Whether you’re a gamer, or just have a gamer mate who wanted to show you something fucked up, chances are that you’ve seen the weird E3 trailer for Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding.
The brief reveal showed a naked Norman Reedus holding a crying baby on the beach. There was some other strange shit going on too, and fans have been hard at work trying to work out what the hell it means.
Of course, Kojima is a notoriously tricky developer. He can’t resist dropping hints, misinformation, and red herrings whenever he gets a chance (I suspect he does it whenever he’s on the loo just for a laugh).
Kojima’s latest Twitter tease has shown off the baby “props” he used to film the trailer. The babies are called Lu#1 and Lu#2, and this will doubtless have fans staying up at night trying to work out the hidden meanings behind those names.
I would point out that Kojima’s company mascot is called Ludens (note the “Lu”), so there might be something in that? Take a look at his tweets below.
The baby Norman Reedus held in the trailer was Lu#2, so what’s the deal with Lu#1? Time will tell, I guess.
All we know for sure about the baby so far is that it’s definitely not a clone of Norman Reedus, as many suspected. Naturally, that narrows things down in almost no way at all.
A release date for Death Stranding has not yet been announced, but Kojima has said that the game is still ‘far from being released.’ Plenty of time to chew over these weird hints, at least.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.