The first moments of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach offer us glimpses of a very different sort of game. Sam Porter Bridges, the grumpiest delivery man in the postapocalypse, is awakened from his nap by a cooing baby’s small pudgy fist.
This is Lou, the child Sam saved at the end of Death Stranding by freeing her from an embryonic pod. Lou is a toddler now, at the mercy of Sam’s clumsy single-dad shenanigans. You spend the first few hours of Death Stranding 2 toting Lou around in a custom harness, taking extra care not to trip while navigating pitched inclines. You watch as Sam cooks her breakfast, sings her lullabies and distracts her with toys.
This touching sequence is cut short, unfortunately, so that the real game can begin. When Lou is taken away from Sam (Norman Reedus), he is thrust back into the deeply familiar role of a porter designated with reconnecting a bunch of estranged cities and bunkers. Like in the first game, most of the action of Death Stranding 2 involves making solitary, perilous deliveries — across mountains, through forests, over rivers — in order to rebuild a world torn apart by its returning dead.
Though Death Stranding 2 has Sam connecting the forts and outposts of a ravaged Australia rather than the United States, its format remains the same. The game is less a sequel than a reiteration.
Many of these story beats overlap with those of the game’s 2019 predecessor. There’s still Sam’s ambivalent relationship to power and his reluctant, if inevitable, obedience to shadowy figures and organizations who wind up revealing their true nature in the third act (a staple plot device of the series’ auteur director, Hideo Kojima). The dastardly Higgs Monaghan, playfully embodied by a returning Troy Baker, appears intermittently to foil Sam’s steady advancement. There are even occasional visits to an alternate dimension where Sam must do battle against a mysterious man with sad, beautiful eyes; Neil Vana (Luca Marinelli) takes over the position that Cliff Unger (Mads Mikkelsen) ably filled the last time around.
But no matter the novelty — the freshness of this coat of paint, the impressive crispness of these updated PlayStation 5 graphics — everything feels familiar, if remixed with new ideas and new performances.
Mechanically, things run much smoother. There are fewer pointless deliveries and less backtracking to the same areas of the map. There are more interesting side missions, and Sam meets more remarkable characters out on the road, like a martial artist pizza chef and a snazzily dressed ghost hunter. Battles with the game’s “Beached Things” and human adversaries alike are better thought out and more dynamic, a far cry from the clumsy button-mashing of the original game’s fights.
There is also a whole boatload of new characters to meet, a bevy of actors, artists and filmmakers who have been scanned and assigned roles in Kojima’s ever-expanding Dungeons & Dragons adventuring party.
Tarman, played by the director George Miller, helms the floating ship your team uses as a home base. Onboard is Rainy (Shioli Kutsuna), a woman cursed with an endless pregnancy disease, who happens to cause deadly rain every time she steps outside. We also meet Tomorrow, played by Elle Fanning, who can rapidly advance time with only a touch. One of the more entertaining additions is a man’s spirit trapped in the body of a ventriloquist puppet; Dollman, played by another director, Fatih Akin, and voiced by Jonathan Roumie, is ready with a comment about nearly everything you comes across.
These new characters, along with familiar faces like Léa Seydoux’s Fragile, Guillermo del Toro’s Deadman and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Heartman, crowd Sam’s life with noisy affection. While Sam spent most of the first game alone in temporary bunkers, the sequel surrounds him with allies. Sitting in Sam’s bunk on the ship usually means being able to overhear the muted conversation happening between the others crammed onboard.
Their presence raises the emotional caliber of the story. They constantly bring Sam into their vignettes, catching him on his way to a mission to ask him to take a Polaroid of their group, or to answer some random riddle, or to observe Tomorrow as she learns to master her time-bending powers. It’s a big messy family, and Sam plays the uncomfortable and emotionally awkward father.
The punch of these interactions is often undercut by clunky and obvious writing. The characters of Death Stranding 2 are exposition machines, delivering reams of robotic narration to a player who might be perfectly happy with a spare line or two. Often one emerges from a touching, melodramatic cut scene only for a character to turn to Sam and immediately list the relevant themes.
The game repeatedly emphasizes the idea that connection can bring pitfalls just as easily as benefits. Sam’s grief over losing Lou is cleanly translated into a delusion that Lou is still alive and traveling with him, tucked away until the story is ready for Sam to process his trauma. Higgs dresses up his arbitrary role in the story with hammy performances that nod at the fourth wall.
Rather than subtext, Death Stranding 2 employs something more like supertext. Players are presented with a maximalist delivery of its themes, a wall of meaning that can easily overwhelm an audience trying to understand what the game is trying to say.
If you stick with it, though, an impression does inevitably form, like the shapes that dance behind your eyelids after you shut your eyes to the blinding glare.
The caring, often feminine, companionship Sam experiences throughout Death Stranding 2 feels deep-rooted and authentic. There’s a late scene where Sam is rescued from being tortured at the hands of Higgs when Fragile, Rainy and Tomorrow arrive just in time to save the day. It’s a moment that feels triumphant and gratifying, a simple but effective ode to the power of friendship. In spite of all the awkward dialogue, in spite of the doll-like stares and unnatural stances, these characters are in fact capable of bringing emotional vitality to their roles.
Still, it is Death Stranding 2’s earliest moments, which have Sam trying his best at parenting, that suggest a more frank emotional journey than the one we got. The series continues to hides its heart behind verbosity and lists of proper nouns. We remain distant, disconnected from the porter who must continue delivering his packages to sycophantic hermits along the same dusty routes. Real change exists somewhere beyond the horizon.
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach was reviewed on the PlayStation 5.
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