This article discusses plot details from throughout Death Stranding 2: On the Beach.
Hideo Kojima went through a lot between the release of Death Stranding and its sequel, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, as did we all. The first game came out in late 2019, just a few months before the COVID pandemic really kicked off and we all went into lockdown. In the years since, geopolitics has gotten… a bit chaotic, to say the least. You experienced it, I experienced it. We all did.
So, when Kojima said there was going to be a philosophical shift between the two games, it was expected. Death Stranding was idealistic about how the internet could connect us all. In Death Stranding 2, that technology is a double-edged sword. And it makes perfect sense why he would see it this way. Between 2019 and 2025, it's become abundantly clear that the first game was too naive.
But let's go back in time first. To start, Kojima did not like the COVID pandemic. Shocking, I know. Not only did Kojima get seriously ill, but he felt the isolation wasn't very productive. According to him, development on Kojima Productions projects slowed to a crawl because of remote work. To truly create, he needed in-person collaboration. Regardless of how you view his return-to-office perspective (it's something I'm very much against), he found that working solely through the internet just wasn't the same as working together in person. There's something to be said about how we interact with each other face to face versus through a Zoom call.
He also saw what was going on in the world. He told the PlayStation Blog about the divide happening around events like Brexit, COVID, and the American presidential election. He was inspired to change his philosophy around what Death Stranding as a series would be about.
"The predecessor was inspired by the fear of social fragmentation and isolation, but after experiencing COVID, I started ruminating over the dangers of being ‘too connected,'" he said.
Kojima's experiences aren't unique considering what has occurred over the last six years. They only feel that way because his work has been oddly prescient. During the pandemic, many people grew nostalgic for Death Stranding, which came out just a few months before lockdown. In a world where people were cut off from each other due to a worldwide crisis, one brave porter played by Norman Reedus could connect us all to the internet and deliver the supplies we need to survive lockdown. Granted, my Instacart driver wasn't played by Norman Reedus, but otherwise it was very apt.
There's no way Kojima could've known that his project would get such a real-world boost (or did he?), but the message of the game—that the internet can be a powerful tool for connecting humans—was a comforting one during a time when we needed comfort and connection. Getting through lockdown wasn't easy but we had the internet, so it could've been worse.
It was also very idealistic. That has become painfully clear over the past decade, but especially in the years since the pandemic. Sure, we can connect with others to spread information in ways we never thought possible just 50 years ago. It's objectively cool that I can find people who want to talk about TV shows with me or who can spread resources for community organizing online. Without the internet, I wouldn't have met my spouse, who lived across the country at the time, and we wouldn't have been able to communicate in real-time through Facebook Messenger or videogames. I wouldn't have had my career in online journalism. I wouldn't be who I am.
But with the internet also comes exploitation, misinformation, and all-consuming propaganda. I don't think I'm off base when I say that we wouldn't be experiencing our current fascist era if it weren't for the internet. The U.S. oligarchy, with its Peter Thiels, Mark Zuckerbergs, and Elon Musks, wouldn't exert so much power if it weren't for us propping up those who promised the future through technological progress. Much of our current crisis can be traced back to the goings-on of the internet and the potential of instantaneous human connection. Our current generative AI bubble is banking on the idea that humans would rather sit back and let machines do all of our most impactful creative and research work. It would rather humans not be humans anymore.
For all the ways that we have evolved thanks to the internet, there are just as many where we have regressed.
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Death Stranding 2 posits an important question: "Should we have connected?" It's a question I've been thinking about a lot in 2025, even before I started the game a month ago. And yet again, Kojima has proven to be a kind of Nostradamus (Kojidamus?) for our current moment. By poking holes in the premise of the first game, Death Stranding 2 is able to interrogate its ultimately shallow idealism.
In Death Stranding, you play Sam Porter Bridges, who is tasked with connecting whole continents onto the chiral network, which will bring about a sort of techno-utopia. It's the internet broken down into its most basic form, but instead of being a series of tubes, the chiral network consists of a series of "beaches" that allow us to instantaneously connect with each other. When 'we' are connected, everyone can be saved from a chronic isolation caused by a world ending event known as the Death Stranding. People share information and advancements with each other, which in turn grants Sam new technology for connecting even more people.
