Death Stranding 2, the serenity and vertigo of a Kojima at twilight

It is rare for a video game designer to become the embodiment of an idea and a way of doing things. Hideo Kojima has done just that. From the release of Metal Gear in 1987 to Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain in 2015, he has never ceased to amaze us with his meta-ludic narratives. His spy stories, which have often turned out to be fictions about the medium itself, have always skillfully attempted to blur the lines between the player’s identity and that of the hero. Unfortunately, this creative power has come up against the walls of a multinational corporation: Konami. In March 2015, the Silent Hills project was canceled and Konami announced that it had begun proceedings to dismiss Kojima, citing power struggles between the Japanese creator and the rest of the organization. In the summer of 2015, his name was removed from the covers of MGS V. In December, a lawyer for the firm even prevented him from taking the stage at the Game Awards to accept an award on behalf of his team. The news, relayed by Geoff Keighley live on air, was met with astonishment by the audience. The love story between the author and his publisher ended in the uproar of a highly publicized divorce. He was then a creator deprived of his voice, like an actor who had been cut from the final edit.

And yet, from that wound came a rebirth. On December 16 2015, Kojima announced the founding of a new independent studio: Kojima Productions. Seven months later, during E3 2016 at Sony’s conference, his silhouette crossed an illuminated walkway while a cryptic trailer played, featuring Norman Reedus naked, a baby on a beach, and whale carcasses scattered across the horizon. A name appeared on screen: Death Stranding. No date, no stated genre. In this new chapter of his career, Kojima remained faithful to his principles. The game of playing with players began from that very first trailer, and he seemed determined to take mischievous pleasure in keeping his work shrouded in mystery for as long as possible. When Death Stranding finally released on November 8 2019 on PlayStation 4, it instantly divided opinion: some saw it as a radical work where walking becomes a form of writing, a “walking simulator” transcended by topography; others denounced it as slow, repetitive, and hermetic. But its delivery mechanics carried a story about a fractured nation that needed to be stitched back together. The game proved eerily prescient: just months later, the COVID-19 pandemic locked the planet down. Suddenly, off-screen, we were experiencing the same fear of isolation and vital need for connection that Sam Porter Bridges already symbolized. Death Stranding was not only a game about connection; it was a parable of a world about to run out of air and human presence, a reminder that the “strand” Kojima cherished was more necessary than ever.

It is along this battered road, between public disgrace and visionary triumph, that Death Stranding 2: On the Beach now advances. The game has been revealed in fragments, through dense, shifting trailers where acid rains, furious winds, crimson squalls, and black waves are no longer just atmospheric effects but living entities capable of shaking the very geography of the world. We see a more battered Sam traversing an even more uncertain planet, where each step seems threatened not only by the weight of the terrain, but by climate phenomena far more varied than the first game’s timefall. The game promises a traversal that is more unstable, more elemental, as if the landscape itself had been replaced by the shifting hostility of a grieving Earth. An unspoken promise is made to the player: an adventure even more steeped in Kojima’s essence. The depressive mood of this post-apocalyptic America that looked like Iceland is seemingly set aside for brighter colors and a broader embrace of global pop culture. Kojima’s entire artistic imagery resurfaces: overpowered mechas, cyborg ninjas, and Troy Baker once again embodying Kojima’s flair for grandiloquent, eccentric antagonists. Yet this radical promise of a game where gameplay embodies the world’s chaos to the point of vertigo seems troubled by another, more ambivalent trend.

Since its first announcements, Death Stranding 2 has given the impression that Kojima seeks to win over those who disliked the original, as though making amends to the skeptics. New companions, chattier dialogues, more pronounced weapon mechanics, a softened harshness to movement, a more overtly whimsical tone: all signals interpreted by some as a step aside, or even backward, toward a form of accessibility more in line with mainstream standards. There is in this sequel a palpable tension between staying faithful to an atypical vision and yielding to the temptation of reconciliation, as if Kojima, once a glorified outsider, were now trying to accommodate the tastes of a world that once cast him out. One fragile, lingering question remains: Will Death Stranding 2 follow in its predecessor’s footsteps, extending its painful poetry and radical playfulness? Or will it turn back, into appeasement, even normalization? It is with this haunting question that I threw myself headlong into this new journey. But to understand what it attempts, or avoids, we must first return to where we came from: that phantom America, hand-stitched by a solitary courier, whose traces are fading in the rain.

