DENIAL
What do we want out of videogame sequels? We want more of the same, but different. We demand the impossible, and can tell when we’ve been deceived. “Please surprise us with the familiar,” we say, sitting down on the same couch where we played its ancestor. We arrive with a blank slate of cautious optimism hoping to be rewarded—before the inevitable negotiation with our secretly carried expectations, and how they’re exchanged for what we actually get. We logged all those hours in the foundation that set this one up, and have a malnourished termite’s sense of when the cracks and grain have been recast or retconned. We paid like $85, because that is what videogames cost now, to get at it two whole days early. We sat around and did nothing while hundreds or thousands of people killed themselves and worked themselves sick to make this thing. We waited the many hours the $700 console needed to install it while we were sleeping. We deserve satisfaction. But we also know what comes with any sequel is a crossroads where we have to decide whether we’re onboard.
Death Stranding came out in 2019. But what time has already made slip or turn fuzzy—especially after the six previous heavy years of just trying to exist on this planet—is that Death Stranding was a prophetic game in ways that the big-budget videogame production model normally makes impossible, or at least unlikely. It centers on an immortal and reluctant deliveryman humping impossible cargo loads across the United States in a post-apocalyptic near-to-distant-future where everyone still unlucky enough to be alive stays inside for their own survival. It subjects this Sisyphean character to a back-breaking fight against enraged ghosts and similarly cursed elements (stopping occasionally to take in the splendor of nature doing its thing, or a piss), and gives you a magical necklace so you may activate something called the chiral network, which is like the internet, but people still believe in it, and it has profound spiritual benefits that are never really explained. Or it is, repeatedly, but none of it makes any real sense. What’s simultaneously clear is what’s being said in Death Stranding can easily be ridiculed, and yet, there’s something there.
It was pretty easy to ride with, because it had wild “speaking to the times” tones. My experience of playing Death Stranding was early during the pandemic. I was not unique in feeling like the world it depicted was not far off—it was already here. The company you work for is called BRIDGES, and the buildings it’s made all over the game’s version of the United States echo/presage the Amazon distro centers that have popped up all over the nation in the last ten years. (Anyone who has ever made a cross-country drive can confirm, indeed, most of the United States outside of the islands that are cities, is pretty barren.) We were all dependent on getting packages, back then, the brown boxes our lifeline to society and whatever it was becoming. Death Stranding was ahead of everyone. It had a lot to say about isolation and the ties that bind.
A sequel is a shot across the bow that clarifies whether the first one was actually profound or if we just needed it to be. It clears up whether we needed to mull on all this in the first place, or should move on. A sequel is a threat. What if this only works once?
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach’s tagline is “should we have connected?” and it is absolutely the logical response to what the first one had to say. But when someone else asks the question so you don’t have to, you may not feel satisfied by the answers that come. It all depends on what and how much you are willing to overlook.
ANGER
What if the real danger of a sequel isn’t running out of things to say, but cringing as what gets said next is dragged forward by the gravity of everything you heard before? What if you can’t help but feel wounded at discovering how meaning can disappear when something you once loved tries to do too much?
Death Stranding 2 both benefits and suffers from the ways ideas can either carry inertia or end up tap dancing. It buckles under the weight of a familiar creative ailment, the garden-variety issue of Too Many Ideas—about trust, about fatherhood, about trauma, about the singularity, about being stuck between only shitty options, about the forces that conspire to keep us home, introverted, and pacified by devices—being communicated by something still so rare in videogames: a clear authorial voice. A lot of homework has been done on thinking through what connection means, and the complicated consequences it can bring. All unions are temporary, except for the ways in which they are not. Suspicion provokes confrontation. People can surprise you. They can hurt and betray you. But there is no getting around the fact that the end of something lasts longer than the thing itself. What if it’s your own stupid fucking fault for caring in the first place?
Since the first one came out, I had become the de facto Death Stranding evangelist to a friend group filled with videogame burnouts, recovering critics, and multiplayer-exclusive devotees. Mainly, people kept asking me what the first one was even like, intrigued to hear (from me) that it was a game about the virtues of hard labor and collaboration. In the deserts far east of Los Angeles, I watched a friend last November become a convert in real-time and blearily shout late one night, “This is too much fun!” You have to play it yourself to understand that it isn’t really as repetitive—making delivery after delivery after delivery—as it seems to an onlooker.
