Death Stranding 2: On The Beach’s latest trailer is aggressively bizarre. In 9 minutes and 40 seconds, the video assaults us with talking stop-motion puppets, sentient gloves wrapped around people’s necks, throat babies vomiting out spaceships, a samurai that sounds like an infant, and somehow, Higgs returned.
It’s so densely packed with weird stuff that, upon repeat viewings, I actually had to go out of my way to pinpoint anything remotely mundane. In a humorous turn of events, Death Stranding 2 is so overwhelmingly odd that every eye-brow-raising visual element is par for the course. Anything that isn’t a black oil-covered tube baby with a hilariously literal moniker voiced by Troy Baker is now the minority and, in turn, the “weird” stuff. They’re not easy to spot, so I took the liberty of doing it for you. Here are all the normal/boring/remarkably tame elements the trailer has to offer.
Fragile’s Water Bottle
Fragile uses this bottle to clean the tar off a mysterious person, which was encased in a cocoon-like shell early in the trailer. She might have filled it with water mixed with some dish soap. Maybe Dawn, since the commercials say they’re good for cleaning oil spill victims. I was waiting for the straw to do the macarena or for babies to pour out of it instead of water, but since neither happened (yet), that makes it a refreshingly dull liquid delivery device.
Guns
It’s kind of surprising that weapons are relatively conventional in this strange universe (poop grenades aside). Combat was my least favorite aspect of Death Stranding, so I’m not thrilled to see that Sam is still packing enough heat to take down an army of ink monsters. I look forward to not using them as often as possible; I need more room to carry my boxes, anyway.
Trees
The phrase “If trees could talk” has never resonated more than now. I would love their commentary on what it felt like watching the U.S. deteriorate from “It’s pretty weird here” to “We don’t even know if we occupy the same plane of existence anymore, God help us.”
Wall Pipe
Perhaps the most memorable moment of this trailer is when Higgs (who now resembles The Crow if he were a Cyberpunk 2077 character) uses his electric guitar sword thing to battle an imposing samurai who makes baby noises. You were probably too busy absorbing all of that nonsense to notice this perfectly regular wall pipe that just wants to do normal pipe things and not get involved in this foolishness.
Cooking Pan
Given the close-up this pan gets, I’m honestly surprised it wasn’t used as a branding opportunity. Maybe some fan has already magnified the image to reveal an OD release date carved on the pan’s bottom. If not, though, the pan itself seems uninteresting; what Sam is cooking with it, though, remains in question. He’s probably sauteeing those weird floating worm things.
That’s it. That’s all I could find. I can’t trust anything else in this game because everything is weird and probably has a baby inside of it. That desert? Likely a baby. The giant moon? It’s alive and probably has Mads Mikkelsen’s face on the other side of it (Kojima will name him something cheeky like “Majora’s Mads” or something). The floating soldiers represent every celebrity Kojima has lured into his studio’s body-scanning machine; their souls are now trapped within the strand. We have to free them.
I don’t know what Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is. Hell, I still can’t confidently explain Death Stranding 1, and I finished it. I just know that, whatever it winds up being, I really, really want to play it.