brushstrokes of blue light illuminate the cavernous dark. apocalyptic events have punished the surface of australia with pools of jet-black tar and dense clouds of toxic matter; wailing apparitions shimmering like mirages take refuge in valleys blackened by night, stranded between life and death. wrinkles in the land cradle orphaned possessions, gathered like detritus on the seafloor, their owners either dead or holed up in private bunkers concealed in the cliffside.
as a porter—a deliveryman who braves inclement death rain and weaves through camps of armed bandits in his mission to reconnect the country—you're thankful for the broken, fluorescent highways that striate the obsidian rockface of the planet, these fleeting moments of order striping the chaotic darkness. you're thankful for the steady whir of the engine as your pickup truck coasts over rivers of tar, running like mascara in the rain. you're thankful, in particular, for the dead daughter you clutch to your heart, the corpse swimming in an artificial womb affixed to your chest—because if it weren't for her, all of this would be pointless.
in other words, you're sam porter bridges again, returning from sabbatical. it's been nearly a year since you rescued america from the grim aftermath of the death stranding, the cataclysm that opened a gateway to the world of the dead—a liminal realm also known as "the beach," a holding cell for the dead who can't die. the atmosphere is laced with chiralium, an otherworldly miracle substance that can do just about anything, from powering fallen cities to poisoning people with irreversible madness. it's a world in which one's mind and body are split, respectively, into a "ka" and "ha" upon death, prompting lost souls to struggle for existence as their bodies rot and return to the soil.
on paper, you're embarking on another journey to unite the rest of the fractured world under a network of roads and rails. your covert objective, however, is to grieve the loss of your baby, lou, who was just murdered by the ghost of a man you thought you destroyed.
death stranding 2 traffics in dangerous fantasies. it asks what could be provocative questions like: what if a social network wasn't ontologically evil? what if the US government used the unborn children of forcibly lobotomized pregnant women to fuel a renewable source of energy? what if you could ride a coffin like a skateboard? it also asks worthless questions like: what if the dead didn't really die?
though i tempered my expectations, i couldn't help but seek catharsis in death stranding 2. yet i could not find solace in its imagination of an abundant afterlife, nor did i feel inspired by the way it shackles every woman in its cast to a desperate maternal desire. i did not find comfort in its confused moral compass regarding bodily autonomy, nor its shallow political analogies, nor the strains of stomp-clap millennial folk that permeate its soundtrack.
in the end, i was most devoted to its highways and monorails, to the tenuous tranquility of traveling its roads. the most impressive thing about death stranding 2 is how authentically it simulates the experience of grief: being cursed with wanderlust, left to shelter what's precious to you from the vicious passage of time.
///
a friend of mine—n.—passed away a little over a month before death stranding 2 was released. then, about a week after we returned from the funeral in new orleans, my partner of nine years—g.—left me. the three of us were very close, both as pairs and as a trio.
these two losses have been the only things on my mind ever since. it felt impossible to separate my personal grief from the short life i led as sam porter bridges.
i met both n. and g. ten years ago, during my senior year of college. the two of them were in the class below me, and they'd become friends early in their time there. i met g. through the campus litmag, where i edited fiction and she edited art. i met n. through g.; later, a mutual friend recruited me as a guitarist for his band, and he had n. play bass.
i discovered that n. and i didn't just share a sense of humor, but a love for music. i was especially struck by their attention to melody; most of the other bands i'd joined were noisy and experimental, music in which three strings of my guitar would be tuned to the same bratty note. but our band made pop music using standard tunings, and n. was always looking for ways to synchronize our parts. during rehearsal, they'd suggest harmonies and counter-melodies. i'd stop playing to listen as they sang or hummed what they were imagining out loud, correcting foul notes as they sculpted the melody in real-time.
the more i got to know them, the more i noticed that they were always coaxing little melodies out of nothing. they'd send me minute-long recordings of them singing into their phone as they trudged through the snow, on the way to my house. they plucked every earworm straight from the canal and offered them to me, wriggling in the air, offered like a snack.
i didn't like my singing voice, so i admired how vulnerable they were willing to be. i started joining them, and we'd make up short and jokey songs on the spot while we hung out, intended for an audience of just us—unless we were with g., in which case she was our audience, too. we'd record them to someone's phone for posterity, but never with the intent of recreating them again.
