This article discusses plot details from throughout Death Stranding 2: On the Beach.
The main villain of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is, like in its 2019 predecessor, a clownish figure called Higgs. As before, Higgs functions as a sort of chaos agent, a figure who delights in violence for its own sake, and a destructive counterpart to the creative acts of community-connecting, road-building protagonist Sam Bridges. After several taunting encounters over the dozens of hours that lead up to On the Beach’s protracted final act, Higgs corners Sam and finds a novel way to torture his enemy. He lights him on fire using a guitar-turned-gun-turned-flamethrower. Because Sam can’t ever truly die and only resurrects after a brief visit to a purgatorial ‘beach,’ he is burned alive, experiences temporary death, then revives to start the entire process over again. Higgs says that he may not be able to truly kill Sam, but he’ll settle for this infinite cycle of agony and relief, torturous life and the brief release of momentary death.
In an earlier attempt to spring a similarly brutal trap, Higgs says that he may not be able to kill Sam, but “locking you in a cycle of endless suffering … well, that’s good, too.” This time, he mockingly repeats the lullaby that serves as the recurring musical theme of both Death Stranding games, named after and sung for the baby Lou. Some of the cast sing it to a child that represents the future they’re working toward as a convolutedly explained extinction event approaches humanity. Higgs sings it in celebration of the endless agony that he’s inflicting, and that he wants the world to plunge the entire world into.
At the end of the recurring cycles of tortured life and equally agonizing rebirth, obliteration awaits. The choice is what to do with the time left.
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On the Beach is a 1957 novel by Nevil Shute, adapted into a movie two years later, about a cast of characters waiting around for humanity’s extinction. In its doomsday scenario, the Cold War has erupted into global nuclear missile exchanges that have, at the time of the book’s opening, annihilated apparently every living human in the northern hemisphere. An American navy captain, Dwight Towers, ends up stationed in Australia as the fallout creeps southward and, after submarine missions to investigate the radiation’s progress, learns that that continent’s population will be the last of humanity to die out in a short time.
Shute’s novel is written with an eerie combination of terminal dread and the kind of sober, stiff upper lip tones of Blitz Spirit Britain. Towers shops for gifts to bring home for a dead wife and child back in America who he can’t force himself to believe are truly gone. He tries to resist forming a new romantic relationship with an Australian woman called Moira. His last living act is to dutifully scuttle the submarine he commands, since it’s docked in foreign waters, because he cares about doing his job properly, even on the verge of human extinction. Two of his friends in Australia, a young couple with a baby, make home improvements and tend to a garden that will bloom in seasons they won’t be alive to see. Others consider whether or not to relax fishing restrictions on the eve of annihilation. These characters live in a sort of optimistic denial, carrying on until their bodies are so irradiated that they take government issued suicide pills to end their agony.
On the Beach is about waiting around for extinction. It’s a story where the end of the world has already happened+. Death Stranding 2 is about the same. Though laden with mystical concepts that buffer the stark terms of Shute’s novel, it, too, is about living in the time before the coming extinction of the human species, referred to as the ‘Last Stranding.’
Though released nearly 70 years apart from one another, both possess a keen vitality, arriving for an audience currently living through an era that, on the darkest of days, feels an awful lot like humanity’s last. Whether it’s a headline that suggests the 21st century’s New Cold War is about to lead to nuclear armageddon or a weather report detailing the latest progress in our planet’s environmental collapse, the apocalypse seems always, like Yeats’ rough beast, to be slouching toward its terrible birth. In this landscape, as Yussef Cole wrote in this issue, the question is whether it makes sense to hope for children that, in Death Stranding 2 and in reality, represent a future population “which will only maintain a stagnant and moldering world.”
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Even before Sam is tortured by Higgs, killed and reborn over and over again, Death Stranding 2 highlights other kinds of cycles. Near the beginning of the game, just after Sam believes his daughter, the baby Lou, has been killed, he falls into a depression. He tries to kill himself with gunshots to the head, only to return to life. When he’s eventually forced to move on, he ends up back at the beginning of another cycle, dying his grey hair back to brown and strapping on a baby-carrying pod, as if nothing has changed at all. (His hair is dyed, though, and the pod no longer contains an actual baby, but a vision of one that sometimes disappears into a mass of tentacles when his delusion breaks.)
Following these early hours, Death Stranding 2 introduces a cyclical layer that extends beyond its text by replicating the form of its predecessor in a number of ways.
