‘Death Stranding’ Is an Extinction Nightmare We Can’t Afford to Ignore

Hideo Kojima’s latest masterpiece asks us to consider whether a divided Earth can survive a harsh future. (Spoilers)

Credit: Kojima Productions

This post contains late-game spoilers for Death Stranding.

Death Stranding, a game about hand-delivering mountains of cargo through hostile terrain, is meant to challenge you. But it’s not the clunky walking mechanics or the rocky terrain that truly push the player; it’s the complex message that the game delivers through these unusual gameplay mechanics. Beneath all the talk of creepy undead spectres, even creepier “bridge babies,” and all the famous people who got motion-captured for the game — Léa Seydoux! Mads Mikkelsen! — is an urgent dispatch about our future. Death Stranding, created by gaming auteur Hideo Kojima, asks us to consider the value of community and the dangers of isolation as humanity faces certain apocalypse.

Sometime before the start of the game, an event called the “Death Stranding” blurred the barrier between the world of the dead and the living, and Beached Things — those creepy undead spectres — now roam the space between big cities. If they manage to kill a human being, they trigger a “voidout,” which is essentially a nuclear blast. You play as Sam Porter Bridges — a post-apocalyptic delivery man portrayed with wonderful melancholy by Norman Reedus — and your goal is to connect the entirety of the country via the chiral network, an advanced form of the internet that uses the Death Stranding to, uh, tap into the entire history of human knowledge, across time and space, in order to recreate materials and tools in a hyper-advanced 3D printer of sorts. It’s complicated, and the details don’t really matter. The gist is that the people in charge of this world believe that connecting everyone to the chiral network, by any means necessary, is the key to stopping what has rapidly become an existential threat to humanity.

While extinction is what looms large over Death Stranding, it is Sam’s specific actions that propel the narrative forward. He connects the disparate people of a fractured, desolate vision of the United States. In an early mission, Sam interacts with a confrontational junk dealer who refuses to join the…