we started staying up late together. i'd be working on a paper, or i'd be watching n. play earthbound or half-life on their laptop when they were supposed to be studying. we'd spend time sharing our most prized bookmarks from the internet with each other: a mid-2000s webcomic dedicated to a brand of sneakers, a low-view youtube video of a lizard, an etsy listing for wall art made by someone who could only be a witch. g. took us on drives out of our college town, and we’d smoke cigarettes with the windows rolled down, cruising along a horizon of wheatfields misshapen by snow, while n. fiddled with the aux cord in the backseat. they introduced me to a lot of music—the drums at the start of this song by the free design, or the way this song by the breeders sounds at twice the speed—and had a way of renewing my appreciation for things i already loved.
i felt this intimate connection with them the entire time i knew them, even years after we'd all graduated, after g. moved to LA to be with me, and after n. found a home in philly. while apart, n. and i collected things from the wild—songs we thought the other person might like, or pictures of signage we thought was funny—to share during the next time we saw each other. i received so much music from them—so many lasting sources of joy.
the work of low roar's ryan karazija—an icelandic artist whose music features prominently throughout the first death stranding—casts a palpable shadow over death stranding 2's windswept mountain ranges. karazija passed away in 2022, and he receives a dedication in the end credits. after learning of his passing, hideo kojima, the game's creator, wrote: "without ryan, without you and your music, death stranding would not have been born."
throughout both the original and its sequel, music plays a vital role in dictating pace and tone. death stranding 2 even supplies players with a digital audio player (similar, it seems, to the one kojima uses himself), containing all the songs they've heard thus far. this makes it feel intimate in its own way, as if the playlist in your pocket was curated by a single person, like a mixtape.
to be honest, though, i didn't use it much. i was moved by some songs, but others left me nonplussed. it just felt wrong, for some reason, to think about n. so much while listening to something they wouldn't like.
///
partway through death stranding 2, it occurred to me that its gameplay loop can be broken into sections that resemble the ADSR envelope, a term that describes the trajectory of a sound in music: attack, decay, sustain, and release.
first, attack: you retrieve the cargo, whether it's a case of vintage wine or a mysterious artifact dripping with death. you haul precious metals, living emus, and rare DVD collections into a pickup that looks like a cybertruck rendered with a higher bit depth. spend enough time daytripping through death stranding and every thing, living or inanimate, starts to look like cargo, estranged from its intended destination or otherwise destined for disposal. scan your surroundings using a watchtower and you'll find the earth itself is bejeweled with cargo other players left behind, the horizon clouded by the usernames of strangers.
then, decay: timefall, raining from chiral clouds, scrubs through the mortal timeline of anything it touches. the surface of the earth has been cratered by pockets of accelerated time.
after that, sustain: ultimately, you can only slow the decay of cargo by stowing it in temporary shelters. monorails and roofed highways provide stretches of respite from the weather; the map glistens with veins, and cargo is the blood. these fleeting, meditative passages connect the game's moments of drama to one another. when left idle for long enough, sam sits on the ground and drifts off to sleep, watched over by the winged ghost of his dead daughter.
finally, release: either you deposit the cargo at the requested location, or you let it go, shipping it to another player's world at a delivery terminal or leaving it to rust in the rain. then you accept another order and do the whole thing all over again.
i spent most of my time in death stranding 2 oscillating between decay and sustain. instead of embarking on freeform exploration, i was drawn to the routine task of restoring the game's roads and monorail tracks.
an in-game text entry describes a phenomenon called "drone syndrome" in which porters, driven mad by airborne death spray, become "addicted to delivering cargo." they forfeit their memories to chiral contamination, which also poisons them with depression and suicidal thoughts. some go rogue and become MULEs, highway robbers obsessed with pilfering cargo from travelers like sam.
it's called "drone syndrome" because it emerged after the death stranding halted the use of automated delivery drones, causing an overreliance on human porters. but, as i wound down the unfinished highway on the west coast, tracing my pickup over the coarse, graphite skin of the planet, i thought about how the term also recalls a musical drone—an unchanging sound with an infinite sustain. a chord, or tone, that travels forever, unperturbed by melody.
drone syndrome is exactly what i’d call whatever it is that’s been gunking up my brain. my memories, like the bulk of the belongings g. and i used to share, have begun to show signs of wear. i've smoked too much weed and repressed too many experiences. yet i also took it for granted that i could entrust important memories to the people with whom i experienced them. without g. or n. to shelter them, i'm afraid my memories of the life we shared might be ruined by neglect.