After forestalling human extinction in the first game, the world seems to have basically moved on like nothing really happened. Everyone’s living with the apocalypse looming ever closer—pointedly, in the form of increasingly violent natural disasters like floods and storms, brushfires and dwindling animal life—but, in the meantime, the priority is to continue hooking up the mystical pseudo-internet that allows humanity to flourish. Despite losing his young child in an attack by Higgs, Sam must also play out his own part in this blinkered recreation. Now that the United States is linked up to the webbish ‘chiral network,’ he has a blank slate to explore in the form of a new continent—an Australia where people are waiting for the end just like the cast of Shute’s On the Beach. The game becomes numbingly familiar from this point on, its systems a polished mirror of the first game’s and its plot featuring recurring devices.
Where in the first Death Stranding Sam was regularly swept into nightmarish war zones, hunted by Mads Mikkelsen’s Cliff Unger and a squad of tactigear-wearing skeletons, here he’s plunged into deathly warzones where similarly boney enemies are commanded by a man named Neil Vana. With time, players learn that Neil is trapped in his own ‘beach,’ or purgatory, after being killed in an attempt to save Lou in the past, repeating the motif of Cliff Unger locked in his beach trying to find the baby taken from him before his murder in the first game.
From here, there’s a seemingly endless number of further recurrences. Death Stranding 2 not only retains narrative and design concepts from its predecessor, but also makes overt references to elements from creator Kojima Productions’—and studio leader Hideo Kojima’s—prior work on the Metal Gear series, from Neil’s Solid Snake-style bandana, Heartman’s possessions by Deadman, mysterious cyber ninjas, shirtless final boss brawls, and even Higgs repeating Snake’s “Kept you waiting, huh?” catchphrase.++. Like the plot and character reworkings from Metal Gear to Metal Gear 2, Metal Gear Solid to Metal Gear Solid 2, Death Stranding 2 seems to represent the latest in an endless procession of creative and thematic recurrence—another cycle of indefinite samsara.
Samsara ends with the achievement of nirvana, though, and the presence of Neil Vana, whose name is first misheard as ‘Nirvana,’ points toward a meaning behind all of this repetition+++.
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There’s a hopefulness to Death Stranding 2 that’s striking in a landscape of post-apocalyptic genre fare so often concerned with brutality. The cycles of violence and despair popularly highlighted by games like The Last of Us and its unnecessary sequel are premised on the reasonable-enough belief that human history plays out, in grand and intimate fashion, through repeated destruction driven by a failure to learn from past mistakes. The wheel spins on and generations move with it, killing and ruining over and over again on a long path toward total obliteration. Neil Vana and his skeleton warriors, fighting and fighting until the end.
Death Stranding 2, though, makes villains of those who see these apparently inevitable cycles as impossible to either break free from or re-envision. Competing ideas struggle for primacy in the game’s search for nirvana. Higgs, for instance, wants to end his purgatory on the beach through mutual destruction. The “President” of the APAS/APAC organization wants to forestall the cycle of serial extinction events described in the first game by bringing all of humanity in line with a transhumanist group of undead computer people. We’re either snuffed out in one last spasm of violence or led to a passive future where humanity is fused with computer servers, allowing everyone to live on through a static kind of immortality.
Sam and his friends are opposed to these goals, and the game itself is, too. Just as the characters in Shute’s On the Beach tend gardens, raise babies, and fall in love while radioactive death approaches, the game’s cast behaves similarly. There are women like the pregnant, ceaselessly cheerful Rainy and the Amazonian-style enclave led by psychic midwife Doctor representing the literal birth of new people. There’s also, goofily enough, a guest appearance by the members of Chvrches as the leaders of a fledgling animal sanctuary and researchers of all kinds trying to preserve the dying present for an imagined future.
Most importantly, though, is the relationship between Léa Seydoux’s Fragile and the baby Lou, who grows into an adult named Tomorrow, played by Elle Fanning. A plot twist during the game’s ending reveals that Fragile ‘died’ at the beginning of the game but, per some supernatural trickery, has spent the bulk of the plot still ‘alive.’ In essence, she 'lives' with an undisclosed terminal illness, hidden from Sam because he isn’t aware that the young woman Tomorrow is actually the baby Lou, still alive and all grown up as the result of even more story contortions.