The tech is also helpful for the player in connecting with other players, in both Death Stranding and its sequel. Making progress begets physical, usable tech like vehicles, roads, catapults, and ramps that you can do a sick ollie off of with your coffin skateboard, and these inventions can be shared across game instances, appearing in other players' worlds to use for themselves. This data not only benefits you but other real life humans. It's a truly innovative multiplayer system that allows you to keep your distance from other players and it (mostly) removes the negativity that can come from typical online game interactions. You help and compliment each other through "likes," which incentivizes you to build and build. It's why some of Death Stranding's most rewarding gameplay involves building highways that allow other players to traverse difficult terrain.
While it's eventually revealed that this chiral network expansion was all a ploy by the President of the United States—here called the United Cities of America, or UCA—to create an extinction level event, it's ultimately stopped and the chiral network is allowed to flourish. That's a good thing, right?
Well, Sam gets a recap in the early hours of Death Stranding 2 about what occurred after the events of the first game. The world has moved on with a degree of ambivalence, people going about their lives as if they didn't have one foot in the collective grave of humanity. Deliveries have been automated by robots, and while people have started to emerge from their bunkers, they're now plagued with new natural disasters in the form of earthquakes (called "gate quakes"), wildfires, and floods. However, the country is still marginally better off than it was before, and that progress can be used to connect all the other continents. So, Sam sets out once again into Mexico and then Australia.
A heaviness hangs over the new proceedings at first. It's easy to once again get caught up in the routine of deliveries and building. There were multiple moments when I realized I had spent hours just delivering materials to build roads instead of moving the plot forward. With new features like monorails and their ziplines, there are even more ways to connect land masses. If you're paying attention, there's tension in Sam's second journey. The new UCA president is suspicious, talking to you about conspiracies on private channels. There is a shadowy patron funding the expedition. The chiral network connection also has way more physical effects, so as you are connecting more locations together, you get more and more signs that what you're doing might be causing harm. Not only do the natural disasters become more frequent but the violent gangs become more dangerous. While you are directing Sam to do exactly what he did in the first game, you have to wonder when it's all going to turn.
And, of course, it does. There are new forces pushing the continued expansion for their own gains. In Death Stranding 2, the major threat is, once again, the president. Now, instead of being one person, they're an amalgamation of 4,000 dead souls, killed in a disaster known as a voidout, who seek to trap humanity in a state of arrested development. By merging humanity with a sort of giant server through the chiral network, these souls are limiting our ability to evolve, therefore preventing another Death Stranding. By connecting Australia and Mexico, you were unknowingly ushering this process along.
You, as Sam, are able to put a stop to this—or rather, another character named Die-Hardman uses Sam to stop this secret plan—but the rest of the game is tainted as a result. How can the player feel a sense of accomplishment for all the connecting they've done when their work was being used for world-ending means?
Even though something similar happened in the first game, the threat in Death Stranding 2 feels more sinister. This is probably because it's more purposeful. The full extinction sought in the first entry is certainly apocalyptic, but it's treated as fate. Entities will emerge and bring about extinction, and that's just how this fictional world works. While we don't have mystical entities in the real world that bring about these kinds of events, there have been five distinct mass extinctions in Earth's history so far, and who knows, we might be headed towards a sixth. The villains involved aren't evil necessarily. They're just acting on instinct. Technological progress and the player's goal of connecting the country are still seen as an objective good, separate from the antagonists. Sam is still congratulated in the end and rewarded with the option to live his own life.
The threat in Death Stranding 2, on the other hand, does have a moral code. The president has chosen to enact Sam's Australian expedition to create a new kind of apocalypse, one that doesn't end with an explosion, but with a whimper. Stifling human evolution by uploading everybody onto a chiral server is a quiet type of end for humanity, something that will occur over time. The second expansion is, therefore, marred from the start.
