Hideo Kojima took the stage at Sony’s E3 press conference to announce his new project: Death Stranding. The time for speculation is now.
The theater’s orchestra boomed as Hideo Kojima, the legendary video game developer, took the stage. He looked at the audience and announced, “I’m back!” to a huge chorus of applause. He then let the stage darken as a trailer for his new project started.
It opens up on a beach littered with bones and dead sea creatures. Black hand prints materialize in the sand. We see a nude man on a beach with one handcuff on his wrist and a baby attached to his stomach with an umbilical cord. The man is revealed to be Norman Reedus, and he clutches the infant to his chest and cries. The black hand prints cover his body as the baby disappears. He’s wearing a collection of what looks like dog tags around his neck. There’s a cross shaped scar on his stomach, which could possibly relate to the baby. The beach around him is completely littered with dead fish. He looks up at the sky to see several mysterious figures floating in the sky, before disappearing. The title appears: Death Stranding.
The trailer is kept very ambiguous. It seems like it centers on the themes of birth and loss, and implies that Norman Reedus’ character was impregnated somehow. Or maybe it’s all a metaphor for the decay of the world and the environment. At any rate, the trailer didn’t give us much information on how the game will play or what it’s really going to be about. There’s a lot of imagery to unpack, which makes the short, esoteric trailer all the more interesting.
Previously, Hideo Kojima and Norman Reedus were set to work on a new Silent hill game with Guillermo del Toro. However, the game was cancelled and Kojima left Konami. Death Stranding is a rekindling of the working relationship between Kojima and Reedus. Even the genre of the game isn’t explicitly stated, but we can be sure it’ll be very dark, thought provoking and will comment on current social issues.
