OD is Hideo Kojima's return to horror, and while I'd like to say it's cloaked in mystery we actually know a fair bit about it: it's co-written with Jordan Peele of Get Out fame, and stars Sophia Lillis, Hunter Schafer, and a posthumous Udo Kier. According to Kojima, early trailers may point to "a standard horror game" but it's definitely not that at all.

In fact, we've been told repeatedly that OD is like nothing else that's come before: what it actually is, is a mystery Kojima seems pretty eager to exacerbate. In a new Entertainment Weekly feature which seems designed, maybe with poor timing, to celebrate the virtues and achievements of Xbox as it enters its 25th year, Kojima is called on to comment about OD, which will be published by Xbox Game Studios.

"I wanted to do something new. I wanted to do something different," Kojima told EW. "I had this OD concept since I was working on DS1 [Death Stranding] and I was working on it just by myself. I can't reveal much detail, but it's something that no one has ever seen before. A new game system."

He goes on to say that despite being Hideo Kojima, the creator of Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding, and perhaps the most beloved (maybe only) auteur in the biz, many weren't receptive to his pitch. "I pitched to many people, to the big companies, and also to the up-and-coming companies. All of them said the same thing," Kojima said. "They said that I'm crazy, and that they really don't understand the concept—that they will not be able to do it."

Phil Spencer, former Xbox head, was pretty keen on the concept though. Or else, he was keen to secure a crowdpleasing exclusive after Kojima's decades-long association with PlayStation. Most of the Metal Gear Solid games didn't or haven't launched on Xbox consoles, though the majority have since been reissued on that platform. Death Stranding and its sequel both launched as PlayStation exclusives: the first eventually came to Xbox, but the second is yet to make the jump.

New Xbox head Asha Sharma supports OD, calling it "deeply moving" and representative of "another kind of game". She also seems eager to conflate Xbox's support of the game with its broader vision for the medium as a whole. "We need to make sure our platform is sufficiently open so more creators and developers can come on board and be successful, because the next Kojima is yet to be known." (True, but perhaps he was among the thousands laid off by Microsoft in the last two years).

Kojima has a tiny bit more to say about OD: "I wanted to go beyond the limit of the 'scariness' that other games had reached. It's a single-player game, and I wanted to make it as scary as possible. But for those that might stop playing when it gets too scary, I have thought of a system that will allow them to keep going. I can't say much more, because it'll give too much of a hint on the system, and I could get in trouble for saying too much!"

OD has yet to get a release date.

The Death Stranding movie was announced way back in 2022—a length of time that may well have worked out for it given how videogame movie adaptations are suddenly on a hot streak. The project is still in its early stages and the specifics are being hashed out. But one detail has recently been confirmed by director Michael Sarnoski, which is that the cinema version of Death Stranding won't be a straight retread of Kojima's scenic delivery simulator.

During a chat with IGN live (via Eurogamer) about his latest movie The Death of Robin Hood—which arrives in cinemas later this month—Sarnoski shared some additional details on progress with the Death Stranding film: "I'm writing the script right now, and [am] hopefully almost done with that and really excited to dive into it," said Sarnoski, who previously directed the well-received prequel A Quiet Place: Day One.

Rather than retell the story of Sam Porter Bridges' journey across Kojima's 'I can't believe it's not Iceland' depiction of North America, Sarnoski instead says the movie is "a story with my own characters and my own corner of the world." He does hint that viewers "might see some characters from the game pop up"—so there's still hope for a Dollman cameo. But all-told, Sarnoski wants to "explore something that's meaningful to me."

Whatever Sarnoski's vision for Death Stranding, production company A24 seems pleased with progress so far. "They've read a draft. We're working on some revisions together, and they all seem super excited and happy with it," Sarnoski says. Perhaps more importantly, Kojima himself seems pleased with the story Sarnoski is writing. Certainly, Sarnoski is impressed by Kojima, as he keenly explained during the interview:

"I was impressed that when he read this script, without me needing to talk to him about it, he knew every single [film] reference," Sarnoski says. "He was like 'Oh, you're doing a Come and See reference there. I see that. I like that'. He just knows movies incredibly well."

A Death Stranding flick isn't the only game adaptation A24 has in the works. Alex Garland's Elden Ring movie is filming right now, and is expected to release in 2028. Numerous videos from the set have leaked online, including footage of guards strolling around what might be Conwy Castle in North Wales—likely to be serving as a stand in for Elden Ring's sprawling Stormveil Castle.

While some creatives are in staunch opposition to AI slop, Hideo Kojima isn't one of them. Instead, he's made a cheesy AI-generated short film with his director bestie, Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn—all to advertise Prada's "itinerant" private club, Prada Mode, and its invite-only New York event.

What a wonderfully bleak age we live in!

