A totally accurate review of Death Stranding -- based only on trailers

(Originally published on Nov. 8, 2019 on my old Wordpress blog.)

The next game from Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima is almost here, releasing Friday Nov. 8 for PlayStation 4. Reviews from press and influencers already went live last week, but unfortunately I wasn't one of them.

So I decided to write up my own pre-release review. But instead of basing it on any hands-on impressions of Death Stranding's gameplay, I'm going to judge it by the only other resource I have: the trailers.

Kojima is known for making long, lavishly produced, and self-indulgent trailers that fly in the face of traditional marketing tactics. But that's also what makes them so intriguing: They can be just as important as the games themselves because they set the tone of his virtual worlds. That's why Kojima's trailers for the various Metal Gear Solid games were so highly anticipated (and highly over-analyzed by his ravenous fans).

He used a similar approach for Death Stranding. Developer Kojima Productions released more than a dozen trailers during the lead-up to the game's release, most if not all edited by Kojima himself. But for simplicity's sake, I'll only be focusing on the major ones (the longer videos that showed new cutscenes and gameplay footage).

You don't need to watch all eight trailers to understand or enjoy Death Stranding. But when taken as a whole, they serve as a fascinating companion piece to the game, offering some insight into what Kojima thinks are the most important or most technically impressive moments to show off.

Some of the videos are also just completely mad and stuffed with a ton of in-game jargon, rendering them completely incomprehensible to anyone but Kojima. But that's what makes watching them so much fun.

With a little help from my (famous) friends

Death Stranding debuted with a short but evocative trailer (above) in 2016, with striking imagery of dead sea creatures backed by an eerie song. It's also our first introduction to main character Sam Bridges (played by The Walking Dead actor Norman Reedus). At the time, the Reedus reveal was a surprising choice, especially because his character is a realistic recreation of the actor himself.

What we didn't know back then, however, was that Reedus was just the first of many famous faces we'd see in the game. Perhaps moreso than video games, Kojima loves film  -- his Twitter bio even says "70% of my body is made of movies." His friendship with beloved director Guillermo Del Toro is well-documented. And for one reason or another, it seems like Kojima decided that Death Stranding, his first non-Metal Gear game in over a decade, would serve as a tribute to his love of film.

That became more and more evident with each new teaser. At the 2016 Game Awards in Los Angeles, the second Death Stranding trailer revealed that Del Toro was a character (Deadman) as well – but in this case only his likeness was used, as another actor provides the voice. It also showed Doctor Strange actor Mads Mikkelsen as Cliff, a sort of supernatural soldier in the game. Like Del Toro before him, Mikkelsen soon became one of Kojima's Hollywood pals.

Other celebrities would end up joining the game as well. The original Bionic Woman Lindsay Wagner lends her likeness to Amelie, the daughter of the president of the United States; actress Léa Seydoux is Fragile, someone who helps Sam; Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn is Heartman; and actress Margaret Qualley is Mama.

While Kojima has worked with big actors before (most notably with Kiefer Sutherland on MGS5), Death Stranding is by far his most star-studded project to date. It's tough to tell if that's a good or bad thing just yet, but at the very least, the actors' names and likenesses definitely bring more attention to the game than it would have otherwise.

Existential horror

Another interesting thing about Death Stranding's early trailers are the way they establish a horror-like tone. These videos show harrowing situations where humans try to hide from supernatural creatures that can attack from above or emerge from the ground via a viscous black goo, with strange limbs that can pull you into god-only-knows-where.

In the trailer above, one guy even tries to kill himself before a hulking monster can consume him. Though unsettling, these scenes illustrate just how dangerous the world can be, and what players might run into as they go on Sam's journey.

But body horror isn't the only subgenre Kojima is toying with. As time goes on, the trailers become more specific, with characters slowly doling out expositional information. A lot of this includes heady concepts about life and death, with various characters musing, in both metaphorical and literal ways, about what it means to reconnect a fractured United States (now known as the United Cities of America).

All that philosophizing won't be a surprise to anyone who's played the MGS games before, which obsessively focused on the horrors of nuclear warfare. For Death Stranding, it seems Kojima is after something a bit more existential as characters grapple with what it means to be a survivor in this post-apocalyptic world.

A helping dose of WTF?

However, it's hard to take the characters seriously when they casually drop inexplicable jargon like "timefall," "chiral networks," or "voidout." I suppose it's a quick and easy way to add some mystery to the story. But it also just makes the game sound more confusing. No one outside of Kojima Productions or PlayStation will know what the hell those words mean until the game is out.

There's also the whole thing about babies being trapped inside portable liquid tanks. One of the later trailers reveal that these are "bridge babies" (or BBs for short), which means they have the ability to bridge the real world with another dimension. And by plugging into a BB, Sam and others can detect any BTs (the floating creatures hinted at in the previous videos) around them.

It's ... a lot to digest. And I haven't even talked about the weird masks some of the characters wear, the peeing mechanic, or why everyone seems to be crying all the time. The closest I've come to understanding Death Stranding's premise is with its penultimate "briefing" trailer, and that's mostly because it's just one long cutscene (presumably taken from the beginning of the game).

If you were to watch all the trailers in order like I did, what you'll see is a beautiful yet confusing mishmash of philosophical concepts and sci-fi action scenes. Are they fun to watch? Sure. They're tailor-made for endless online discussion. And in true Kojima fashion, the videos fail to address some basic questions.

Is Death Stranding a walking simulator? A glorified UPS delivery game? Or a meditation on how much Kojima loves Norman Reedus? I have a feeling that the answer is somewhere around "all of the above." All I know is if the full game can at least be half as interesting as the trailers, then that'll be enough for me.