The legacy of a stitched-together world

Death Stranding was initially an experience of solitude. Sam Porter Bridges moved forward, his silhouette bent under the weight of his cargo, in a world devoid of human presence, where even the geography seemed to conspire against man. Every river was a potential trap that could cause you to lose your cargo. Every slope was torture for your shoes and your endurance. In this ghostly, Icelandic-looking America, the player experienced a truth that video games often mask: moving means suffering. Walking means experiencing gravity, feeling the ground give way, measuring your exhaustion. The topography was no longer a backdrop, but a hostile material that shaped the very writing of the narrative. Kojima decided to take a basic game design element and do something remarkable with it by simply adding the concept of friction between the player’s avatar and the expanses they traversed.

However, this solitude was never complete. Where everything seemed deserted, there were still signs: a suspended rope, a makeshift bridge, a shelter from the rain, encouraging signs, or even footprints. I remember my excitement when I noticed that the passage of players could create natural paths if enough of us passed through the same place. These echoes were the traces left by other players, anonymous companions on a shared journey. They did not have the monumental character of monuments, but the fragility of offerings. These are discreet, barely perceptible gestures, but ones capable of saving a life. Kojima, by taking up the asynchronous aspect of FromSoftware games, as well as bits and pieces of the ideas he had developed on MGS V for the Nuclear Ending, sublimated the very idea of a multiplayer game. By removing competition and confrontation, connectivity became a pure act of care, an anonymous solidarity where the individual faded into the background in favor of the collective.

This game system is a strange parallel to our society, corroded by isolation and distrust despite our hyper-connectivity. After the COVID-19 crisis, it became clear that our salvation would not come from a solitary hero but from the patient weaving of strands between human beings. That is what Death Stranding taught those who were receptive to its message. Each delivery, each construction, each stone laid by Sam Porter Bridges embodied a stubborn struggle against the logic of walls and separations. Death Stranding was not just a work of science fiction: it offered a fragile utopia, that of a humanity still capable of coming together.But this utopia was haunted from the outset by impermanence. The time altering rain, called Timefall in the English script, wore down structures, corroded bridges, erased traces. Roads vanished if they weren’t maintained; Sam’s footprints faded behind him as if his passage had been only an illusion. Nothing was meant to last. Hideo Kojima wove a funerary dimension into the game’s mechanics: every bond is doomed to be forgotten if not maintained, every act of solidarity to disappear. To connect was always to stitch over a wound that barely managed to close.This is what gives the game its melancholic tone. Each act of mutual aid is precious yet destined to fade; each victory over the terrain is temporary, promised to erosion.

Death Stranding confronts us with a truth that video games often deny: nothing is ever secured—everything falls apart. In this sense, Hideo Kojima’s world is not a living land but a corpse kept alive through collective effort. It is a body we desperately strive to stitch back together. The player becomes a kind of mortician, disguising death and delaying the inevitable. All of this carries political and spiritual weight. To mend is to sustain the idea that connection is still possible, even if nothing lasts. Building a road or throwing a rope across a gap does not erase the death that lurks, but it asserts that we have not yielded to oblivion. The game becomes a ritual in which every delivery is a step toward another, who reaches back in return. Who has not felt comforted by the words, “Hello Sam, glad to see you again,” from one of the shelter managers? You don’t just play to move the plot forward—you play to perform acts of remembrance. It is as if placing a ladder were writing a brief sentence upon the world, destined to disappear yet having saved someone, if only for a moment. Far from being just a walking simulator, Death Stranding is a meditation on connection, memory, and grief. It teaches us that solidarity is never a state but an act—one that must be endlessly repeated. That connection is not a stable given, but a fragile thread the rain could dissolve at any moment. The feeling of community exists only through the stubborn repetition of a gesture, even if it is doomed to vanish. This is the legacy of Death Stranding: a utopia for the future, yet pierced by an awareness of impermanence. A world stitched back together, yet still cracked, on the brink of collapse. A humanity that holds together only on the condition of accepting the fragility of its own bonds. It is upon this unstable foundation that Death Stranding 2 steps forward. For even if the world has been stitched together once, it remains a wounded body, its scars opening anew. The sequel is not the story of a healing, but the continuation of a mourning: that of a world we try to keep standing, knowing it will keep falling.

