Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

• 1. Introduction

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  Hideo Kojima, the director of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, responded to glowing playtest results by tearing up part of his own script. Roughly halfway through development, audiences testing the game liked it a great deal. Kojima told his co-composer Woodkid: "We have a problem." To him, approval was a warning. "If everyone likes it, it means it's mainstream," he said. He wanted people to "end up liking things they didn't like when they first encountered it." So he rewrote the story to be more polarising. That choice frames everything about this sequel. It is a game about hauling packages across a ruined world, yet its director distrusts anything easy to love. What does a player actually do in this game, and why does a porter's backpack matter so much? Who is left in a world where robots have taken over the deliveries? What secret does the story hide about a child named Lou? And how did a project that began before 2020 end up shaped by a global pandemic?

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• 2. Delivery Across Rough Country

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  Two large open worlds, Mexico and Australia, make up most of the map, and the player may roam either one freely. The core loop is simple to state. Sam Porter Bridges carries packages to scattered preppers and survivors, then links each of them to a wireless system called the Chiral Network.

  The backpack is where the difficulty lives. Players must pick a path through hard terrain while keeping the weight of the cargo balanced on Sam's back. Vehicles arrive early in the game and make long trips faster. They can be customized heavily, with extra batteries to extend their range or gun turrets added for defense.

  The land itself pushes back. Earthquakes and sandstorms strike often, reshaping the landscape and forcing players to find a different delivery route. Players also rebuild what has been broken, laying roads and bridges. Later they can construct a monorail between isolated colonies, which moves large quantities of goods from mines to cities.

  The DHV Magellan, a ship that travels across tar, serves as the home base. Aboard it, Sam can rest, talk with his companions and run VR training missions. The ship also lets the player fast travel over the tar. Players can place structures and signs using materials, and other players may see them. A player can "like" someone else's creation as a gesture of thanks. Sam's fighting skills turn out to matter just as much as his balance, and the next chapter turns to them.

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• 3. Fighting Without Killing

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  Voidouts are the first game's most feared accident: devastating explosions that end the run. In this sequel, the default weapons are non-lethal, so players can fight directly without that worry. Combat receives a greater emphasis than before.

  Players have three broad choices when enemies appear. They can fight head-on, sneak past, or avoid trouble altogether by taking rougher terrain. Sam carries a large set of tools and gadgets for drawing an enemy's attention or steering it elsewhere. A dynamic day-night cycle changes how enemies behave.

  Progress comes through the Automated Porter Assistant System, which doubles as the game's skill tree. It has five branches: porter, combat, stealth, servicemanship and bridge link. The last branch concerns Sam's skill at delivering packages. Sam's attributes also grow quietly through ordinary actions. The more packages he delivers, the better his delivery skills become.

  That same assistant system carries a very different meaning inside the story, where it has replaced Sam's former trade.

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• 4. A World After Bridges

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  Eleven months after the first game, the United Cities of America has grown out of the remains of the United States. Every corner of it is joined to the Chiral Network. The logistics company Bridges has gone defunct, and unmanned delivery robots run by the Automated Porter Assistant System now handle the work. Human porters have lost their jobs.

  Meanwhile, the extinction event is worsening. The ghostlike creatures called Beached Things are evolving, and natural disasters are frequent. Portals known as plate gates have begun to appear in places with high chiral density. The most important one links Mexico to Australia. That continent is overrun by bandits and by hostile robots called ghost mechs.

  Norman Reedus returns as Sam, a legendary retired porter, and Troy Baker returns as Higgs, the antagonist of the first game, who appears to have come back from the beach. This is the space between the afterlife and the physical world. Léa Seydoux plays Fragile, Sam's ally and the founder of a private company called Drawbridge. Lou is Sam's adopted daughter, and Lucy is his late wife. Amelie, played by Lindsay Wagner, is Sam's adopted sister and the Extinction Entity, a being the universe produced to trigger extinction.