most of my personal mementos of n. are audio recordings, mainly digital ones. but i also have physical ones, too, like a set of cassette tapes stored in my closet.
n. visited g. and i in LA during the summer after she moved here. on n.’s last day in LA, just an hour before they were supposed to catch a ride to the airport, i asked them to record some music with me on a four-track cassette machine i'd recently picked up from someone on craigslist. i was only just learning how to use it, and i wanted them to be on one of its inaugural recordings.
we took turns dubbing vocals, bass, and guitar, then listened back and laughed. we recorded about three songs before it was time for them to get serious about leaving. out on the front patio, they gave me a hug and apologized about not wanting to join g. and i in LA. it wasn't us, but the city. i told them that i'd never hold it against them, which was the truth. after they left, i spent the rest of the afternoon listening to the recordings we made on repeat, slowing them down or processing them with effects, giggling on my bed.
every time i listen to the tape, friction claims a sliver of its life, wearing down the magnetic surface on the ribbon of plastic spooled in its bowels.
///
everything feels noble in the rain. death stranding 2 taught me this. there's a certain electricity in the sound of timefall crackling against the gravel. it makes you feel like you shouldn't let yourself stop moving, for even a second.
the game's single-lane highways, always bereft of traffic, are your constant companion. self-driving monorails thunder into your periphery as you travel. on clear nights you can sort of make out the stars through the pale blue timefall roof connected to the road. sometimes, you soar past pieces of lost cargo abandoned like roadkill on the highway.
you're always in transit, drifting from order to order. after hours on the road, you might forget what your destination is or why you're going there. you might wonder if you're even helping in the recovery of this death-stained planet at all. but the sound of the rain is motivation enough to keep moving, lest your cargo decay.
i thought about that time g. and i drove through a storm in texas, with me at the wheel and at eighty miles an hour, the tommy gun pattering against the windshield, the taillights of the car ahead of us gleaming through the thicket of rain like the eyes of a wild animal. i could barely make out the skip lines on the road. a part of me was terrified, but the rest of me was ecstatic and coursing with adrenaline. i was restless to deliver us to our bright new future together in LA. it was the summer after g.'s graduation, and the back of the car was packed with all of her belongings.
she left some of these things behind when she moved out of our house. some of the furniture we used to share is falling apart. i still wear all the hand-me-down dresses and blouses and shoes she gave me when i started my transition. but one article of clothing i don't wear is an old, blue sweater that g. gave me, which originally belonged to n. i've never worn it, but now, somehow, it's mine.
///
death stranding 2's post-apocalyptic landscapes recall the setting from roadside picnic, the 1972 sci-fi novel by arkady and boris strugatsky. it's the book that inspired both stalker, the 1979 film by andrei tarkovsky, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the ongoing franchise of survival horror games. (some believe that "ludens," kojima productions' mascot, is a reference to an alien race introduced in the time wanderers, another novel by the strugatsky brothers.) these works tell the stories of people—scavengers, researchers, military personnel—who find themselves drawn to "the zone," an area of land made weird by nuclear disaster or alien interference, governed by inexplicable physics and teeming with unseen dangers.
the zone renders the familiar strange; mundane articles of refuse strewn across the earth (monkey wrenches, dish rags, spent batteries) harbor supernatural powers. trespassers develop bizarre rituals for overcoming the zone's obstacles, like tossing metallic bolts into the grass ahead to identify invisible booby-traps. lush foliage overtakes the bones of old buildings, and abandoned vehicles line broken highways. "stalkers" smuggle alien artifacts out of the zone for profit, aware that any given expedition could be their last. overall, the characters in these stories are driven by myriad motivations—the desire to escape poverty, a hunger for forbidden knowledge, pure mercenary survival instinct—but they all share an obsessive fascination with the unknown.
though i love tarkovsky's stalker, my personal favorite take on roadside picnic's ideas is otherside picnic, an ongoing yuri manga series illustrated by shirakaba and written by iori miyazawa. in this loose retelling of the novel, two gun-toting college students slowly discover their feelings for each other as they make repeated journeys into the "otherside," a zone-like realm that adapts itself to match their subconscious fears. they share an obsession with probing and understanding it—even after some encounters leave them traumatized and on the brink of death—because they also see it as their private sanctuary, a vast world for them to explore together and with no one else. their love blossoms from this shared madness, this fixation that no one else could possibly understand.
when the residue from chiral rain crystallizes on the earth, it twists itself into the shape of a pair of outstretched hands, mirroring the dead's desperate longing for connection. grieving n. continues to be a lot like being completely zonked on drone syndrome, clinging to deteriorating mementos as they dissolve in your hands, obsessively retracing your trodden paths. when n. passed away, it was like the map to our otherside was lost forever, but i still have this sick compulsion to find it again, even as i run out of road, as the unfinished highways give way to steep cliffsides and dark rivers.