A new kind of loneliness

border, almost at peace, in the shelter he shares with Louise. The game could have opened on the continuation of that fragile intimacy, as if the baby’s coos and breaths were meant to keep setting the rhythm of our every step.But Death Stranding 2 shatters that bubble. Fragile, now the founder of the Drawbridge organization, comes to remind Sam that the world is still fractured. The stitching done in America was only a reprieve. The mission must now be carried further, extending the chiral network beyond American borders all the way to the southern tip of Mexico. And so our super-courier takes to the road once more, with the goal of reconnecting humanity. This time the player’s sense of rupture is not merely geopolitical. It is intimate, because Lou does not come along. She stays behind in the shelter, entrusted to Fragile, who becomes a babysitter in the cozy nest Sam and his child once shared. This almost discreet narrative detail unsettles the very texture of the game. Where the first Death Stranding gave players the sense of never being truly alone, with every delivery accompanied by the baby’s cries, laughter, or sighs, the prologue of Death Stranding 2 ushers in a silence more terrible than the solitude of the plains. In the first game, the hostile topography was counterbalanced by a presence: a breath in the pod, a fragile life entrusted to our care, which humanized the march. In the second, that silence opens a void. It is the paradoxical experience of a father returning to the road of work without his child, a solitude no longer geographical but domestic, a sense of absence lodged deep in the flesh itself.

Kojima thus transposes into the video game experience a very concrete feeling of our time: the return to work after lockdown. During the pandemic, many people experienced prolonged and enforced intimacy with their children and partners. The home had become the entire world. After two years in which I was able to work with my young child running around me, my return to the office was somewhat brutal, carrying the dryness of an exile. Even though I was surrounded by dozens, even hundreds, of colleagues, I felt strangely alone for the first time since March 2020. The days became silent once again, weighed down by the emptiness left where my child’s chatter had filled every moment just yesterday. Death Stranding 2 reactivates this trauma, one that many of us have experienced. We set out as if taking a suburban train, yet with the sense of leaving behind what gives meaning to our steps. Fragile, now a kind of surrogate maternal figure, regularly sends messages via the Social Strand Service. We receive photos of the child, gentle words, like texts from a partner who stayed at home. These gestures are comforting, but they also heighten the sense of absence and the fierce desire to return home after work is done. These photos remind us that the home continues to exist without us, that the child grows up elsewhere, in a daily life from which we are excluded. They serve as strands, but they are thin, dematerialized strands, both intimate and impersonal. Where once the pod made Lou’s breathing tangible, these messages are only digital echoes, affective simulacra that emphasize the distance more than they bridge it.

The solitude in Death Stranding 2 is heavier than in the first game. In the original, walking meant enduring physical suffering, struggling against gravity and erosion. Here, walking becomes an emotional pain as we move through a silence that should not be there. Sam is no longer just a porter; he becomes a father at work, weighed down by absence, condemned to remember with every step that something is missing at his side. It is a solitude haunted by a missing laugh. Kojima transforms one of the game’s major devices by leaving the pod empty even though the harnesses are clearly visible, reinforcing this absence even in Sam’s character design. The game mechanics take on an intimate dimension: what once provided the player with immediate emotions now becomes an emotional void. This radical choice gives Death Stranding 2 a new depth. It is no longer only about stitching continents together, but about navigating an inner rift, an emotional scar that bleeds with every step.