Death Stranding is also special for calling on the sublime ways the natural world and its cosmic indifference extends to little old you. I didn’t know this awaited me in the first game, and was similarly in the dark about the next one. As a rule, I avoid repeat visits on things I loved in the past. Reliving Death Stranding vicariously through a longtime friend is the closest I’ll get, both because I’m not an especially nostalgic person, but I also am afraid of, for example, rewatching Succession and learning it doesn’t stand up because it wasn’t cynical enough. It sucks to realize that the world around us has gotten grim enough to outpace satire. So, for Death Stranding 2, I avoided trailers. Didn’t read speculation. I kept my expectations low, even though I told everyone around me why it mattered. I like to preserve the holy act of going into something blind and letting it reveal itself on its own terms. Even if you know you can’t capture lightning twice, you still set the little bottle up in the storm.
What is “more” to Hideo Kojima, the man who we unfairly or not, ascribe total authorship to this pretty videogame with many intricate moving parts? How does he answer that? Does he care what we want out of videogame sequels in 2025, or focus only on what we need more of? Is he making only what he wants to see? Are we taken into consideration at all?
Contorting to explain how maybe yes, maybe no is just a stall and a flex. Mixed signals are tainted and weighed down by the undeniable evidence that you’re being shut out. That rejection is there if you see it, and once you see it, you’re scarred. Much like Francis Ford Coppola with the polarizing Megalopolis, the only thing you can’t argue is that he made the film he wanted. Kojima can always be counted on to deliver strangeness you couldn’t have seen coming, but is also saddled with outsized expectations: because in 2001 he made Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, certainly he can come through with another mind-blowing second entry in a newish series. He has it in him and we are, at a minimum, expecting that. He owes us.
At the start of DS2, your avatar Sam Porter Bridges is in a similarly impossible position. What’s changed for him since the last rodeo is revealed mercifully quick: Eleven months later, he’s now a ruinpunk stay-at-home dad, laying low in a bunker, and wanting to be left alone forever in whatever the borderlands between South Texas and Mexico have become in the shadow of The United Cities of America. It’s beautiful down there. Quiet. Then there’s some exposition of how deliveries in the UCA are now being made by bots, but more extinction events loom. Yada yada something about chiral density. Fragile, a friend and frequent scene partner from the first game appears, only to blackmail Sam to cross the border and activate another network terminal in Mexico in exchange for a pardon for going AWOL from his country and stealing a baby that is government property.
This setup draws out a few of the things that are new this time around. Sam has dialogue options while talking to others. When Fragile asks if he will agree to the deal, you can refuse the call. Except, you can’t. Doing so forces you to go a bit farther back, and rewatch more of the intro. He’s stuck. There is a lot of dialogue early on about how Sam’s thirst for revenge and for understanding secrets from the past will never be satisfied. You’re warned repeatedly that going down this road will only hurt you in the end, and then the game shoves you out the door. You can idle and you can tarry—DS2 boasts a glossary and footnotes accessible at any time during cutscenes, one of many ideas here that are refinements of concepts dating back to at least Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots—but the game is pulling the strings. You know where you have to go, and what you have to do. You can’t go back.
“More” in DS2 will not sound like much on paper, but it will take you at least 70ish hours to see almost all of it. There are earthquakes, floods, and sandstorms. Wildfires. Avalanches. Sunburns. In a game about staying on balance and maintaining proper posture at all times to protect something you must prioritize above yourself, these are no small additions. In DS2, you have to schlep all over Mexico and Australia and do it again, Sam. There is also, if you choose to walk that path, a lot more combat. So many guns. Making lots of deliveries to the grateful survivalists—who don’t seem really damaged by their isolation—cumulatively grants you a beefier arsenal, and a lot of additional wrinkles for how to get your gunplay on. You still shouldn’t kill anyone, but that you have so many more ways to edge closer to that line feels like a weird concession, since that wasn’t the draw back in 2019. That there are so many new kinds of things to shoot—red guys called ghost mechs—wouldn’t be novel for a videogame from the last century, nevermind this one.
The “more” we are given here doesn’t invite complicated conclusions about the nature of connection, but instead: that’s it? An abundance of options doesn’t make the poetry of a videogame any deeper. It only jumbles the meter.
BARGAINING?
