By Andrew Dodson on June 14, 2016 at 12:46am
At the Sony E3 conference today, famed developer Hideo Kojima was invited to the stage to personally announce the first game of his new studio Kojima Productions - a game called "Death Stranding." The trailer that followed was perhaps one of the more bizarre (but oddly hypnotizing?) trailers that has come across a screen at E3.
The trailer is almost like a dream sequence. We have a naked Norman Reedus on a beach, with hand prints appearing in the sand. There is a baby that seems to be attached to Reedus through an umbilical cord but as soon as the child is picked up, it turns into a black ink and causes tiny baby hand prints to appear all over Reedus' body. Then we get a glimpse of Reedus' torso with a cross-shaped scar, either indicating some kind of religious marking or maybe showing that his character gave birth to the baby on the beach. As we get a look at the surrounds, we see that the beach is covered in dead sea life - from crabs, to fish to whales - and it looks like they're attached to something via some kind of cord (another umbilical cord?).
It is very hard to know what to expect from a game with a trailer like that. It is exciting to see that Kojima and Norman Reedus were still able to work together even after the "Silent Hills" game fell through, and it appears that Reedus will have a leading role in this new game. Exactly what that role is going to involve though, is completely up in the air. A lot of people seem to think that the name "Death Stranding" is related to the unexplained behavior of whales where they beach themselves and die, known as cetacean stranding. It's hard to tell exactly where that would lead us in terms of story or gameplay, however.
Maybe the whole thing is just a dream or crazy metaphor, and the actual game will be based on something completely different. It is too soon to tell, so all we can do really is speculate. Still, it is going to be very exciting to see what Hideo Kojima does with "Death Stranding," because at the very least, it will be different.
There is no release date yet for "Death Stranding," but given Kojima's current partnership with Sony, we expect this new game to come out on the PS4.
