Hideo Kojima is the Salvador Dalí of video games. A creative, surprising and eccentric designer who raises the bread every time he shows up to present one of his titles. Creator of the great Metal Gear saga, he announced a new project for PlayStation after breaking relations with Konami : Death Stranding . The first images revealed almost nothing and it was not until May 29, 2019 that some clues were given to the players with a trailer of almost 9 minutes that included CGI cinematics and gameplay in equal parts.
You can see the trailer here.
They announced it through Twitter and, after one of the classic “kojimadas” whereby the screen was black and the image was revealed as more people joined the live show , the video surpassed 20 million views. But, after seeing it, there were many doubts that continued to arise about the game; so we’ve decided to compile everything we know from the new trailer to see if we can shed some light on Death Stranding .
What we know for sure
Let’s start with the simplest. We are Sam Porter Bridges (Norman Reedus), a man who has been tasked with a mission to reunite the remaining humanity, reconnect isolated cities and prevent ultimate extinction (next to nothing). We will have to travel a devastated United States (now called United Cities of America) in a dystopian future that seems to have suffered some kind of meteorological cataclysm, probably caused. It is a commission from the president of the CUA, Bridget, with whom we have some kind of past relationship and probably a family link (mother or mother-in-law?).
We will have several allies who will provide us with support, knowledge and a team with which to survive and face everything that awaits us out there . Among these, the latest technology gadgets stand out, the device on our shoulder that seems to work as a radar, shield and who knows what else, and a motorcycle whose design is a middle ground between TRON and Akira that promises to be a means of transport for almost any situation. We will also have a capsule-incubator with a baby inside of which we will talk later and, of course, weapons.
Because it seems that not everyone agrees with our mission . On the one hand, there are the Homo Demens (‘insane’ in Latin), a radical separatist group that does not hesitate to use violence to impose its dominance and that, according to the trailer, have the ability to create something called “emptiness” and that probably be one of the great enemies. On the other we have the dreaded EVs : floating entities in human form but without a physical body as such that seem to be able to control a viscous black mass and that are responsible for everything that is happening in the world. It is more than likely that we will meet other enemies along the way, such as the members of a certain CERAMIC whose emblem, as seen in the trailer, is reminiscent of the SS .
Bad bad or a misunderstood hero?
But if we want enemies, everything indicates that our great rival will be Cliff (‘cliff’ in English), played by actor Mads Mikkelsen . The images seen in the trailer first present him to us as some kind of scientist or person in charge of the research project related to babies (we got to that, just a minute); but at other times he appears at the head of a military commando whose members are literally skeletons teleported by black cables that come out of Cliff’s own body. Will they be the Death Stranding ?
It is likely that the character of Mikkelsen has some interest in that we fail to restore that famous link around which Kojima has turned both the plot and the gameplay and for this he will put stones in the way at any time and place. Yes, now comes the jumps in time.
BB, the great enigma
One of the key elements of the trailer is the babies, highly developed human embryos that seem to live in capsule-incubators to which the characters connect for… something . Recalling a bit of what the machines did in the Matrix, babies are the source of energy and the key for Sam Porter and the rest of human beings to come into contact with the Death Stranding , which seems to be some kind of parallel dimension or astral plane .
Although the theme is futuristic, images have been seen in the trenches of the Great War (including a Mark IV tank), a city destroyed by bombs during World War II and what looks like a rainforest in Vietnam. These encapsulated babies may not be a product of nature as such, but must have been conceived in order to “connect to the other side .” Although in the available images we see several characters with these capsules and therefore we must assume that there is more than one, they only refer to one of the babies by name: BB. Will this be the first to present that link with Death Stranding or will there be a more complex explanation? When it comes to Kojima, surely nothing is what we expect.
What will the gameplay be like?
The developers themselves refer to Death Stranding as an action game with great relevance for exploration, puzzle solving and stealth . As happened in some of the Metal Gear installments, it seems that they will place us in an open world with a lot of ground to cover but few people to interact with, being mostly enemies and thus accentuating the feeling of loneliness and desolation that this seems to ask for. qualification. It will depend on our ingenuity, equipment and ability to be able to overcome or not the different missions and restore the bond, reconnect humanity.
Our bet
Although it has been said that the main plot will revolve around the restoration of the United States from the independent cities that exist , something tells us that time travel to prevent the occurrence of what led to that separation and the arrival of the EV will be very important. The Homo Demens and other enemies will try to prevent us from creating these bridges with other cities, but almost certainly these only obey a larger plan orchestrated by Cliff himself . It also smacks of a Terminator- like paradox of causality, but that’s already a feeling of ours.
Hideo Kojima has demonstrated his ability to tell stories and to know how to translate them into huge, complex video games as careful as an Oscar- winning movie. We do not know if Death Stranding will make us travel in time, take us to other dimensions or if it will turn 180 degrees with respect to everything that has been speculated by fans; What we do know is that the wait until November 8 is going to be very long.
