E3 2018 brought with it a lot of new announcements and trailers. The weirdest, and perhaps most intriguing of them all is the new trailer for Death Stranding.
Death Stranding being weird is nothing new. We’ve seen trailers from the game before, and all of them were bizarre and confusing. However, this time we actually get to see some gameplay and learn more about the characters, world and story.
Most of the trailer is still made up of cutscenes (this is a Kojima game after all), but we do get to see Norman Reedus walking around the world, carrying a lot of different things.
Thanks to a very long blog post by Hideo Kojima, we know that Reedus’s character is not a military man or a war veteran. He is a “hands-on professional. Someone with a skillset akin to a blue-collar worker.” Judging by the footage, he is probably a deliveryman of some sort – carrying important items across a ruined (but beautiful) world.
The fact the character’s name is Sam Porter Bridges is also a pretty big clue.
Later parts of the video show Sam sneaking past the black apparitions that act as the enemies. It seems that they can’t see Sam, only hear him, which is why stealth is a big part of the gameplay.
Unfortunately for us, we can’t see “them” either, only the palmprints they leave in the mud. However, there are ways to make them slightly more visible. That’s where the weird babies we keep seeing in the game’s trailer come into play.
In the trailer, we see Sam contact a shoulder-mounted senor to a container containing a fetus. It seems like this device allows Sam to see what the baby sees – black, floating figures connected to each other with long umbilical cords.
I’m sure there’s a healthy dose of symbolism in there somewhere.
However, even with this contraption, Sam fails to remain undetected, and the figures grab him. We learn from the video that this is called a “voidout,” presumably the equivalent of death in other games. We also know that Sam can come back from a voidout, but “the surrounding area will still be a crater.”
So we probably lose all our gear and the item we need to deliver if a voidout occurs.
The trailer also introduces two new female cast members of Death Stranding. First, we have French actor Léa Seydoux, who plays a mysterious woman Sam meets in a cave.
We don’t know anything about her, but she does use the term “timefall.” We don’t know what a timefall is, only that it “fast-forwards” everything it touches.
She can later be seen eating a maggot-like creature called a cryptobiote. Eating them can perhaps protect you from the timefall, so maybe these are a consumable resource.
The second actor to be introduced is Lindsay Wagner, the Bionic Woman herself. We first see her likeness in a photo Sam is trying to grab, but later we see a younger version of her standing on a beach.
Kojima mentions that for the story, they had to recreate Lindsay’s younger self from a recent 3D scan data. She might be a victim of the timefall, or perhaps something else we haven’t seen.
That’s everything I got from the trailer. If you have more theories, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Death Stranding is a PlayStation 4 exclusive, coming… well, hopefully in 2019.
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