Warning: Narrative spoilers below for the first act of Death Stranding 2.
Death Stranding 2 is as bizarre as any of Hideo Kojima’s games. Maybe even weirder? It trades Metal Gear’s cloning and nanomachines for aging rainfall, interdimensional beaches, magical tar, and all sorts of other stuff you might kinda understand by the time you reach the end. It’s tragic, goofy, tragic again, and then goes so deep into mystifying sci-fi territory that you better be referencing the in-game encyclopedia if you want to keep track of all the proper nouns.
One key plot element—mercifully pretty straightforward—is that protagonist Sam Porter Bridges is a “repatriate,” someone who will come back to life even after dying. Death Stranding 2 twists this blessing into a curse more than once throughout the story.
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The first time is in the opening hours of the game, when Sam’s adopted child Lou is seemingly killed—a tragedy that he tries to forget by committing suicide more than once, to no avail.
Everyone in the room got a good laugh from the anecdote, so I have to assume they took the reaction—and her clear investment in Death Stranding’s characters—as a compliment. While this story came at the very end of our interview, I had to follow up and ask what Mrs. Sakamoto thought of the rest of the game. I won’t spoil the ending, but she did apparently get there, and have a take on that, too.
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