Second Death Stranding Trailer is Peak Kojima

During last night’s The Game Awards, Hideo Kojima debuted the latest trailer for his forthcoming title, Death Stranding, and it’s about as strange as the first one:

The clip shows Kojima’s friend and collaborator on the aborted Silent Hills Guillermo del Toro sneaking through a war-torn town with a baby in a jar. After entering a flooded tunnel, he encounters a team of soldiers who bare a passing similarity to Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain‘s Skull unit, led by and connected to (by strands), Mads Mikkelsen. All very oblique, but wonderfully stylish – Kojima, in a nutshell.

Little is known about Death Stranding, past what the two trailers have shown – which is basically nothing – but Kojima has given away a few tidbits over the last few months.

“Connecting people through gameplay is the basis of the game,” Kojima told Wired. “Trying to connect one character to another, or to connect life and death.”

“In arcade games, you have this notion of dying, putting another quarter in, and coming back,” he added. “That hasn’t changed in the 35 years that I’ve been making games. In this game, life and death will be part of that, but I want to give a different twist to that notion.”

This is Kojima’s first game since he left Konami under a cloud, and Death Stranding is the first non-Metal Gear Solid game he has written and directed since Policenauts in 1994. “Being able to work on something new is a nice feeling,” he said.

Following the trailer, Kojima released two new posters for the game:

The man in the suit is my dear friend @RealGDT & the man in the army suit is Mads Mikkelsen. Main character (the player) is Norman Reedus. pic.twitter.com/JhaCR4oacj

— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) December 2, 2016