This emptiness is only a prelude. For while Lou’s absence accompanies every step, it also fuels the feverish anticipation of her return. We walk in silence, yet always with the stubborn desire to regain the warmth of home. At the end of the first mission, as we return to the shelter, an alert sounds following the detection of a break-in at Sam’s refuge. The suspended time of the journey shatters. Everything shifts into urgency. Each step becomes hurried, each meter covered in the panic of a father who already knows that something irreparable is happening behind his door.What Sam discovers upon returning shatters the protective bubble of the prologue. His shelter, a place of peace and domesticity, has been turned upside down, violated by an armed group. The sanctuary has become a battlefield. Outside, Fragile lies unconscious after trying to defend Louise from the men dressed in red. The child is gone. Kidnapped, lost, perhaps already dead. It is in this scene of devastation, somewhat diminished by Norman Reedus’s limited interactivity, that the prologue ends and one of the major themes of Death Stranding 2 emerges: grief and the denial that accompanies it.

While the player is aware that Lou is no longer with us, Sam is not. He refuses to accept her loss. He even imagines that the child has returned to the pod he carried throughout the events of the first game. Everything in the staging conveys this dissonance. Sam keeps searching for traces. He clings to the last messages received, to the photos, as if they could undo the obvious. Kojima traps the player in a psychological dissonance with their avatar. There is something profoundly sad in this desire to keep alive what is already gone. Where the first game taught us to stitch the world back together, Death Stranding 2 begins by making us experience a definitive loss. This is not chosen solitude, but a solitude imposed by violence. Ten years after Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Hideo Kojima makes us relive the experience of phantom pain, that of losing a child. The prologue does more than establish a narrative frame. The initial absence becomes a brutal loss. The child’s silence becomes permanent. And the entire game is built upon this fault line: how do you continue to walk when what made you walk has disappeared? How can you still be a porter when you have nothing left to carry? And yet, the walking does not stop. The days following Lou’s disappearance blur into gray inertia, a succession of sleepless nights and mechanical gestures. Sam wanders like a shadow, haunted by echoes of Louise, refusing to admit that the silence has become permanent. The world could collapse entirely, and he would perceive nothing because his universe has already fallen apart.

It is then that Fragile returns. No longer just an ally, she is the outstretched hand that calls Sam back to the road. She does not deny the pain, nor does she try to fill the void: she guides it. Her offer contains a paradoxical promise: to find meaning through movement, to transform loss into trajectory. For the world has not stopped needing porters. She invites him aboard the DHV Magellan, the colossal ship designed to reach the unreachable. The destination is Australia, a territory still isolated from the chiral network. It is a new continental-scale odyssey, where the act of connecting souls and overcoming isolation becomes more crucial than ever. Thus begins the true journey of Death Stranding 2. It is less a flight than a labor. More than a mission, we experience an act of mourning that calls us to carry again, not just to save humanity, but to survive the absence of a child. The journey that begins offers no solace. On the contrary, it is a stubborn attempt to keep walking, despite everything, to find joy or comfort wherever it can still be found, in whatever form it may take.

Australia, a trail for the bereaved

The DHV Magellan is not just a ship. It is an ark launched into the heart of tar-like currents, carrying a disproportionate hope: to connect Australia to the rest of the chiral network. But for Sam, this is not a political project. The Magellan is first and foremost a floating coffin, a place of passage where he tears himself away from familiar land. On board, the silence is thick, almost religious. The cargo holds hum with shipments, sealed crates, and provisions for an endless voyage, yet Sam hears only absence. Louise is not there, replaced by an illusion of denial far less interactive than the baby in the first game. Every vibration of the engine resonates like a missed lullaby. There is a profound form of solitude in the minutes we spend aboard this vessel, which almost justifies the fact that we cannot move freely on board. The Magellan is not the Normandy. It is not a space for interaction, but a place of isolation where Sam occasionally interacts with other people between routine missions. The Magellan thus embodies a tension unique to Death Stranding 2. On one hand, the utopia of a world and its inhabitants waiting to be reconnected; on the other, the despair of a father who has nothing left to deliver but his own grief. The tar ocean he crosses on foot via the famous plate portal at the other end of Mexico becomes the perfect image of this melancholy: an infinite space traversed by a man, yet uninhabited.

