Death Stranding 2's delivery game world is even stranger than before. It almost works

Sam Porter Bridges is having a day.

His off-road delivery vehicle — which looks like a Zamboni with shock absorbers and all-terrain wheels — is trudging slowly across the rocky, sandy plateaus of Australia when a small earthquake suddenly hits.

A boulder about the size of the off-roader crashes into it from above, tossing Sam out of his seat. Dozens of items stored inside, from critical medical supplies to misplaced children's toys, are strewn across the ground.

Sam — played by Norman Reedus, digitally recreated in astonishingly precise detail — groans as he gets to his feet. He picks up every item from the ground and throws them back into the off-roader, now dented and covered in dust, before getting back on his route.

This is the essence of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, being released Thursday. It's the latest game for the PlayStation 5 by longtime video game director Hideo Kojima and his studio, Kojima Productions.

If the idea of playing as a futuristic Amazon delivery worker sounds tedious and boring, that's because it is — by design. Through that tedium, however, it can become a solemn, thought-provoking meditation for its players on the nature of human connection.

Unfortunately,  Kojima's trademark storytelling puts overlong exposition and celebrity over substance, dragging the game down under the oceans of tar that cover his post-apocalyptic setting.

The first Death Stranding, released in late 2019, told the story of a world where humans retreated into underground bunkers, each one shut off from the rest of the world. Critics praised Kojima's tale as eerily prescient when, shortly afterward, much of the world was hunkered down during the COVID-19 pandemic, fuelled by deliveries from Amazon and Uber Eats.

The world's dreary state is thanks to a phenomenon called the Death Stranding, which unleashed spectres of the dead —  known as Beached Things, or BTs — onto the world of the living. If they consume a living human, it sets off a nuclear-sized explosion called a voidout. Fearing total obliteration, civilization fled underground.

Sam, a lone porter, was tasked with braving the BTs and other supernatural threats to deliver critical goods and connect the major American cities to the Chiral Network — a sort of internet powered by the afterlife.

On the Beach starts about a year later. Sam sets off on a new mission to connect Mexico and later Australia to the Chiral Network, with the help of a crew called Drawbridge.

Celebrity sightings

Drawbridge's mobile base abounds with familiar faces from Hollywood: Lea Seydoux as a woman named Fragile (former organizer of a porter service for fragile goods); Shioli Kutsuna as Rainy, a woman who summons rain wherever she walks; and Elle Fanning as a mysterious ingenue Tomorrow.

The narrative is doled out in short, cryptic scenes that are equally filled with Kojima's love of bizarre imagery and his thundering lack of subtlety.

Quiet moments with Fragile and the crew hint at a story with warmth and humanity, shot and digitally choreographed with finesse and beauty betraying Kojima's long-documented love of cinema. But then Dollman (literally a talking doll) will recount everything you've seen, unpacking every intended metaphor to make sure you're not missing a thing.

The bloated script does little to express the characters' personalities, instead relaying reams of bone-dry dialogue and proper nouns like a technical manual. A glossary will grow to include hundreds of terms — and you'd better know your Timefall from your Chiral printers if you hope to figure out what any of this is about. 

More unnerving are the faces that tell you the story along the way. Each lead actor is rendered in state-of-the-art graphical detail, but the technology's emotive range seems extremely limited. Seydoux speaks while frozen in a pensive gaze, and Kutsuna is almost always stuck in an unsettling wide grin.

Building roads and bridges — literally 

Thankfully, you can ignore On The Beach's insipid plot for hours at a time with Sam's workaday job. And if you grow to enjoy the game's unusual mechanics and missions, you may even like doing it.

Most of your time will be walking, climbing and driving from one location to the next, delivering critical goods and connecting people to the Chiral Network. 

With few distractions, it's easy to get lost in the loop. I spent hours planning delivery routes and picking up lost cargo along the way. 

And few things in gaming this year are as satisfying as loading building materials like metals and ceramics at a depot, which then 3D-prints a pristine road for you to drive along, making deliveries a joyride instead of a treacherous quest.

It's also during the boring missions that Reedus's Sam shows the most personality. When planning out routes, he'll repeat a motto that the worn paths are the safest. If you teeter on the brink of losing your balance but regain your composure, Sam will say, "Yeah, that's how it's done," like a high school football player impressing his coach with a safe play.

One of Death Stranding's quirkiest details is how it connects other players into a sort of network of porters. Structures you build or leave behind, whether they're a simple ladder to climb a steep hill or a bridge to cross rushing rivers, may be seen and used by other players.

Everyone's working together to make the treks easier for those who come after — not to mention leaving Likes and neon emojis to encourage fellow players. Short of Splatoon's social spaces filled with enthusiastic art and graffiti, it's probably the most positive social network around today.

Combat is substantially expanded from the previous game, with enemy encampments dotting the landscape and several missions forcing you to infiltrate them, taking out enemies with silenced tranquilizer pistols or menacing electric swords.

It harkens back to Kojima's Metal Gear games, which set much of the blueprint for stealth action games. But it's mostly a drag in Death Stranding, as Sam teeters his weapons and equipment on his back while hyper-competent enemies harass him with sophisticated weapons. 

Death Stranding 2 showcases Kojima Production's greatest strengths and weaknesses. In an industry that constantly walks the tightrope of massive profit and mass layoffs, it's a miracle anyone gets to make a game as esoteric and unbothered by shareholders' expectations as On the Beach.

But that doesn't make it inherently fun. As you drive across a mostly barren Australia, players may find it the perfect way to ponder the profundity of human connection that comes with a simple delivery. But if you want a coherent dramatic story that takes less than 50 or more hours to hint at what is even happening, you're better off walking away from this one.