  Several Drawbridge members carry the faces of filmmakers. George Miller plays Tarman, Fatih Akin plays Dollman and Nicolas Winding Refn plays Heartman, with voices from Marty Rhone, Jonathan Roumie and Darren Jacobs respectively. Guillermo del Toro plays Deadman, a researcher of the Death Stranding phenomenon. Shioli Kutsuna plays Rainy. Alastair Duncan voices the President, who runs the company behind the delivery robots. Tommie Earl Jenkins plays Charlie, Drawbridge's mysterious benefactor. Elle Fanning plays Tomorrow, an amnesiac young woman with powers tied to the tar. Luca Marinelli plays Neil Vana, a spectral soldier. The story hinges on what these last two characters really are.

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• 5. The Truth About Lou

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  Near the former US-Mexico border, Sam lives quietly with Lou after deserting the United Cities of America. Fragile finds him and asks for help linking Mexico to the Chiral Network through abandoned terminals. Her offer is a pardon. The government treats Lou as Bridges property, and Sam took her. Sam reluctantly agrees and leaves Lou with Fragile.

  After the link succeeds, Sam finds a recording that Deadman left in a research facility. It describes the plate gate to Australia. It also reveals that Lou's identification number belonged to a decommissioned unit, so she was never properly registered. Sam hurries home and finds his shelter attacked. Fragile survives, but Lou appears to be dead.

  A month later, Fragile invites a grieving Sam aboard the Magellan. On the voyage, Lou appears again as a creature resembling a Beached Thing inside his BB pod. Aboard, the President explains that completing the Australian network will activate more plate gates, capable of linking continents everywhere. In Australia, Sam meets Higgs, who now commands ghost mech forces. Strange "tarfall" anomalies also throw Sam into fights against Neil. After the first of them, Sam finds a chrysalis holding an amnesiac woman, whom Fragile names Tomorrow.

  When Sam finally defeats Neil, he experiences Neil's memories. Lou is his biological daughter, long believed dead alongside Lucy in a voidout. In truth Bridges had secretly taken her first and designated her BB-00, the first successful Bridge Baby. Neil had worked for Bridges, smuggling braindead pregnant women from Mexico to supply its BB programs. He tried to help Lucy and Lou escape, and both he and Lucy died in the attempt. Fragile then tells Sam that his pod has been empty all along. Drawbridge let him hallucinate Lou so that he could process his grief.

  Higgs besieges the last hub needed to finish the network. Sam and Drawbridge hold it and activate the final terminal. Then the President betrays them. He is an amalgamation of thousands of dead human souls connected to his company. His plan is to use the network to isolate humanity within their beaches permanently, which would end the threat of Beached Things by separating the living from the physical world. He admits that he revived Higgs to spread the fear that would make survivors accept the network.

  Charlie steps in and reveals he is Die-Hardman, the former president of the United Cities of America. He had secretly altered Sam's Q-Pid so that the President's connection would be cut once the network was complete. Higgs then returns and seizes Tomorrow. She is the adult Lou, and because of her bond with Sam and Amelie, she is the next Extinction Entity. Higgs intends to use her to set off the Last Stranding.

  Sam follows Higgs to a beach linked to the President's company and fights him with Higgs's own electric guitar. Lou appears in a massive form and eats Higgs, cutting his tie to the beach and ending the Last Stranding. Soon afterward Fragile dies. She had been fatally wounded in the attack on Sam's home and stayed alive just long enough to protect Lou. Neil's memories show that Lou had been teleported to his beach and sealed in the chrysalis, where she aged rapidly into adulthood. With her memories restored, she reunites with Sam. A post-credits scene shows an older Lou following in his footsteps as a porter, about to enter a plate gate.

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• 6. Making the Sequel

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  In March 2020, Norman Reedus hinted that he might keep working with Hideo Kojima. By then Kojima, who wrote, directed, produced and primarily designed the game, had already written an earlier version of the story. When new story ideas reflecting the effect of COVID-19 on the world presented themselves, he reworked the narrative from scratch.

  The game's existence came out in May 2022, when Reedus mentioned it in an interview with the outlet Leo Edit. Kojima answered with a series of Twitter photos in which he cheekily punished Reedus for the slip. In October, after a run of teasers on social media, Elle Fanning was announced for a coming Kojima Productions game. Kojima then unveiled the project at The Game Awards 2022. The trailer confirmed Léa Seydoux and Troy Baker in their old roles and added Shioli Kutsuna to the cast. Yoji Shinkawa, the artist and mechanical designer, and the composer Ludvig Forssell were confirmed to return.

