One game everyone is bound to be talking about for months to come is Hideo Kojima’s PS4 exclusive Death Stranding.
Kojima’s first project away from Konami was revealed during Sony’s E3 conference, and gamers everywhere have been going out of their minds trying to make sense of what they actually saw. In typical Kojima fashion, of course, it was incredibly cryptic and gave nothing away.
Thankfully, Kojima Productions has shared an in-depth series of Tweets that (seem to) reveal loads more about Death Stranding. Let’s take a look, and see if it answers any of the questions we’ve had, or if it simply creates more riddles to solve.
I reckon it’ll probably be the latter.
Kojima referring to the reveal of Death Stranding as part of the “game” is undeniable proof that he sees us all as nothing more than his little puppets, here for his amusement.
If you couldn’t tell yet, a big theme of Death Stranding seems to be how everything is connected in some way. Our boy Norman Reedus (who worked with Kojima on P.T) starred in the trailer, if you haven’t seen it yet.
Now this is interesting, and possibly our first real clue as to what the actual gameplay of Death Stranding will entail. Is Kojima referring to permanent death for your character in the game?
“Permadeath” has been done so many times before though, so it could be something else entirely.
Not massively sure what he’s saying here, though he seems to be getting at the idea that it will still be a conventional game in some respects.
This backs up what Kojima said previously; that fans of AAA titles like The Division and Uncharted will still be able to pick this game up and enjoy it.
And cue the dedicated cabal of Kojima theorists rushing to Amazon to find a copy of that novella.
I have no idea what he’s talking about in that second tweet, especially the idea that we fight with “sticks” on social media. Smarter men than me will crack the code, I’ve no doubt.
Ah, so stick and rope are keywords. That clears things up… slightly.
So what genre is Death Stranding? Horror? Action? Rope? Kojima has an answer, (kind of).
Nice answer, and I can see where he’s coming from with this one. Perhaps these days trying to narrow down videogames to specific genres is a bit reductive – you do your thing Kojima, we’ll be waiting.
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.