When we set foot on Australian soil, it does not carry the promise of a new beginning, but that of a reprieve. If the continent must be connected, it is not only so that humanity can continue its work, but above all so that Sam can keep walking, again and again, as if each step might, perhaps, revive a presence that has gone out. The spectacle is both magnificent and threatening. The new continent stretches as far as the eye can see. It is deserted and wild, like a forgotten world. The land is dry, marked by the scars of suspended time. Ravines, steep cliffs, and winding rivers flow into empty estuaries, while the Australian bush can be glimpsed in the distance. Sam steps onto this new territory, immense, fragile, and dangerous. The contrast with the Magellan is striking. Where the ship offered shelter, a metallic cocoon, an ordered and reassuring structure, the continent seems to resist any form of control. The first contact with the new stranded, who may observe you with their glowing eyes, sets the tone. If the prologue had felt like a leisurely stroll, the harshness of the first game could well return forcefully in this new play area. Unfortunately, the challenge never truly materializes throughout this adventure. Kojima has given in to the call of casualization. The experience is intended to be much simpler and less demanding, as shown by the fact that weapons automatically adapt to our enemies. We no longer need to plan our arsenal before setting out on the roads, nor worry about the annihilation that would occur if a human opponent were killed. The same goes for the topography of this new territory, which is far less rugged than in the first game. The Australian bush is resolutely flat and arid, but the problem arises when even the areas of relief are designed so that it is always possible to find an easily passable path on foot or by vehicle. This is far from what the first game achieved, modeling zones that forced us to deploy all our tools to reach our destination.

This new adventure for Sam abandons any concept of friction. In this respect, you could even say it’s a complete reversal. Kojima and his team were so keen to make the experience more flexible that they removed what was the very essence of the original game: the slow conquest of a hostile world through physical effort. From the very beginning, it’s clear that the terrain and endurance mechanics no longer have the same impact. Shoes wear out less quickly, the energy gauge depletes more slowly, and even the once nightmarish mountainous areas can now be crossed without excessive tension. The only constraint is the time it takes to cross them. The player is no longer cornered, only slowed down. It’s as if the game had been designed so that everyone could always find a comfortable solution, whereas the first game assumed that fatigue, mistakes, and falls were an integral part of the journey. The topography itself betrays this desire for accessibility: large open areas allow for almost complete traversal by vehicle. Everything seems designed to avoid blockages, as if the frustration that was part of the initial experience had to be erased. This choice has direct consequences: we experience less of the world’s harshness and, as a result, less of the intimate satisfaction of having triumphed over it.

The situation is similar with the stranded, who here appear as a much more anecdotal threat. In the first game, certain areas were marked by an oppressive density, where progress came with a mix of fear and weariness, punctuated by Lou’s distressing cries. This sensory dimension disappears in Death Stranding 2. The stranded can be easily avoided at high speed with a vehicle or a suitable exoskeleton, reducing any sense of danger to a mere formality. The feeling of being hunted, of walking a tightrope above the void, vanishes. Even the new hazards feel underutilized. Fires only appear in one region and seem likely scripted. The sandstorms, visually stunning and reminiscent of Mad Max: Fury Road, never disrupt the balance of gameplay. River floods remain inconsequential, too confined to small areas to destabilize the player. As for the new chiral creatures—spiders, jellyfish, flocks of birds—they lack bite, too slow or harmless to generate lasting tension. Being arachnophobic, I remember my knees knocking during my first encounter with a horde of spiders, only to exhale in exasperation when I realized they were less dangerous than those in Animal Crossing. Everything gives the impression of a catalogue of brilliant ideas left unfinished, as if the fear of frustrating the player prevented the developers from fully committing to experimentation.

Finally, this casualization is accompanied by a symptom already observed in Metal Gear Solid V: the proliferation of gameplay ideas that prioritize immediate fun over overall coherence. You can now surf on a coffin, fight with special gloves, or adopt a kung-fu master stance. These discoveries bring a smile and enrich the gameplay repertoire, but they also deepen a growing dissonance. How can one reconcile grief, solitude, and the anxiety of a post-apocalyptic world with pure fun mechanics that feel like they belong to another game? This is where the project seems to dilute itself: caught between the desire to remain a dark, meditative work and the temptation of a generous, entertaining sandbox. Kojima, perhaps burned by criticism of the first game’s heaviness, has chosen not to constrain, not to confine. But in freeing the player from the weight of the terrain and its dangers, he also frees them from the necessity of existing cautiously in this world. Yet, even though I remain convinced that the game suffers from this desire to please those who rejected the first experience, I spent many hours reflecting on what could thematically justify the existence of this less harsh adventure.