  In January 2024, a 10-minute trailer at a PlayStation State of Play event revealed Fanning's character, Tarman, Dollman and fresh gameplay. By May 2024, filming and motion capture were complete. Kojima said the game had entered an "adjustment phase" that would take about a year. On the 9th of March 2025, a trailer at SXSW announced the release date. It added Darren Jacobs as Heartman, Luca Marinelli, Alissa Jung and Alastair Duncan in new roles, and Debra Wilson as Doctor. On the 29th of May 2025, Kojima Productions announced that the Hololive virtual YouTuber Usada Pekora would cameo as a "data scientist."

  On the 9th of May 2025, the game went gold, meaning development had finished. A premiere event followed on the 8th of June at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles, after Summer Game Fest. It featured a panel, a live gameplay demo and the announcement of Woodkid's soundtrack album. The PlayStation 5 release came on the 26th of June 2025. Special editions included in-game and physical items, and pre-orders gave early access two days before launch.

  A Windows version was announced during a State of Play on the 12th of February 2026. It arrived on the 19th of March 2026, ported by Nixxes Software, with support for ultrawide monitors, upscaling technologies and frame generation. That PC release also set the stage for the game's first publicly stated sales milestone.

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• 7. Two Composers, One Sound

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  Ludvig Forssell, a Swedish composer, scored the first game and also worked on Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. After ten years as Kojima Productions' in-house composer, he left to take on freelance projects. When he came back for the sequel, he said his independence helped him focus. He aimed for music that was "much more lyrical and melodic" than before, with more "human facets." His original score was released as an album on the 27th of June 2025.

  Woodkid, the French singer-songwriter, joined for a sad reason. Ryan Karazija of Low Roar had died, and his songs were a recurring presence in the first game. Woodkid was approached to create new songs. He worked in person at Kojima Productions in Tokyo over three years, composing alongside the game's development.

  Many of Woodkid's pieces are procedural, meaning they adapt on the fly to what the player does. Some of these tracks run for hours. His album squeezes each one down to a few minutes. The single "To the Wilder" came out on the 9th of March 2025, alongside the pre-order trailer, and the full album followed on the 13th of June 2025.

  The soundtrack also gathers songs, new and old, from Low Roar, Caroline Polachek, Grimm Grimm, Silent Poets, Magnolian, Hania Rani, Chvrches, Daichi Miura, Gen Hoshino, Usada Pekora and Kunio Miyauchi. One outlier is "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head," a 1969 song sung by B. J. Thomas. It plays extensively as background music, and characters sing it inside the story as well.

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• 8. Reception and Awards

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  Four critics at the Japanese magazine Famitsu gave the game a combined 39 out of 40, and three of them awarded a perfect 10. Elsewhere, the aggregator Metacritic summed up reviews as "generally favorable," while OpenCritic reported that 95% of critics recommended it.

  Simon Cardy of IGN called the game "a more accomplished achievement in nearly every facet" compared with its predecessor. He described it as "an inventive journey packed full of both shock and awe." Scott Duwe of Destructoid found the gameplay more varied and improved, called it "one of the best-looking games ever made" and praised its soundtrack and storyline. Phil Iwaniuk, writing in The Guardian, called it a "hypnotising arthouse game" and singled out its atmosphere, performances and refined mechanics.

  Not every critic agreed. Diego Nicolás Argüello of GameSpot judged the sequel "good but not great," arguing that it leaned too heavily on revisiting ideas from the first game. After the PC release in March 2026, sales passed 2 million copies worldwide.

  The awards record is long. The game was already in Golden Joystick Awards contention for Most Wanted Game in 2023 and The Game Awards for Most Anticipated Game in 2024. In 2025 its categories at The Game Awards included Game of the Year, Best Game Direction and Best Narrative. Troy Baker appears in supporting-performer categories at both the Golden Joystick Awards and the British Academy Games Awards, and Shioli Kutsuna's Rainy is listed for Best Voice Performance at the Game Audio Network Guild Awards. The British Academy list also includes a category called Game Beyond Entertainment.

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