother” that you might not understand, as well as a very helpful “story so far” section that I consulted every time I booted up the game.
Image: Kojima Productions
The biggest change, though, is actually me — and the fact that I have some idea of what’s going on. That’s not to say that Death Stranding 2 is any less weird. In fact, it might be even stranger than the original. Now you’re accompanied by a talking marionette called Dollman, and the new cast includes Shioli Kutsuna playing a woman who creates a healing rain (she’s named Rainy, naturally) and Elle Fanning as someone with mysterious powers that are somehow connected to her hatred of wearing shoes.
But with much of the narrative heavy lifting out of the way, I was ready for this, and able to lose myself in Death Stranding 2 more easily. I still don’t understand everything, at least not fully. Even after dozens of hours with the original, I had to regularly refresh my memory on terms, while also trying to grasp new ones (there’s so much to learn about tar). But the basics that kept me in a state of confusion initially — who Sam is, why he carries a baby in a jar, what the heck a Beach is — are now part of my lexicon, letting me immerse myself a lot deeper into this world, and letting Kojima’s team get even weirder.
That might make Death Stranding a tough series to recommend for some. It’s possible it won’t fully click until you play one long and confusing game, and then jump into its similarly demanding, if more accessible, sequel. But for me, that struggle was worth the effort, because, again, there just isn’t anything like Death Stranding. It’s haunting, beautiful, and forced me to focus all of my attention on it, something that’s becoming increasingly rare in modern games. It can just take some time to get past that barrier.
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach launches on the PS5 on June 26th.