At its core, the traversal of Australia is no longer merely a logistical or salvational act. It is a ritual of mourning, a way for Sam to keep walking despite Louise’s disappearance, to transform loss into action. Every cable stretched, every road opened, is a stitch on both the continent’s wound and Sam’s own. The gameplay thus becomes metaphorical: working for the collective, advancing despite solitude, to realize that we are never truly alone. Living is accepting the fragility of bonds and persisting in the act of memory. Yet, despite this necessity, absence continues to haunt every step. The vast Australian plains confront Sam with a more nuanced sense than simple solitude. It is an active solitude, heavy with responsibility, where the urgency of the mission intertwines with the urgency of his own grief. The distances to cover, the obstacles to overcome, become constant reminders of the imprint left by what has disappeared. Thus, Australia is not just a territory to connect: it is the theater of an inner reconstruction. Kojima transforms physical wandering into emotional wandering: walking, building, exposing oneself to the elements is continuing to live with absence, stitching together a world that, like Sam’s heart, is fractured. In this context, every delivery, every structure placed, every bridge or cable deployed becomes an act both political and intimate, a testament to persistence in an unstable world and in irreversible mourning. There is an almost meditative quality to this work by Kojima and his team. Despite my disappointment with the game’s excessive ease, I cannot help but return to it and make a few deliveries while listening to the sumptuous music selected by Kojima and composed by Woodkid. The world around me ceases to exist for the duration of the journey, and I feel reconnected with myself. Perhaps this is Kojima’s true intention, reflecting his own search for self and past while writing his script.

Denial, but by whom? Sam or Kojima?

It is difficult to approach Death Stranding 2 without talking about Hideo Kojima the author. I have followed this man’s work for just over two decades, and it is clear that he has always been a paradox for me. While I consider him one of the greatest game designers of all time, my relationship with his writing has always been conflicted. He is capable of tackling incredible and profoundly accurate themes, among the most universal, or of anticipating the reality of our world two decades in advance with MGS 2 and its commentary on artificial intelligence and the overabundance of information on the internet that ultimately drowns out truth. With Death Stranding 2, he continues his habit of addressing death, mourning, and the importance of human bonds in a fractured world. Unfortunately, he is also capable of drowning his message in a mass of narrative weight. This second installment, like the first and, earlier, Metal Gear Solid 4, seems to oscillate constantly between the grace of vision and the suffocation of verbiage that ultimately betrays that vision. Here we see a now well-known habit: Kojima never trusts subtlety. Where a few silences, a minimalist exchange, or a lingering shot would suffice to convey the essentials, he opts for repetition, escalation, and pseudo-scientific jargon that aspires to be esoteric but too often sounds like mere noise. Like Christopher Nolan in Tenet, Kojima overlays his themes with a layer of artificial complexity, as if the player must be constantly overwhelmed with concepts and technical terms in order to feel the presence of a “grand idea.” It is not so much that he underestimates his audience, but rather that he seems unable to tolerate leaving anything unresolved. Every motif must be explained, every metaphor commented on, every detail hammered home.

This results in dialogue that is often painful to read or hear: rarely natural, almost always geared toward exposition. No one speaks the way their characters speak. Each person functions as a mouthpiece tasked with delivering concepts or advancing a story that only progresses because it is repeated. The emotional density is thus lost in favor of narrative mechanics: idea takes precedence over flesh, explanation over embodiment. The worst part is that this tendency is accompanied by a certain structural laziness. Where one might have hoped that this new expedition in Australia would venture into different narrative territories, as is the case with all of Kojima’s sequels, he instead chooses to reproduce previously tested patterns. We connect Australia in much the same way as the USA, traversing the continent from end to end, and the story unfolds in the same manner, punctuated only by bathroom breaks. The character played by Luca Marinelli thus almost identically reprises the function of Cliff Unger in the first game. Same principle, same function, same narrative tricks, to the point where it feels as though Death Stranding is doomed to endlessly replay its own ghosts. This internal loop, rather than reinforcing the cyclical nature of the story, gives the impression of mere repetition.