OK, but what if it was my fault for not really thinking through what “more” for Death Stranding might mean? One of its biggest draws for me was the way it put on full display the plight of high-functioning people who are overburdened but press on anyway. You may not like being confronted with that heaviness—maybe it reminds you of something about the real world you can’t face—but that does little to make that reality go away. It’s happening whether you like it or not. So maybe it’s enough that you’re still carrying impossible loads across new vistas. What else could a sequel here be, but that? Isn’t that enough to distract from all the sermons you (and Sam) get as a reward for yet another one of your deliveries? Maybe that, in some way, is a test to see if you are understanding what the game is really trying to say.
Every haul, I gave DS2 another chance to become what I needed it to be. Of course, I am the one who gets to decide whether this game is any good or not. I didn’t mean to feel this. There’s still time to change my mind, right? If I don’t write my feelings down, they aren’t real. Yes?
But two days into playing and still trying to understand the shape of the thing, one of my first suspicious smell-test thoughts was, “Huh, it’s kinda weird when it’s in on what it’s in on.” Something about the internet of our day was discussed, and once that crept in, there was a sense that the game’s insistence on connecting dots from today to the whenever-future it’s depicting—that people playing this today can’t imagine a future where we are intent on destroying ourselves—that that was a bridge too far for me, realizing Death Stranding 2 self-consciously needed to hold my hand to see how that might be possible. But haven’t we already been living all this shit? The first one felt like it tapped into something—some deep current under everything. The second one keeps winking, nudging, and chili-dog stage whispering into your ear, “See? This is just like real life.”
But, OK, maybe the problem is my standards are too high. I am not the average bear. Something broke in me watching Gamergate play out the way it had, raising existential fears about what the internet was becoming, and how it was able to sour all it touched. Should we have connected? I have been wondering about that for a quarter of my life, and am conflicted to bring up the numbers associated with it, spending the last decade interviewing over 500 people about all the questions this one ugly harbinger represented. The number glosses over the reality that each of us is a complicated individual who at the end of the day just wants things to be OK. So I was very curious what Kojima had to say and where he’d go in this sequel—mainly I tried to keep it out of my mind and meet it on the day.
A friend I made through these interviews who used to work for Konami, where Kojima came to prominence, told me the videogame director loves America but hates Americans. They don’t know whether this holds true anymore, and maybe he felt similarly about the Japanese, but the gist was that he wasn’t very concerned with his American co-workers and staff. However you or I may interpret that second-hand sentiment, it has stuck with me for over a decade. In Death Stranding 2, connecting Mexico and Australia is an unsubtle metaphor for manifest destiny. But it’s hitting at a time when that hatred, fear, and disgust for Americans is pretty common and widespread here and beyond. The unaddressed tolls of original sins we all ignore to go about our days are, through the language and expansive sci-fi of Death Stranding 2, shrugged off by American leaders with a “what’s done is done” rhetoric. But all the doom that has stacked up here, it’s made clear again and again, is due to the past’s grip on everything.
The one thing someone who is asked to write about videogames really doesn’t get is the benefit of hindsight or ample time to even process what 70 hours of a videogame crammed into two weeks of many sleepless nights might mean with even a bit more distance. Maybe the ideas here are just big, and it’s burnout talking. Maybe sequels just aren’t built to surprise anyone anymore, and that’s not Kojima’s fault. Maybe he doesn’t owe us anything. What if this is Kojima working through his own disappointments with the world, so it should be somewhat disappointing to play, and obviously he’s thought about this for longer, and is also older? I know that savvy creative people with things to say know that their audiences can’t be taught anything new, and only reminded of the things they already know but have lost touch with. So maybe Kojima doesn’t owe me anything. I know he doesn’t. He doesn’t even know who I am.
DEPRESSION??
There are not-subtle signals early on that this whole game might be a ritual, a way for Sam to process a loss that Death Stranding 2 half-heartedly thinks it’s hiding from you. But because that loss was spelled out so plainly if you knew what to pay attention to, and because I was pretty sure about it, I found even that suspicion led to my playing with more recklessness. Repeatedly going up and over the same mountains started to get annoying. I’d give little thought to how much some cargo might need protecting, and make fewer rest stops if I could get away with it. I accidentally forgot to pack extra boots near the end of the game, so wound up making one of the final merciless long slogs barefoot. It wasn’t even about getting there anymore. If this is a game about grief—and I believe it almost undeniably is—then on some level I thought maybe speeding up the pain, to make the game speak faster, would get us both somewhere. To maybe reach an understanding. To give yourself over to a videogame is to, in the end, let it play you.
