If you’ve played Metal Gear Solid series, then you’ll know legendary game designer Hideo Kojima has a knack for weaving twisting, compelling tales. Freed from the shackles of writing for a long-running series, Kojima goes all-in and all-out with Death Stranding’s story. You might have caught some of the trailers and seen a baby in a bottle strapped to Norman Reedus’ chest and some ghosts floating in the sky, but it makes a lot more sense than you might think. In a nutshell, the titular Death Stranding was caused by an explosion that unintentionally bridged the gap between the world of the living and the world of the dead. There are two things that are terrifying about the world post-Stranding: BTs and Timefall. BTs are those ghostly apparitions that haunt the land, and Timefall is a kind of rain that rapidly ages whatever it touches. Between the BTs, Timefall, and the explosion, the America we know is long gone, replaced by a handful of scattered cities and survivors living in isolation. Navigating this new and dangerous world is the game’s main character, Sam Porter Bridges, played by the aforementioned Reedus (The Walking Dead). Blessed (or cursed) with something called DOOMs, which let him detect BTs, Sam gets on just fine as a delivery person-a job that’s revered in the post-Stranding world-bringing goods like medicine and supplies to isolated camps. But when the last President of the United Cities of America is on her deathbed, she gives Sam a final task: Reunite America by connecting all the disparate cities to the chiral network, which is like the internet but much, much cooler. If that sounds like a crazy sci-fi story to you, that only covers like the first hour of the game. Along the way, you’ll meet characters played by TV and movie stars like Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal), Lindsay Wagner (The Bionic Woman), Léa Seydoux (Spectre), and director Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water).
