“Death Stranding 2: On The Beach reinforces the series' exoskeleton with a gripping story and retooled action.”
- Gripping story
- Smoother exploration
- Improved combat
- Same great social systems
- Some disjointed plot threads
- New world feels the same
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There may never be a video game as prophetic as Death Stranding. In 2019, Hideo Kojima painted a picture of an already politically divided United States forced into isolation as a plague swept through the country. It pushed the need for human connection in society, urging its players to come together in moments of darkness rather than splintering. That message would become hauntingly urgent just one year later when a real world pandemic shut the world indoors. Death Stranding retroactively became the first great work of Covid-19 art, offering up a hopeful message about strengthening social ties that bond us all together.
Everything has changed since then. The rise of digital communication that was necessitated by a pandemic has backfired. Online communities have become a hotbed for alt right radicalization. Social media platforms like X have been reshaped into misinformation pits built to manipulate the outcomes of elections. The rise of generative AI has made it easier than ever to mislead trusting suckers into believing anything they see. The mass connection that Death Stranding advocated for has shown its dark underbelly and there are some days where I wish we could go back and undo it all.
That anxiety is palpable in Death Stranding 2: On The Beach, an introspective sequel forced to reassess its predecessor’s optimism. The gameplay hasn’t changed one bit – it’s still an open-world adventure game about a delivery man tasked with uniting a country one doomsday shelter at a time – but the attitude has. Do the benefits of togetherness outweigh the vulnerability it presents to society? Should we shut everything down and return to the safety of our homes? Are we all better off alone?
Even when its faith is shaken, like an overloaded porter tripping down a rocky mountain, Death Stranding 2 still stands firm in its belief that we’re all better off together. No matter what comes next.
Back to the beach
If you need a refresher on Death Stranding’s complicated story, the sequel graciously includes both a recap video and a handy lore glossary that players can jump straight into anytime a character says something like “Timefall.” The short version of it is this: After successfully connecting the United Cities of America to a Chiral Network, Sam Porter Bridges (Norman Reedus) has gone off the grid. He’s now hiding in Mexico in a move to protect his surrogate child Lou, the baby in a tank who helped him survive his trek across America. The plague that has turned people into ghostlike monsters, or Beached Things, still rages worldwide, Sam has found safety in isolation. He is now the very prepper he once convinced to join the UCA.
Despite his newfound peace, he is pulled into one last job when his old associate Fragile (Léa Seydoux) discovers his location and enlists his help in linking Mexico to the Chiral Network. An agrophobic’s worst nightmare ensues, forcing Sam to hitch a ride to Australia with Fragile’s crew aboard a tar-faring vessel and set out on a continental connection mission as he tries to learn more about Lou’s origin. It’s an engrossing story that feels like a season of Star Trek filtered through an arthouse cinema’s projector.
It’s the grounded moments that make Death Stranding 2 so vital.
That’s a minimalistic explanation of a sprawling story that oscillates between serious societal reflection and total absurdity in the same breath. There’s a bad guy who has a guitar gun. Sam travels with a talking doll who is animated on twos. Mad Max director George Miller lends his likeness to a character called Tarman, who is missing one of his hands because it is off traveling through the tar currents in the world (this helps him pilot his ship better). It is gonzo storytelling that’s happy to sit on the fence between brilliant and moronic. The writing is bound to be divisive, just like the first game was, but Kojima’s unfiltered creativity continues to make the world of Death Stranding an unpredictable delight to discover.
Though the silliest bits will create headlines, it’s the grounded moments that make Death Stranding 2 so vital. Sam is still a skeptic when it comes to the Chiral Network operation, but it’s not so much because he’s a loner who just doesn’t want to be bothered. There’s a sense that he knows that the reasoning behind the Australia mission could be a peaceful cover for an expansionist ploy. Everything about it seems a little too normal, and players are left to wonder who massive acts of altruism are really designed to benefit. Sam’s relationship to his child brings intimacy to that looming geopolitical question, placing him in a situation where he’s forced to balance protecting his world with the broader one around him. Those two goals aren’t always in harmony.
The story is at its best when it leans into those tender moments. Between all the cinematic action and musical numbers, a good deal of the story is spent building relationships between the crew of Tarman’s ship, the DHV Magellan. Norman Reedus adds subtle depth to the typically disaffected Sam as he finds a family worth protecting aboard the vessel. His interactions with characters like Rainy (Shioli Kutsuna) and Tomorrow (Elle Fanning) show us the way that other people can bring something out of us. Maybe that’s enough to come out of hiding and connect to the people around us, even when we know the risks.
It’s less effective when Death Stranding 2 wanders into tangents that hit thematic dead ends. The story seems particularly fascinated with the declining birth rates brought on by the plague. A chunk of the story centers around women trapped in a pregnancy crisis, an uncomfortable digression that strays a bit too far into natalist territory. It’s hard to tell if Kojima is trying to communicate something there or if we’re just meant to see motherhood as a sci-fi worldbuilding exercise like so many other pieces of media.
It’s all sure to be dissected to the point of exhaustion, but I look forward to those conversations after thinking about the story entirely in isolation for weeks. I long to talk to others about it all, getting their perspective on parts that rubbed me the wrong way. I consider that a credit to the strange ways in which Death Stranding 2 unfolds. It practices what it preaches, giving players a puzzle that’s meant to connect those looking to decode it.
An Australian Walkabout
Knowing Kojima’s history of high-concept games, I expected Death Stranding 2 to pull some kind of subversive magic trick in the vein of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Perhaps the most surprising thing about it is that it’s a straight sequel. As soon as I start playing, I’m reintroduced to familiar gameplay mechanics that have gone largely unchanged. I load Sam up with cargo, arranging them all over his body, and set out to shelters to make deliveries. I keep my balance with my triggers controlling each side of Sam’s body, construct tools like ladders to help me cross tricky terrain faster, and improve my star rating with various preppers.
