Death Stranding 2: On The Beach is undeniably Hideo Kojima`s most self-indulgent creation, merging absurd, spiritual, and supernatural elements within a unique post-apocalyptic world without offering simple explanations. It`s packed with cameos from his favored artists, references to his past work, anime, and movies. Despite sounding like a jumble, it surprisingly coheres. While highly self-indulgent, Death Stranding 2 arguably stands as his finest achievement in over ten years.
At its core, DS2 remains a delivery game. Players embody Sam Porter Bridges, tasked with transporting goods across a hostile landscape. Sam is uniquely equipped to endure threats like tar and timefall (rain that accelerates aging), and his mission is to reconnect the scattered human settlements.
While the first game spanned a journey across the East and West coasts of America, DS2 shifts focus, starting in Mexico before moving to the vast landmass of Australia. Though not geographically accurate, the world feels immense from the ground level. The cataclysmic Death Stranding event reshaped Australia, destroying both its natural environment and infrastructure, meaning Sam can`t simply drive down a highway. Instead, he must reconstruct it.
Utilizing the unique element Chiralium, which appeared after the Death Stranding, Sam can use chiral printing technology to simplify his journey. If a fierce river blocks the way, he can literally print a bridge with enough Chiralium and metals. Or, if his battery depletes within the chiral network, he can print a turbine generator to recharge, provided he brought a PCC tool.
Preparation is paramount. While Sam possesses improvised methods (like using Sandalweed leaves for makeshift shoes if his footwear fails), carrying spares is always preferable. A dead battery without a charge point might force you to discard excess cargo to reach your destination. Fortunately, the presence of other porters significantly eases the journey.
The structures and modifications you build in Death Stranding 2 are persistent and shared with other online players, alongside materials contributed to road and monorail construction. These creations might be damaged by timefall or floods, but new porters will inevitably rebuild their own. Playing offline can feel solitary, but online, the traces of other players and their travels are visible everywhere. Instead of feeling isolated, you become part of a silent, dedicated community. With no way to maliciously interfere with others, the online interaction exclusively feels like a helping hand during tough moments.
Navigating Death Stranding 2`s vast open world is inherently challenging, and taking a direct path is nearly impossible, even with aids like bridges and zip lines. Not that you`d want a straight line anyway, as distractions abound. Discovering a lost package might divert you towards another settlement. The idea of repairing the monorail can easily lead to a multi-hour undertaking involving collecting, shipping, mining, and transporting materials across the continent. This is where DS2 truly excels: when it motivates you to establish your own objectives and tasks driven by curiosity.
Hideo Kojima`s Metal Gear Solid V is arguably an incomplete game, yet it boasts some of the finest gameplay mechanics ever conceived. Kojima`s highly publicized departure from Konami and its effect on MGSV`s development are well known. Despite its flaws, the way MGSV enticed players to detour off the planned route to acquire materials and personnel from passing enemy camps felt truly unique. Years later, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was hailed as an open-world masterpiece for its encouragement of players to forge their own paths and devise personal solutions to almost any challenge.
The true brilliance of both MGSV and BotW lay in providing players with compelling distractions. While we now discuss “second-screen experiences,” these games fostered a mental checklist of primary and secondary goals that could transform a planned hour of play into an all-night session. A simple journey to a main destination would spontaneously lead you off-course to gather items and resources using whatever methods you saw fit. Death Stranding 2 recaptures this feeling in a way the original DS didn`t quite manage.
Achieving longer journeys across the continent makes logical sense when broken into segments, transporting various goods between multiple destinations conveniently located along the route. Picking up lost packages encountered along the way costs nothing. While you`re there, contributing materials to a road or monorail construction point is always an option. However, discovering cargo destined for a settlement you haven`t yet visited should absolutely become the immediate priority.
This ever-expanding, self-imposed list of goals and priorities is what makes DS2 so incredibly difficult to stop playing. It`s always “just one more delivery,” “just one more package,” or “just one more road segment built.” Ultimately, it`s a game where you play to simplify the act of playing itself, yet it`s so rewarding that it`s addictive. While some games grant power through powerful gear or rare loot, Death Stranding 2 empowers you through freedom of movement—both on the grand, continent-spanning scale and the smaller, kinetic level of Sam`s subtle movements. Metal Gear Solid V set a high bar for third-person action gameplay, and Death Stranding 2 shares a similar free-flowing mechanical philosophy, despite Sam not being a combat specialist.
Despite Sam`s nature, DS2 features significantly more weaponry and shooting compared to its predecessor. Enemy camps are better armed, and certain sections effectively mandate shootouts. Stealth is an option, but foes are surprisingly observant, making it hard to remain undetected for long. Other action sequences enforce gunplay, even literally providing weapons at your feet. It`s rarely overly challenging but can effectively elevate your heart rate. Larger boss encounters are visually stunning displays, yet they admittedly prioritize spectacle over deep mechanical engagement.
However, it`s hard to truly complain when that spectacle is so visually impressive. Death Stranding 2 on PS5 Pro stands out as one of the most stunning console games ever created. As the first major new PS5 exclusive released specifically with the PS5 Pro in mind, its graphical fidelity is evident. Minute details like text on clothing or the texture of a hat are rendered sharply, while sweeping vistas unfold majestically as dawn breaks over mountains. Even simply riding the monorail and watching the world blur by is oddly captivating, purely thanks to the genuinely gorgeous visuals. The world`s most expensive console now officially boasts the best-looking game available on a console.
The connective tissue holding Death Stranding 2 together is, against all expectations, its narrative. Kojima masterfully weaves together mixed metaphors, wordplay (likely more effective in Japanese), references to his past creations, and his favorite media. Somehow, it all converges and successfully lands. Whether this makes him a genius or you simply cease questioning his logic after twenty hours is debatable, though I lean towards the former. While some of his metaphors and analogies are perhaps best overlooked, others feel incredibly powerful and resonant.
Regardless of how obscure the fabricated sci-fi terminology in the dialogue becomes, the cutscenes are consistently presented with stunning beauty and acted with compelling performances. The game mimics cinematic style more closely than any previous Kojima title, and its star-studded cast firmly anchors the experience. With talents like Léa Seydoux, Norman Reedus, Elle Fanning, Luca Marinelli, and Shioli Kutsuna, each scene is captivating. This is the antithesis of a “second-screen” experience; looking away for even a moment risks making the subsequent lines of exposition even more confusing, and frankly, you won`t want to miss a single moment of these incredible performances anyway.
That`s not to say the tone is relentlessly serious. Certain scenes will elicit laughter, groans, or stunned silence. The tone can abruptly shift, leaving you questioning the purpose. But then, it might showcase one of the most expensive and visually breathtaking real-time rendered action sequences ever created in a video game. It truly feels like everything Kojima has ever liked, or even contemplated, thrown together at once.
Death Stranding 2: On The Beach feels like the first genuinely essential PS5 game to date. It represents the visionary Hideo Kojima at his most unrestrained, his ideas refined through the artistic sensibilities of Yoji Shinkawa and the decades of development and game design expertise at Kojima Productions. If you have ever enjoyed a Hideo Kojima game or wondered why others do, you absolutely need to play Death Stranding 2: On The Beach.
Finley Holt 
Callum Darby