A teaser of the six-minute film was posted yesterday, showing the pair of buds crash landing on an alien planet before they eventually head to New York's Chelsea Hotel, where Prada Mode's event will be taking place.

It doesn't look great! I do enjoy the aesthetic it's inspired by—the surreal sci-fi of the '60s and '70s—but that makes the use of AI even weirder. It's just doing shit that filmmakers were doing 60 years ago on a shoestring budget.

The pair haven't just put together this short film, they're also collaborating with Prada on the event, dubbed Satellites 2. Here's how Prada describes it:

An immersive, multi-day experience, Satellites II unfolds across the layered architecture of the hotel, traversing public, domestic, and intimate spaces. A spatial narrative reflects the balance between private environments and collective accessibility, while a classical yet progressive science fiction aesthetic reimagines the historic setting. During the private program, select guest rooms function as micro television studios, hosting original performances for invited participants. These same spaces later reopen to the public as intentional installations, shifting perception and use.

This is actually the second time the developer and director have worked with Prada. The original Satellites exhibition took place in Tokyo last year.

Kojima working with Prada isn't a surprise, of course. The man loves his fashion. And these exhibitions go well beyond the world of fashion; they are spaces for art and artistic expression, while the Satellites series specifically explores science fiction. This all sounds extremely Kojima—and actually genuinely interesting.

Which makes it a terrible shame that two talented creatives decided to offload a bunch of the work onto the biggest threat to creativity that we've ever dealt with. Good job, lads.

In 2018 Hideo Kojima visited Valve headquarters to talk about Death Stranding. Based on emails now public thanks to the ongoing Musk v. Altman lawsuit, Kojima and Gabe Newell seem to have hit it off, if they weren't already buddy-buddy: after the meeting Newell promised to introduce Kojima to people at the then still-not-well-known OpenAI, and also to Elon Musk.

Musk, of course, owns SpaceX, and Kojima has well-known ambitions to go to space.

"Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear series, a real visionary in our field) was here at Valve talking about his new game, and he mentioned the importance he places on future work in AI," Newell wrote to Musk in late October, 2018. "I said I'd be happy to introduce him to the people at OpenAI and spoke enthusiastically about the work that team has done with us (I'm not sure how involved you are with them nowadays)."

Newell continues: "The second thing is he was talking about how much he wants to go into space, and I offered to introduce him to you. He'd love to get a SpaceX tour."

Musk was receptive: "Sure, it would be great to meet Hideo Kojima and he's welcome to see the rocket factory," he wrote. "No problem to send him my email."

By 2020, Kojima's desire to visit space still hadn't been fulfilled. In an interview with Geoff Keighley, Kojima said that he wanted to visit SpaceX with Newell, to which Elon Musk replied on X (then still Twitter): "Welcome anytime."

It needs to be kept in mind that Kojima's desire to go to space is more intense than, say, a five-year-old child's. In his book The Creative Gene (via Vice), Kojima describes his passion thusly:

"If I could have just one wish in my life—if I could cast a magic spell and make anything come true—without hesitation, it would be this: 'I wish to go to space before I die.' It doesn't have to be anything as extravagant as a trip to the moon or Mars. I would be satisfied with only a brief orbit, just beyond Earth’s atmosphere, where I can gently brush against outer space. I would give up anything to make that wish come true: my current place as a game designer, which I’ve built up for forty-five years; I'm even prepared to throw away my family or my own life. That is how powerfully I—or rather we—yearn for the cosmos."

In other words: Someone really needs to send this guy to space.

As for Kojima's wishes to chat with OpenAI, Musk displays an early ambivalence towards the organisation that seems to presage the current Musk v. Altman lawsuit.

"Regarding OpenAI, my involvement is very limited at this point. I still provide some financial support and get verbal and email updates every few weeks from Sam Altman, but don't spend time there. I lost confidence that OpenAI could muster the resources to serve as an effective counterweight to Google / Deepmind and decided to attempt that through Tesla instead. We have cash flow on the order of billions of dollars per year to build hardware that hopefully has at least a dark horse chance to keep Google honest. Probably worth talking about at some point."

Given how much Steam earns Valve in revenue, I have to imagine that even in 2018 he wasn't overly impressed by Musk's "billions of dollars per year" line. Newell does, though, touch on Musk's Neuralink concerns. No idle interest, it turned out, because a year later Newell founded his own neuroscience company in the form of Starfish Neuroscience.

"For a long time I thought neuromodulation (e.g. rTMS) was weird, mainly because I had an unsophisticated understanding of a bunch of aspects of the brain," Newell wrote. "I've more or less done a 180, and think there is a significant near-term consumer market. Is this something I should bring up with the Neuralink team? If so, anyone in particular I should chat with there?"