This key difference between the games feels relevant. Back in the early 2000s, when I hopped on AOL for the first time, it was overwhelming but exciting. I, like many, truly believed that the possibilities of the internet were endless. We could communicate across great distances, share information, learn from each other. You could read up on any topic, including some you never thought existed. When you watch massive amounts of people come together over a single cause—the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo—you start to think that anything is possible when communication is so seamless. And all of this could be done in real-time, instantaneously.
In 2025, the internet feels different. An overreliance on technology has led us to a world that is run by rich men building tech that capitalizes on what experts are calling the loneliness epidemic. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is pushing the company's new AI chatbots as potential medicine for that disease, and it's resulted in at least one death. Other members of the mega powerful are pushing generative AI, which early studies show might be reducing our critical thinking skills and making us lonelier (although it's unclear if lonely people are just more likely to use gen AI). Elsewhere, OpenAI is pushing its ChatGPT product despite numerous ethical complications, including one instance where a man got health advice from the chatbot that ended up poisoning him and another where a man died in a standoff with police after being spurred into psychosis after talking to ChatGPT. Other executives are talking almost gleefully about how AI will wipe out jobs.
Things aren't much better outside of chatbots. Shadowy billionaire backer Peter Thiel's Palantir is being used by the American government to deport people. Privacy has gone completely out the window thanks to the likes of Palantir and AI-powered surveillance tools like Flock—because we didn't learn anything from the Snowden leaks about the PRISM program. You can even make your own fucked up software with an easily obtainable program through Google, if you want to talk about easy-to-share information. YouTube just rolled out AI age verification that feels mostly like a ploy to gather users' personal information. That's not even getting into tech just doing what tech does and being weaponized for war and death, like how Microsoft products are actively being used to facilitate genocide in Gaza.
These are mostly recent examples because new stories come out every day, and it's impossible to keep track. All of this horror, and so much of it simply to pad the wallets of the unfathomably rich, to make numbers go up and up. That's the most positive interpretation of our current situation. In the most negative, technology is being used to subjugate the general populace, to keep us from evolving to rise up against the upper class in control.
But everything that made the internet great still exists. We still organize there, share resources, and create works of art, including some that can only exist online. Sites that produce criticism like this one would look very different without the internet, or wouldn't exist at all. You can also learn just about anything. In the wake of governmental websites with important information disappearing or being changed, there are people and organizations like the Internet Archive doing mass archival work to preserve websites. I was interested in learning how to contribute to that effort and decided to find some tutorials. Within a couple hours, I was crawling websites and then seeding the files via torrenting. We are able to fight against any of these new online threats by connecting online. That's pretty cool.
If Death Stranding is the optimistic view of technology's potential, Death Stranding 2 reflects the reality, complicating the utopian ideal of the first game by showing that technology can be used for malicious gains. But human connection through the chiral network—and therefore human connection as a whole—is worth it. Sure, there are downsides, but then people still congratulate Sam on his journey and his myth as the world's greatest porter is taken to even greater levels of legend. The characters in the game are grateful. The players outside the boundaries of the game revel in connecting with others through building highways and farming likes. When you encounter a structure built by another player that is exactly what you need to get over an obstacle, you want to pay it forward and be that savior for somebody else, to make their lives just a little easier. Ultimately, Death Stranding is still a series that exists online, and while people can play the games offline, they'd be missing all the good that comes from interacting with others.
"Should we have connected?" We'll probably never have a full answer. The internet's power to connect has been exploited by the rich for more gain and is a huge part of why we as a society are in such a mess right now, but we use that same power to fight back. We still make lasting connections and can help each other. We can build more ethical, less profitable, more impactful technologies by sharing online. All of this good is probably still worth any apocalyptic downsides. For us, and for Sam.
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Carli Velocci is a freelance writer and editor in Boston just doing their best in a very strange world. They've written for IGN, Digital Trends, Polygon, Game Developer, and a whole mess of other publications about cool media doing cool things. You can find them on Bluesky at @carlivelocci.com.