This Embodied
Dan Schindel on Death Stranding and Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
From its beginning, the Metal Gear series has incorporated an unusual usable item: cigarettes. In the first game, smoking slows a countdown clock during a climactic escape sequence. Later installments have deepened their simulation of nicotine’s calming effects. In Metal Gear 2, the player character must smoke before hopping on a hang glider. In the Metal Gear Solid games, smoking steadies your aim. But Metal Gear Solid also added a wrinkle: equipping a cigarette saps your health (this feature was retroactively added to the predecessors in rereleases). That cigarettes both aid and harm you is one way Hideo Kojima asks the player to consider the characters they control as not mere avatars but beings with bodies.
Outside of certain contexts, such as life management sims or survival modes, games do not tend to encourage in-depth contemplation of physical health. Per the term, the player character is usually an extension of the human controlling them. But Kojima pushes at this paradigm through the metafictional aspects of his stories, toying with your agency and your relationship with these figures. This tendency escalates dramatically in the series Kojima began after parting ways with Konami and concluding Metal Gear. Death Stranding (2019) and its sequel, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (2025),demand constant awareness of the controlled character’s physicality, complicating the divide between player and avatar as it strives for simulated embodiment.
These games represent the beginning of a new era in Kojima’s output. With Death Stranding, Kojima affirmed that he would be doubling or tripling down on conceptual oddness. The first teaser, featuring a nude digital double of Norman Reedus cradling an infant on an otherworldly beach filled with spectral beings, caused mass bafflement. After the game was released, videos proliferated online of Reedus’s character experiencing myriad, almost silent-film-like pratfalls. Kojima had accentuated his obsession with virtual embodiment to the point of making a game that was often deliberately difficult to control. Though a well-established developer, he refused to play it safe or remain comfortable, just as he defied expectations with the surreal meta-narrative of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Yet both Death Stranding and On the Beach have proved to be huge hits, demonstrating that there is in fact an audience even within the mainstream for offbeat material.
The collapsing of barriers is built into the series’ premise. The Beach, a liminal space between our world and the afterlife, has bled into reality. Wayward aggressive ghosts—"beached things,” or “BTs,” because Kojima adores acronyms—will attack people and even consume them, with the resultant matter/antimatter collisions causing massive explosions. The atmosphere is laced with “chiral matter,” which can defy normal physics and accelerate entropy; all precipitation is now a “timefall” that rapidly ages and degrades anything it touches. Under such stresses, civilization has collapsed and most of humanity has died out, with survivors living in rigidly quarantined communities or isolated shelters. Porters are vital as the only option for transporting supplies, and they brave environmental dangers, BTs, and roving brigands. The player inhabits one such porter, Sam Bridges (Reedus’s character), who in the first game embarks on a journey across the former United States to connect the disparate pockets of the living. On the Beach follows a similar quest, this time to join Mexico and Australia into an expanding network of cooperation.
The post-apocalypse is a well-worn video game setting, but in Death Stranding, piled rubble and overgrown ruins take on a ludic significance and isn’t mere evocative set dressing. Most games work on a simple control schema, established almost at the birth of the medium: Push a key or button, or tilt a control stick, and your character will move in the corresponding direction. There are exceptions, like the gags/experiments of Bennett Foddy, climbing-focused titles like Grow Home, or physics-based platformers like Human: Fall Flat. One does not expect to encounter any complications of movement in a massively budgeted game. But Sam can fall when performing even simple tasks, and that’s a feature rather than a bug. Rocky or uneven ground is not an aesthetic flourish. They can cause Sam to trip, stumble, or even fall over. The player uses the controller’s shoulder buttons to coordinate his balance. Where and how items are attached to Sam’s suit and/or backpack will affect his equilibrium—stacking heavier containers on top of lighter ones will make him more likely to topple. If you want Sam to pick up and carry something in his hands, you must keep physically holding the right and/or left shoulder buttons, or he will drop them.
Different genres have their own ways of making players consider their relationship with a world. In stealth games, one must be constantly conscious of their positioning both within an environment and with non-player characters for the sake of avoiding detection. In open-world games, maps are a crucial interface element, and in Death Stranding, traversal is an in-depth mechanic. You plot routes with both major and minor obstacles in mind. In the field, a terrain scanner will highlight the hazards of your surroundings—where there are blue dots, you’re safe, yellow signals caution, and red means that you will fall if you don’t mind your balance. Movement is a moment-to-moment negotiation in which you can’t take anything for granted. This deep attention to particulars is characteristic of Kojima, who has operated mainly in the stealth genre—perhaps his preoccupation with such particulars is why he favors that genre. Death Stranding’s insistence that you mind your steps is a natural evolution of the Metal Gear series’ exacting stealth mechanics.
The emphasis on physicality goes deeper than the controls. Sam eats, sleeps, drinks, takes showers, and even relieves himself—all of which require specific player input. He has a bladder gauge, and if it fills, he will become agitated and clumsy. In keeping with the game’s dedication to using multiple steps to act out things most games relegate to straightforward inputs, urination is a part of the game’s gear menu. You “equip” Sam’s penis to piss. (He will shyly turn away from the camera if you try to peek, echoing Raiden’s extended nude sequence and its modesty-protecting cinematography in Sons of Liberty.) Sam is a “repatriate” and can’t die, meaning even resurrections after game overs happen in-universe. Because of this ability, his bodily waste has special properties, and so his sweat, blood, urine, and stool are recycled into equipment used to fight BTs.