Musk points him to several contacts before offering a progress report: "We've made some pretty insane technical progress. This is highly confidential, but we're now able to implant ~6000 electrodes in a monkey brain with decent signal / noise. Moreover, the electronics are compact enough to be flush with the skull and the only thing visible is the USB-C opening and slight surround. Very trippy. Just like Neuromancer."

You can read the full email exchange, surfaced by OpenAI defense firm Morrison & Foerster, here.

Actor, writer and director David Hayter has had a long and successful career in multiple industries, but for videogame fans he'll always be the voice of Solid Snake and Big Boss. The first 3D entry in the Metal Gear series, 1998's Metal Gear Solid, was a cinematic leap forward in an era where videogame voice acting was in its infancy, and Hayter's gruff performance as the battle-weary Solid Snake gave the character a believability and depth that simply wasn't common at the time.

In a new interview with Fall Damage (spotted by GR+) Hayter discusses his time on the series, how he settled on Snake's voice, and whether he had any clue about what was going on. "When we started Metal Gear and I started taking on Snake, I didn't want him to sound like Kurt Russell from Escape from New York," says Hayter.

Snake's character was modelled after Russell's character Snake Plissken, something that Hideo Kojima would explicitly acknowledge in MGS2 by making the character's alias Iroquois Pliskin. "I knew that there were similarities there and I felt like he needed to sound more weathered, you know," recalls Hayter. "That he had been through a lot more than I had been through at that point in my life."

Elsewhere in the interview Hayter is asked about the often baffling plot that unfolds across the games, which is rammed with double-bluffs, triple agents, shadowy cabals, outright misinformation, and countless references to real-world events and organisations. The story is often brilliant: but there is simply no denying that it is initially very hard to get your head around some of what it's doing.

"Do I understand the story of Metal Gear Solid? Uh, basically I do," says Hayter. "Do I understand all of it? Absolutely not. I didn't understand all of it while we were recording it. I'd be like 'What does this mean?' and they'd say, 'just say it.' And I'd be like, 'Okay.'"

One of my favourite lines in Metal Gear Solid 2 comes when Commandant Scott Dolph exclaims in surprise "the La-li-lu-le-lo", a moment I admire mainly because the voice actor doesn't crack up as he's delivering it. But that's the kind of script these games have: at times they're utterly wacky but, as Hayter points out, that's the secret sauce.

"That's what makes Metal Gear, Metal Gear." says Hayter. "There's more information. There's more character development. There's more detail to the story than you can ever possibly absorb, no matter how many times you play it. That's what makes the world feel real and rich and lovable."

Hayter himself has made a welcome return as the face of the now Kojima-less series for Konami, as the publisher gradually feels its way back into the series (most recently with the excellent remake Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater). Speaking last year, Hayter says he can see a future for the series without Kojima, but boy is it gonna be different.

"I think it's absolutely possible," said Hayter. "Will it be the same? No. There's no way to replicate his exact genius, his exact weirdness, his specific personality.

"I've been a working screenwriter for 26 straight years and written on countless pieces, and I think I'm pretty good at it. but I look at the Metal Gear scripts, and I'm like, 'I could never do this.'"

Hideo Kojima has been on his travels again and, rather than posting pictures of overly elaborate lunches like usual, he's been posting photos of himself at places like Microsoft. And next on the agenda was Seattle and Valve HQ, where the Koj allowed himself a photo blowout with various cool things around the company's office.

The first bunch show Kojima grasping hold of the giant valve that is installed in Valve reception and appears on the startup screen of their games. Then in what looks like a masterpiece of trolling from whoever set up this display, Kojima has a photograph of himself posing in front of the giant Valve sign: beneath which are three Half-Life gravity guns, as well as three portal guns. Three!

We're far from done. Next up is the Death Stranding director posing in the orb, which Valve staff created as a promotional tool for the Steam Deck OLED: it now lives in the lobby.

Kojima also appears to have arrived bearing gifts: we next get a snap of the Kojima Productions Ludens mascot, holding a custom-made flag with the Valve logo, next to the TF2 medic and the Portal companion cube.

We then get a clutch of three more: a headcrab posed on a mannequin head, the giant valve again, and a reverse shot of the Valve sign.

Kojima hasn't said anything about why he's visiting Valve, although the answer is probably just "because I can" rather than an imminent collaboration on Half-Life 3. One thing the visit has done, however, is re-surface some comments Kojima made about Half-Life way back when he was designing Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (spotted by GR+).

On January 12, 1999, Kojima wrote: "I asked Kume-chan to buy Half-Life for reference for MGS2," because it had been nominated for Edge magazine's Game of the Year award. "While the graphics are somewhat underwhelming, the gameplay and attention to detail are astounding. Once again, I felt that sense of, 'We’ve been outdone by the Americans!' Most of all, the atmosphere is incredible. The real-time direction is superb, and you can feel the soul of the creators in the game."