What spectators can’t glean from Death Stranding are the ways it demonstrates the amazing potential of networks, and how we all benefit by looking out for each other. The offline portions of the game—before you connect the chiral network in another region—are intentionally punishing. You wind up packing the kitchen sink with you “just in case” because alone, you don’t know what you are going to face in a new area. But the ladders, the ropes, the things that helped you in the past, will help someone else later. Death Stranding understands how to make “Likes,” a worthless symbol our egos crave, into a cycle of positivity for strangers. The internet of today hasn’t figured out how to transmit that kind of quiet kindness. Death Stranding shows a way.
In Death Stranding 2, the player population knows the deal. I found pretty much from the beginning, once I reached the online versions of places, there was a garish abundance of fully leveled-up structures everywhere I went. A big part of this series is being asked, “How can I be useful?” I wound up building a lot of roads—a grisly back-and-forth and back-and-forth of materials in heavy containers that are typically hard to come by—mainly because there was little else I found I could do that wasn’t already done by others. Death Stranding 2 made me feel like a freeloader, and made me scoff a bit at other players who built structures in spots that got in the way of mission-critical tasks, begging you to notice and reward them. In 2019, “Likes” in Death Stranding felt kinda neat. In 2025, “Likes” in Death Stranding 2 feel performative and elbow-jogging. I put up a lot of “don’t pee here” signs, though I think my most liked structure was a winking face I put near where a cluster of rainbow lorikeets have taken up residence. Big deal.
Why do I draw a line between Kojima’s manmade cliffs and forests—which I loved for the way they made me feel small—and the ramps, generators, bridges, and safe houses left behind by other players, which just made me feel unnecessary? Maybe it’s because they pierce the illusion of self-reliance. But it’s more than that. What once felt like wilderness now resembles the real world we sometimes play videogames to escape: overbuilt, overlit, and overwrought by everyone else. Everywhere you go, Death Stranding 2’s world reminds you how easily a quiet, careful space can be turned into a neon joke. Where I once roamed in solitude, it now feels like I’ve wandered into someone else’s punchline. I’m just background for their photo bomb.
But my assumption is that even the keenest completionists out there will admit, sooner or later, making enough deliveries so that every recipient gives you a five-star rating starts to lose its charm. You realize you never actually see the inside of any of these boxes, and they are just the same shapes with different labels, over and over. It all gets a bit hollow, even if the landscape or ways the camera behaves can still be pretty impressive. But for me, these runs become vacant when you start to be reunited with “friends” from the past—people you did this for before, in the first game. Did all of that mean nothing? We really have to start from zero? I don’t get to rate you back? And I’m doing all of this for another kind of grenade I probably won’t even use?
Is the problem here, basically, that we aren’t getting to suffer enough?
ACCEPTANCE???
Despite Sam making it almost a full year without being caught in the trap of what Death Stranding means for his life—and that he seems content even—it’s like he never really believed he was allowed out. He shrugs at Fragile’s offer/ultimatum to resume his beast of burden duty, and with a weary surrender, says, “[This] seems like the only thing I’m good at.”
We go, because he goes.
Death Stranding 2 is weird in some pretty weird ways. There is the odd realization that this sequel is not really for people who played the first one. Which is OK. It plays with ideas that maybe ought to become the basic level of literary conceit all videogames deserve, like that violence maybe isn’t so good. It isn’t mind-blowing, but every generation needs their own basic ways into these ideas. If you don’t like it, you can go and play the first one again. That’s what it’s there for.
We play a sequel because we played the first one, and hope that’s not the only thing we’re good at.
As we walk the path, we hope in the rear-view, acceptance and surrender merge. Something of us is still moving forward. Only what’s ahead knows where it’s taking us.
CHIRALIUM
“Until moments ago, each of you was trapped in an elaborate illusion created by the President.”
“Friends and family don’t guarantee happiness.”
“The child you’re carrying is not dead. It’s just that time has stopped in your womb.”
“Chiralgrams are great, but nothing beats a hug.”
“Lost cargo was returned by eric_clapton.”
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David Wolinsky is an entertainment journalist turned oral historian of “cool industries” facing internet-era upheavals and author of 2024’s The Hivemind Swarmed: Conversations on Gamergate, the Aftermath, and the Quest for a Safer Internet. He co-hosts the GAMETHING podcast, and I guess that’s about it?