But the game’s most evocative marriage of real-world and virtual gestures comes through Lou, Sam’s “bridge baby,” or “BB.” BBs are fetuses kept in pods that porters attach to their suits. Eternally unborn and suspended between life and death, they can detect otherwise-invisible BTs. In defiance of the convention that BBs be treated like tools and not beings, Sam grows attached to his and names them. Lou’s laughter, coos, and cries come through the speaker on the controller; they’re pleased by fun activities like jumping a truck off a ramp or getting into a good running groove, and can get upset if Sam takes a hard fall or gets shot. If Lou cries, the player has to soothe them by cradling the touch-sensitive controller like a baby and rocking it. Like so many of Kojima’s more eccentric design touches, this mechanic risks absurdity but is incredibly affecting. In a video about Death Stranding, critic Tim Rogers recalls how Kojima once told him that he was most interested in making a game about a virtual pet, one that was “like a person.” Specifically, it would entail caring for a “robot child.” One could see Lou as the fulfillment of this ambition, but Rogers also observes that, with all the meticulous attention that must be paid to his well-being, Sam better fits the bill.
This virtual embodiment ties to the games’ stories, which delve into what it means to forge relationships in a disconnected, atomized world. The efforts made to render Sam as a living, breathing individual are sharply contrasted by the game’s overwhelming lack of a human presence. He has aphenphosmphobia (an aversion to being touched), and Death Stranding makes this sense of isolation pervasive. People in settlements communicate with Sam via holograms, emails, or calls. Most of his encounters in the open world come in the form of fighting or sneaking around hostile raiders who wear anonymizing equipment. In-person conversation is often withheld, making it all the more meaningful when it does come. The plots of the games tend to be doled out through two- or three-hander scenes (though On the Beach expands this scope slightly with more interactions within a tight-knit group). After hours of solitude, these scenes offer a welcome respite.
The theme of connection is also integrated into the gameplay. You can request resources or the creation of specific structures from other players via the internet and you can fulfill others’ requests. You will never see these other porters, but you are engaged with them nonetheless. Like MGSV: The Phantom Pain’s online mode and its hidden goal of total nuclear disarmament, this component of Death Stranding rewards solidarity instead of antagonism between players. It’s an intriguing elaboration on similarly interlinked single-player experiences in games like Journey or the Dark Souls series. Kojima called Death Stranding the first in a new genre, the “strand-like.” In a testament to how singular he is as a director, such a genre has yet to really cohere because few other developers have taken up the idea. It’s also a major reason the Death Stranding games have knitted together an impassioned fanbase.
There’s a great deal of dialogue about “restoring America” in the first Death Stranding, with some characters dedicated to this abstract ideal and others seeing little point to it. Appropriately, the spaces you traverse are not scrupulous recreations of their real-world counterparts à la the Grand Theft Auto series or the synecdoche of New York in Sony’s Spider-Man. The timefall has twisted the landscape so that it bears little resemblance to the locations we know. America in Death Stranding looks more like Iceland. The production of On the Beach used existing locations as references for some parts of its open world, but they are only placed vaguely in relation to where the real places are, and they aren’t given their real-world names. Mexico is mostly undifferentiated hills and deserts. Australia has more varied biomes—deserts, rainforest, bush—but it bears only a faint resemblance to the geography of the real continent. In a video about the expansive world of Elden Ring, critic Renata Price compares the “cartographic instinct” of detailed game worlds to Borges’s short story “On Exactitude in Science” (in which “the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.”)
Despite how beautiful the regions of Death Stranding are, Kojima does not have this cartographic instinct. Like Tarkovsky’s Stalker, what’s more engaging to him is how this environment encourages self-reflection in the player through their evolving relationship with it. As Sam physically connects the broken world through his journey, he opens up to the people he meets, imbuing his mission with purpose beyond mere game objectives. Both games hinge on these interpersonal relationships being the key to overcoming seemingly insurmountable metaphysical challenges. Love transcending life and death is a facile and soppy idea, but Kojima elegantly weaves it into the fabric of Death Stranding.
But his stress on bodies also brings biological essentialism, even sexism, to these games’ depiction of women. As Maddy Myers points out in Endless Mode, nearly all of them are slotted into roles as daughters or failed mothers, and there’s an unmistakable fixation on their wombs and fertility. Yet the games’ concepts of gender and childbearing cannot be neatly dichotomized between male and female. You play as essentially a pregnant man, mindful of a baby in a womb. There’s dissonance between the more conventional ways the text conceives of gender imperatives and the actual gameplay experience, which defies such binary thinking. This doesn’t feel like a coherent statement encoded in the game mechanics. Rather, it seems to be another example of how freely Kojima plays with men’s sexuality and gender expectations throughout his games while having more limited imagination for female characters.
Less constrained than ever by executive oversight, Kojima pours all his best-known (some might say notorious) predilectionsinto the Death Stranding games—the strange names, the unconstrained cutscenes, the sometimes-corny humor, the sometimes-overwhelming melodrama, the convoluted lore (if you aren’t familiar with these games and find any of my summaries confusing, know that I have spared you so much confusion). The deliberate friction of Death Stranding’s gameplay is inextricable from the messiness of its ideas. And this, even more than his emphasis on virtual embodiment, is the most consistent quality of Kojima’s oeuvre. As AAA games become increasingly homogenous and risk-averse, it’s valuable to have one auteur with the power to command large budgets, idiosyncratic though he may be. While On the Beach doesn’t break ground the way the first Death Stranding does, his next two announced games are not continuing this series, which will hopefully induce him to keep innovating. Kojima is now possibly the sole creative of such a high stature to make games whose contradictions are as (if not more) interesting as their refined elements.