Death Stranding 2 is as much a rebuttal of Death Stranding's theme of connection as a sequel

Earlier today there was a mighty eruption of Death Stranding 2: On The Beach previews, featuring commentary on the new game's themes and social relevance from erstwhile Metal Gear Solidifier and Kojima Productions boss Hideo Kojima. Themes and social relevance, eh! Kojima is one of the few bigwigs who will engage openly with such things, which is perhaps less praise of Kojima than a judgement upon the hesitant and anodyne way other blockbuster game creators discuss the impact of their work.

In this case, Kojima has talked at some length about how Death Stranding 2 builds on and, at times, resists the first game's theme of connection, based on his experiences of the Covid pandemic and his dislike of the "metaverse" - that ageing umbrella term for a newly monetisable "web 3.0" fauxtopia of networked technologies, ranging from VR to cryptocurrency, which many large video game publishers have sought to normalise in their hunger for profit growth.

A quick and mildly spoilerific catcher-upper: Death Strandingtakes place in a North America near-obliterated by the opening of portals to the realm of the dead, which have trashed communications and rendered a lot of the countryside impassable. Among its plot elements is the construction of the Chiral Network, a spectral internet routed through a purgatorial dimension, the Beach, which is used to reunite a divided country.

All of this was very much a political statement on Kojima's part. "We released Death Stranding before the COVID-19 pandemic," he recalled in a Q&A at the latest Death Stranding 2 event, as reported by VGC. "The world was heading towards isolation and division, such as the UK leaving the EU. So I was saying, 'Let's connect. We're headed for disaster if we don't connect.' That was the theme, story, and gameplay for Death Stranding.

"After the release, just three months later, we entered the pandemic, and I was really surprised," Kojima went on. "It looked like Death Stranding, in a way. In the real world - the 21st century - we have something similar to the Chiral Network, which is the Internet. This was a little different compared to the 19th century, such as the Spanish Flu or the like. We survived the pandemic because of the Internet and people were connected online."

Now that the pandemic is "over" - that's to say, now that the continuing circulation of Covid has become "manageable", and the weekly death tolls no longer make headlines - Kojima is revisiting the idea of the Chiral Network and portraying it more negatively. This stems, apparently, from his own experiences as a studio manager trying to persuade remote workers to return to the office.

"What happened was, there are now people in our studio who work from home, and I still don't know their faces," he continued. "Even music concerts were cancelled, and it all became online streaming. I understand this was unavoidable at the time of the pandemic. The same thing applies to schools; instead of getting to play with your friends or learning from teachers, you just look at a screen online which isn't any different from watching YouTube videos."

In a leap of association that deserves more interrogation, Kojima also linked the normalisation of remote working and socialising during the pandemic to the much shat-upon metaverse concept - which, I would argue, has many origin points besides the pandemic.

"Everything was leaning into the metaverse," he said. "When you turned on the TV, everyone was talking about how it was the age of the metaverse now and there was no need to interact with people. I felt that we were going down a terrible path. Communication between human beings is not meant to be this way. You meet people by chance or see sights you didn't expect to see. With the way we were headed, you would lose all of that."

All these concerns led to Kojima rewriting the concept of Death Stranding 2 to fit his experiences of the pandemic. "It's the strangest thing," he said. "After I created a game with the theme of 'let's connect instead of division and isolation,' we had the pandemic, and I began to think, 'Maybe it's not such a good thing to connect so much'," he said. There are specific characters and events in Death Stranding 2 that express these feelings, though Kojima naturally didn't give anything away during the event.

According to VGC, Kojima's sense that humanity now has too much of the wrong kind of connectivity has also shaped his approach to press events. It was "the reason he had insisted on hosting media from around the world, in-person, at his Tokyo studio last month", rather than putting together an online preview event, as is now routine.

"You came all the way here and played for four days," Kojima said. "This may typically be done online nowadays. But this game is about connection. You will know when you play further into Death Stranding 2; I think you will start to feel it after a while.

"That is why we invited you to physically come during your busy schedules, and people from all over the world have gathered here, and I'm sure you all met with many people and had many conversations. You saw the view from Tokyo Station, or you may have walked into a random restaurant - these things are the human experience. These coincidences and unintentional happenings connect seamlessly, but that doesn't happen with the metaverse."

As often with Kojima, there is a blend of insight and crushing naivete or obliviousness to all this, with the usual caveats about possible misunderstandings due to linguistic and cultural disconnects. I greatly enjoy Kojima's willingness to disagree with the direction of his past projects, and even offer a playable rebuttal: it's a healthy change from the "more/better" rhetoric you generally get from triple-A sequel-makers. I share his distaste for the metaverse, whatever that currently means, and sure, I like to meet my own colleagues in the flesh, now and then.

That said, a lot of this reads like yet another manager throwing a tantrum about his employees and associates exerting some agency with regard to their own health and social requirements. It echoes active efforts to put an end to remote-working elsewhere: Activision, for example, recently ended hybrid working for QA staff, in what union workers branded a prelude to "soft layoffs". Rockstar are reported to have required GTA 6 developers to return to the office in the name of "quality and polish". All of which serves company management far more than it does the workers, especially those who have disabilities and other life factors that make working from home preferable, even in the absence of a pandemic.

Personally, I remote-work partly because it's more convenient, but mostly because I have clinically vulnerable relatives and Covid is, in fact, still happening. I do attend press events in person (I still mask up), but I'd rather do the bulk of them online. I would probably have said no to this particular press trip, if I'd learned in advance that it was designed to illustrate the sublime importance of returning to the office.

I'm keen to see how Death Stranding 2 explores the fallout from the pandemic. As a canary in culture's coal mine, Kojima's work can be slapdash and cheesy but it is always worth wallowing around in, yanking up all the threads. Still, the language here doesn’t inspire much hope of a complex portrayal. That line about "the human experience" turns my craw inasmuch as, like most appeals to "the human", it doesn’t acknowledge that different human beings have different contexts, different needs and different degrees of autonomy and privilege.

It's strange, because there's quite a pronounced labour politics element to the first Death Stranding. Your character, Sam Porter, is an overtaxed delivery guy with bosses who sometimes muscle into his "private" quarters as holograms, even chasing him into the shower. I'd be interested to see the purposeful oppressiveness of those interactions extended into a critique of demands for a return to in-person working "after" Covid. Anyway, Death Stranding 2 is out for PS5 on 26th June, with a PC launch to follow - last we heard, it was slated for 2026.