Fragile remains 'alive' primarily to help others shepherd in a new future, this taking the form of raising Lou/Tomorrow and giving her surrogate father Sam the support he needs to pick up with her guidance after she’s truly gone. Lou is, per Death Stranding’s jargon, the first child of a repatriate, a person who’s unable to die, and so she represents both the real-world hope of any child and, in-fiction, a potential solution to the coming Last Stranding, or final extinction event.
Fragile dies when her work is done and Neil Vana, it’s revealed, can finally move on from the otherworldly purgatory he’s been trapped in once Lou/Tomorrow’s future is secured as well. Heartened by a vision of a cycle-terminating future more hopeful than the one pursued by their enemies, Sam and his friends face down Higgs and the President. Higgs is ultimately defeated when a giant Lou appears like a glossily rendered version of 2001’s Star Child. This Lou swipes Higgs up in a chubby fist, swallows him whole, gives a thumbs up, then departs through a vaginal beam of light, to be born again for real in the living world. A post-credits scene shows Tomorrow continuing Sam’s legacy, far in the future, as a porter dressed in Sam’s clothes and, like Fragile, lighting a cigarette with a pair of blue hands draped around her neck. Both characters have fought against the coming apocalypse to create a chance at humanity’s survival, and they’re embodied in Tomorrow long after they’ve died. Hope wins. The cycle may not be broken, but the wheel’s latest turn might wobble into unknown, more positive territory.
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We’re all faced with our own personal extinction. Time moves on and, with it, our deaths approach. While promoting Death Stranding 2, Hideo Kojima spoke to Edge (excerpted here) on reckoning with his own mortality as he turned 60 and faced a serious illness. “Until then, I didn’t think I was old, you know? I just didn’t feel my age, and I assumed I would be able to create for as long as I live,” he says. “But then I became sick, and I couldn’t create anything. And I saw lots of people around me passing away at that time. I was confronted with death. Of course, I recovered, but now I was thinking, ‘Wait, how many years do I have left to make a game or a film?’ Perhaps I have ten years?”
This experience led him to give a USB stick with different ideas on it to his personal assistant so that, after he dies, his team at Kojima Productions can explore new game concepts he hasn’t had time to work on. It also, conversely, made him think he should make another game in the vein of Metal Gear to please his fan base. Death Stranding 2, with the many revisitations of concepts, characters, and design elements from its predecessor and Kojima’s past games, is a project that reflects its creators’ twin desires to look to both the familiar and unknown for inspiration.
The cycles of the past inform our future, but nurturing what exists in the present is far from pointless. Shute’s On the Beach and Death Stranding 2 end, in the former case, with despair and, in the latter, with hope, but their characters find value in the final days regardless. We may be doomed, as a species, to writhe in the torment of everything that’s come before us and the seeming inevitability of our extinction, just as Sam does when trapped in the fires of Higgs’ flamethrower. But there are unseen possibilities that may lead us to destinations more hopeful than the limited ones envisioned from within that agony..
An epigraph appears on screen before Death Stranding 2’s credits begin. It's another quote from novelist Kobo Abe, whose words appear in the first game, too. It reads: “Though the future is a product of every present that precedes it, tomorrow does not belong to today. To live is to imagine ourselves in the future. And there we inevitably arrive. Yet our place in said future may not be the one we envision.”
There are surprises on our path to the end. We have to hope so, at least.
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+ Lewis Gordon writes about Death Stranding 2: On the Beach’s namesake as well in this article for Eurogamer.
++ An incomplete list of these references: Both Olga and Gray Fox return here as another cyborg ninja, piloted this time by Deadman and, later, Higgs. Deadman and Heartman share a body, with the latter’s voice, eyes, and Frankensteinian forehead stitches physically appearing when he’s “active,” repeating the Liquid Ocelot character blending and arm possessions. Higgs, at one point, gets smashed by the arm of the DHV Magellan, which is a mech inspired by Metal Gear Solid’s Metal Gear REX, in a scene that mirrors Gray Fox’s death at the end of that game. Neil wears a headband and strikes poses like Solid Snake.
+++ If this wasn’t a game so dense with references, it would be a stretch to connect the Sanskrit meaning of samsara—“wandering”—with the core of Death Stranding as a pair of games about trekking across sprawling environments. It might still be.
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Reid McCarter is a writer and a co-editor of Bullet Points Monthly. His work has appeared at The AV Club, GQ, Kill Screen, Playboy, The Washington Post, Paste, and VICE. He is also co-editor of SHOOTER and Okay, Hero, co-hosts the Bullet Points podcast, and tweets @reidmccarter and on Bluesky.