I need to talk about that Death Stranding 2 trailer

And no, its not about the Magellan Man, although that is very cool

I’m no stranger to FOMO. You know this. It’s why I bought Monster Hunter Wilds at launch despite having eleven billion other games to play right now. Hyperbole plays a big role in this, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I am easily swayed by marketing tactics, including when a certain new game from the studio helmed by rock star ‘auteur’ Hideo Kojima drops a mammoth new trailer.

Death Stranding 2, the sequel that didn’t really need to exist comes in clutch with a means of proving why, once again, we should all get excited. Curiosity got the better of me, and I sank my teeth into the whirlwind of visuals, fragments of half revealed plot points and a weirdly prolongued and sloppy snogging sesh.

It looks amazing, obviously. Kojima may be a problematic fav, ego heavy, celebrity worshipping and chief conductor of the pervert bus, but he and his team at Kojima Productions have a knack for consistently showing you something you’ve never seen before, and that is something worth getting in a frenzy over.

Why I wanted to write about this trailer though, is something more muted and innocuous, posited at the forefront of this decade of audiovisual treats. A promise built from the remnants of the original game’s most fucked up plot point.

SPOILERS FOR DEATH STRANDING FOLLOW

Dudes rock

I was always quietly impressed, if a little disgusted, by the origin story of the Bridge Babies (BBs), these encapsuled psychic infants that help the porters of the ruined world navigate a world haunted by the echoes of the dead.

Each BB comes into this world the offspring of a Stillmother, a comatose woman held in stasis, and essentially imprisoned in a world between life and death in order to maintain the BB’s connection between the real world and The Beach.

Among all the classic Kojima nonsense that marred what was an otherwise brilliant game (Mario and Princess Beach, anyone?), it was this plot point that remained burned into the back of my mind as I pulled myself through the game’s winding and often baffling story.

A single revelation that remains, at least for me personally, one of the most deeply evil things to have been thought up as a narrative mechanism. What made this work as a shock tactic, however, is that it’s basically never adressed after that first revelation.

Enjoyed Margaret Qualley’s performance but Mama’s character arc is arguably some of Kojima’s worst work

At first I was irked by this. A genuinely interesting plot point left to stagnate so we can have yet another hour of Nicholas Winding Refn telling us about his Bluray collection. The more time that has passed, however, the more I think it’s brevity was saying something more pointed.

A nasty revelation, brushed off as another of the former government’s dirty little secrets, an alarmingly prescient statement about the way that the western world values the concept of a child over the reality of a woman.

But it never quite sat right to me that we never got any kind of moral closure on this plot beat as the game drew to a close. A hanging thread left to decay under the timefall, it at the same time felt suitably rotten and also in desperate need of a conversation.

Its likely that newcomer Neil is going to be taking over from Clifford Unger as the new ‘living BT’ antagonist of this game, but I’m already captivated by the trajectory of his story

Which is why I was delighted to see it mentioned, in plain language, in the opening seconds of this new trailer. New character Neil, played by the striking Italian actor Luca Marinelli, confesses to his psychiatrist that he played a part in smuggling these Stillmothers across the border from Mexico.

Adding another layer to this already disturbing narrative structure, there are inevitably going to be questions that arise from this utterance.

Is this another instance of an imperial power utilising its brute strength to chew up the lives of indiginous peoples, a salient commentary on the breakdown of international relations and how the west inevitably relies on exploited states for its continued survival?

Or is this simply a vapid attempt by a man who watches too many movies to seem mature and ‘political’?

I genuinely do not know what to think, but for a trailer that culminates in a spaceship docking onto the headless corpse of a giant presumably in order to fight other giants, it was this quiet scene right at the beginning, and that inkling of a further exploration of Death Stranding’s darkest revelation, that stuck with me the most.