///
i felt disillusioned by death stranding 2's hopeful ending. when sam discovers lou was never actually dead—her life merely exchanged for fragile's, just one example of the game's conception of women as disposable vessels for the valuable children they cultivate—i felt like he'd been cheated out of the chance to derive any growth from everything we’ve been through, all the sleepless nights he spent with his daughter's coffin chained to his chest. the game's convolutions in metaphysical logic amounted to what felt like a cop-out. with ghosts this persistent, it's almost like sam never has to grieve anyone at all.
but lately, i've also been thinking about the lyrics in mount eerie's "real death," the first track on the record phil elverum wrote after his wife passed away from cancer. these lines in particular often come to mind:
when real death enters the house
all poetry is dumb
at the song's conclusion, he sings:
i don’t want to learn anything from this
i love you
i was unconvinced by fragile's declaration that "death can't tear us apart." the weight in my heart didn't feel any lighter upon hearing it. i just wanted to get back on the road, where i could smother the pain under truckloads of resins and alloys.
///
late one evening, during the first summer n. visited us in LA, i drove n. to a japanese take-out place. i’d run out of washer fluid, and the streetlit road bloomed through my windshield as if painted by watercolor. they were weighing the pros and cons of moving here after they finished an extra semester at school. i already knew, deep down, that they probably wouldn't be happy here, and i didn't have the heart to try and convince them otherwise. still, it made me feel a bit sad.
they asked for the aux cable. they'd been listening to glen campbell's rhinestone cowboy, an album about being a country boy at heart, jaded by the glitz and artifice of hollywood. that night, n. played me the fourth track, "i miss you tonight." its chorus goes like this:
but my friend is the highway
and i keep on going my way
and it don't look like i'll ever see the light
in the morning rain you’ll find me
with another town behind me
but lord knows i'll miss you tonight
"'my friend is the highway,'" i murmured. "i really like that."
///
i did something sort of messed up towards the end of my playthrough of death stranding 2.
i was on the last leg of a series of sidequests revolving around the adventurer, a man afflicted with something like drone syndrome minus the thirst for deliveries. instead, he runs on pure wanderlust, a desire so strong that it leads him to various dangerous locations across the map, where he somehow manages to get incapacitated and must be retrieved, unconscious, like a piece of cargo.
after i rescued him, i zipped him up into a shiny sleeping bag and propped him up in the passenger's seat of my pickup truck. i'd started hoofing it to his destination—the shelter where his worried son awaits your arrival—when i realized that this might be the only significant amount of time sam gets to spend with another living human being throughout the whole game. he gets brief moments of respite with his gang of friends aboard the big hovership they all share, but most of his waking life is spent on isolated deliveries. sure, the adventurer might be unconscious, but friends like deadman are literally dead.
instead of dropping the adventurer off right away, i thought, i could technically not do that—technically, i could keep him with me as i embarked on a long and arduous journey to restore all the roads and monorail tracks in the country. doing so wouldn't incur any penalties so long as i didn't let him take damage. instead, i’d be his timefall sponge: i’d soak up all the damage in his stead if he’d let me. i’d wander brainlessly with him through the chiral marsh, over blank meadows of snow, into freak worlds of tar—anywhere within driving distance, as long as it meant he’d keep the passenger’s seat warm for just a little while longer.
so i hit the brakes and did something like a twenty-point turn on the narrow sliver of highway that carried us over the lake of tar.
"sorry pal," i said out loud, in real life, to the man in a sack on my screen. "but you know me: my friend is the highway."
***
Pao Yumol writes about games, music, and the internet. She co-runs EX Research, a newsletter covering contemporary online culture, and publishes personal writing to her blog, goosepimple.moe. Mostly on Bluesky but still lurking on Twitter. She thanks you for taking the time to read her work.