If you were hoping for a big trick, you’ll be disappointed. Even the general structure of the story is almost identical to that of the first game, save for the fact that Sam travels from west to east rather than vice versa. The move to Australia is an exciting change of scenery at first, with the promise of kangaroos and wildfires populating the nearly photorealistic world, but the environment still feels close in design to the vague expanse of America. If there was a biome or mission type that you hated in the first game, you’re sure to find it again here at almost exactly the same point in the story. I do see some function in that, but it does sometimes feel like I’m playing the same exact game with different cutscenes.
Mistakes now more often feel like the byproduct of my clumsiness rather than an accident …
I don’t entirely disagree with the instinct here. The first Death Stranding was a hard game to love. As ingenious as its walking gameplay was at the time, traversal sometimes felt clumsy for the wrong reasons. The sequel aims to pave over some of the less intentional friction to better focus on the real challenges. For instance, driving is far more viable this time around whereas it felt like a nonstarter previously. There are clearer paths that I can drive a tribike through without tripping over a stray rock every minute. I spent the bulk of my game piloting an offroader equipped with a sticky arm that could automatically grab any packages I passed by. That turned the entire game from a walking comedy to a chill trucking simulator (I even gave Sam a pair of sunglasses to really complete that vibe).
That change makes it easier to appreciate the tension inherent to its cargo hauling missions. I’m sure Kojima has a laundry list of filmic inspirations, but the movie I feel most here is The Wages of Fear, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s adaptation of a 1950 French novel. That story is about a group of truck drivers tasked with ferrying an order of nitroglycerine across a mountain. Every moment of it is so tense that you might pass out from holding your breath too long. With a larger emphasis on vehicles, alongside old tools like floating carriers, Death Stranding 2 is able to better replicate those sweat-inducing moments as I struggle to transport fragile (but not that Fragile) packages through uneven terrain, BT-infested fields, and the occasional earthquake. Mistakes now more often feel like the byproduct of my clumsiness rather than an accident triggered by geometry.
What’s more radically overhauled is Death Stranding 2’s retooled third-person shooting. Action was a weak point of the first game, as Sam’s battles against wandering Mules often felt more like a chore than the actual chores he does for a living. That has been reworked with shooting that feels more responsive, additional weapons, and greater enemy variety. That, alongside the bevy of new tools available to Sam, make Death Stranding 2 feel like a more fully realized second stab at Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (Tarman even invokes that very subtitle when talking about his missing hand).
I’m sure that those changes will elicit some mixed feelings, just as the story will. Some will lament a strange series losing even just a bit of its edge. Many more will welcome what’s ultimately an adventure that’s easier to enjoy. Even Kojima isn’t sure how to feel about it. In an interview with Edge Magazine, he expressed some concern that the sequel play tested so well before release, leaving him worried that he’d made an easily digestible blockbuster this time. Perhaps he has, as the sequel is loaded with the kind of spectacular boss fights that will give Kojima’s pal Geoff Keighley plenty of montage footage to use come this year’s Game Awards.
But it’s still Death Stranding, the game where Sam routinely pratfalls down a mountain with an absurdly tall tower of boxes on his back while a Caroline Polachek song plays. Then he gets up, eats a bug, and takes a piss. “Commercial” is a relative term.
Staying social
What’s also largely unchanged in the sequel is the series’ tentpole social system. LIke the first game, the structures that players build can appear in others’ worlds once they connect a region to the Chiral Network. Mastering the Australian terrain is a collective action, as players can drop resources into community projects to build roads and monorails that make it easier to get around. That system is still an incredibly effective thematic tool, showing players exactly how much easier life is when they work with others.
I can still place items in drop boxes for other porters to find. I can entrust lost cargo to anyone who wants to deliver it for me. I can create aid requests that essentially give the game infinite user-created missions. It’s all meant to make Death Stranding 2 another world worth living in long term, transforming a dangerous dystopia into a mutual aid paradise. There is peace to be found in driving across a fully constructed highway while listening to the soothing sounds of Woodkid and Low Roar.
It takes seeing through the entire story for me to see the full picture.
As meaningful as it all feels, there’s a moment where I question whether or not it’s a proper fit for the sequel. According to Kojima, his original vision for the sequel would have had players traveling back across America and disconnecting it from the Chiral Network. The idea was scrapped as Kojima worried it would be a cop out way to reuse an existing map, but that idea initially feels more fitting to the story that’s told here. Death Stranding 2 grapples with the consequences of mass connection, so it feels odd that there’s not even a twist that adds risk to sharing.
Similarly, the sequel recycles the first game’s social media premise as players can send and receive likes to one another. It’s still a core motif in the story, with characters constantly giving thumbs ups that went out of fashion years ago in Facebook’s decline. The continued optimism around social media feels especially odd when platforms like X have completely changed how humans interact for the worse since the release of Death Stranding. Sometimes it feels like gameplay systems are carried over less because they’re important to the story and more because they were already built and it saved Kojima Productions the development time reserved for crafting high-end cinematics custom made for a smoother A24 adaptation.
It takes seeing through the entire story for me to see the full picture. Yes, Death Stranding 2 is anxious about the side effects of mass connection. It isn’t blind to all the ways it can be manipulated and used to rob people of their humanity rather than enrich it. But it doesn’t give up hope even in its darkest self-reflection. It weighs the pros and cons and still comes out with a desire to keep us all together.
The danger is out there whether we’re on the grid or not. We may as well stand in the rain together, with a song and a smile.
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach was tested on PS5 Pro.