The female characters, for their part, embody another form of frustration. Kojima always introduces them with remarkable visual and thematic force. They appear indomitable, carrying a dramatic weight surpassing that of their male counterparts. And yet, after their entrance, they too often fade into the background, confined within the Magellan, barefoot as if their initial power must be neutralized by fragile, almost domestic imagery to cater to the Japanese creator’s fetishistic pleasures. Then, as the narrative demands, they are summoned, used, reintroduced, but never fully developed. They are always reduced to a narrative function, never allowed the freedom to exist. Adding to this is a more diffuse unease: the story seems to have been rewritten multiple times. Kojima himself admitted revising his script upon realizing it pleased far too many people. Unfortunately, the scars of these rewrites are evident, as if the original scenario had intended to explore the relationship between Higgs and Lou more deeply before being reconfigured mid-course. Higgs’ obsession with Sam and Lou feels shaky, barely justified, and the use of the BB’s Theme sung by Troy Baker resonates more as a forced reprise than as an organic necessity of the narrative.

This sense of narrative patchwork sometimes prevents the emotion from taking hold. And then there is the almost unhealthy relationship with Metal Gear Solid. References abound, sequences are reused over and over, verging on pure citation. In the final third, this obsession turns into self-parody: instead of a subtle homage, it feels like a diminished echo, Kojima trapped in his own museum. It is annoying, repetitive, and yet… strangely moving. Because behind the exasperation lies something touching: the confession of a man who cannot move on. While the entire world seems to have accepted living without Metal Gear Solid, Kojima keeps returning to it, as if his entire body of work is haunted by a past he cannot abandon. In this repetition, one reads the portrait of a creator struggling with his own legacy. This led me to ask: what denial is Death Stranding 2 really about? That of Sam, whose path is littered with false twists so clumsy they made me sigh in frustration? Or that of Kojima himself, unable to detach from the motifs of his past, condemned to repeat them in other forms? The two merge. The game becomes an inadvertent metaphor: that of an artist who, in creating, continually confronts his own ghosts. And yet, despite all these missteps, despite the excesses, the forced dialogue, and the repetitions, something unforgettable remains. Death Stranding 2 is an intimate work, driven by sometimes heavy obsessions but animated by a disarming sincerity. At its best moments, it reminds us that solidarity is the only weapon against isolation, that walking together, even clumsily, is better than remaining frozen in silence. Kojima talks too much, repeats too much, insists too much, but this overabundance ultimately bears witness to an authentic urgency: the need to believe, despite everything, in a shared future.

The journey of Death Stranding 2 leaves the contradictory impression of a game that fails on many levels, yet still exerts an almost magnetic hold. Its narrative excesses, unnecessarily heavy jargon, and tendency to hammer home the obvious often suffocate the raw emotion the work seeks to evoke. And yet, despite these missteps, something persists and endures: the rare serenity of a gameplay loop that turns walking into a meditative experience, and the captivating aesthetic of a world that is at once sublime and oppressive. It is in this fragile balance, between irritation and fascination, that the game managed to engulf me, continuing to resonate long after I put down the controller.

What remains is the question of Kojima’s future. At 62, the creator seems trapped in a paradox: still eager to assert his singularity, yet increasingly prisoner of his own image and obsessions. Death Stranding 2 testifies both to his inability to fully reinvent himself and to the enduring brilliance of his formal genius. The next chapter of his creative journey will likely play out within this tension: will he be able to shed his narrative and stylistic weight to regain the clarity and brilliance of his best inspirations, or will he continue to sink into an overblown rhetoric that obscures the simplicity of his original intuitions? More than ever, he appears as an author wrestling with himself, striving to reconcile the technicality of the medium with the fragility of human emotion.

And despite my reservations, despite the frustrations, what remains is this tenuous bond, this whispered promise that, like a lullaby, continues to resonate beyond the game.

I’ll stay with you

By your side

Close your tired eyes

I’ll wait, and soon

I’ll see your smile in a dream