Kojima praised the "careful attention to detail, direction, and mechanics" that create "a compelling game world." He noted with approval that "everything in the game can be destroyed, bullet holes appear, and when you throw wooden crates or barrels into the river, they float." The Metal Gear games always had an element of this but, as Kojima began pushing the simulation element hard in MGS2, it's not hard to see where Half-Life must have had an inspiration.

This is not Kojima's first visit to Valve by a distance. I believe the most recent was in 2018, which did offer something he didn't get this time around: a picture with Gabe Newell. I imagine that's probably because big Gabe spends his time these days sailing the high seas in a $500 million superyacht.

Just because a deal is reached to get a movie made doesn't mean it'll actually get made. We've seen it happen a bunch of times with videogame adaptations, like Just Cause, which was announced in 2011 and Splinter Cell, which was in development way back in 2005. Neither film ever materialized.

Enter Metal Gear Solid. Hideo Kojima announced the film adaptation himself back in 2006, some 20 years ago now, and despite occasional names popping up—like that Viggo Mortenson or Hugh Jackman would play Snake, or that Paul Thomas Anderson or Jordan Vogt-Roberts would direct—the movie has never appeared or seemingly gotten past the pre-production phase.

Smash cut to today, and like Snake climbing that ridiculously long ladder in Metal Gear Solid 3, we're just gonna keep going onward and upward. According to Sony, via The Hollywood Reporter, the Metal Gear Solid movie is happening, or happening again, or perhaps still happening.

Sony has signed Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, the director duo of the rather good Final Destination: Bloodlines, to a deal to develop multiple films, including an animated Venom movie, sci-fi film The Earthling, and, yep, Metal Gear Solid.

"Metal Gear Solid was nothing short of a groundbreaking cinematic masterpiece that forever revolutionized video games," Lipovsky and Stein said—though The Hollywood Reporter unfortunately doesn't specify whether or not they said it perfectly in unison. I hope they did. "We are thrilled and honored to bring Hideo Kojima’s iconic characters and unforgettable world to life."

It's a standard, boring statement, but the two directors seem fantastically busy: in addition to those Sony pictures, they're also working on a new Gremlins movie, a film called Long Lost with Amblin Entertainment, and something called The Traveler over at Paramount. They're not necessarily directing all of those, but after the 20-year wait, I might be a bit more hopeful a MGS flick would see the light of day if the directors weren't already nipples-deep in other projects.

At least with the deal in place, we can probably expect some casting news, right? Who would make a good Solid Snake these days? Reacher's Alan Ritchson recently threw his hat into the ring, Oscar Isaac was on board for the Vogt-Roberts version, and we're happy to see Karl Urban show up just about anywhere. Hopefully we won't have to wait more than a couple more decades to find out.

When Death Stranding 2 released for PC last month I didn't think it would work well on Steam Deck. And it didn't: when I booted it up on my OLED, nothing I tinkered with could stop its framerate from lurching between the teens and mid-20s with long hitches in-between, which was slightly disappointing because Death Stranding: Director's Cut is a gem on Steam Deck.

Still, fair enough, I thought. It's a big blockbuster PS5-exclusive, and the Steam Deck is getting long-ish in the tooth.

But last week port magicians Nixxes rolled out patch 1.2 for the PC version of Death Stranding 2. The patch notes promised "improved performance on Steam Deck" among other performance-centric tweaks. Nixxes has worked on a heap of PS5 games that have worked surprisingly well on Steam Deck, including both modern Spider-Man games, both The Last of Us games, and Horizon Zero Dawn, among others.

Emboldened, I re-downloaded all 112 GB of Death Stranding 2 and the difference is definitely night and day: using the game's default portable settings I'm generally getting between 30 and 35 fps during moment-to-moment open world gameplay, and around 50 fps in minimal interiors. Battery drain is a bit intense—you can expect around an hour and a half worth of play at best.

Here's what the portable preset for Death Stranding 2 looks like:

And a few shots taken in-game on the Steam Deck:

A lot of studios are implementing portable presets in PC games and it's very welcome, even when the preset doesn't necessarily mean it'll run well on Deck. Resident Evil 9 and Crimson Desert are two notable examples: I haven't played the latter, but Resident Evil 9 is perfectly playable on a Steam Deck OLED so long as you're not expecting 60 fps and exorbitantly detailed texture quality.

It's the same with Death Stranding 2. It's definitely a game that lends itself to a big screen, but I've played six hours worth on the OLED's 7.4 inch display and haven't really felt myself at a disadvantage. Overall, it's good proof that the Steam Deck, and other handhelds with similar specs, can still sing so long as studios have the time to optimise for them.

Here's the full 1.2 patch notes for Death Stranding 2:

• Performance improvements on systems with limited PCIe bandwidth.
• Improved performance on Steam Deck.
• Various crash fixes, stability improvements, and performance optimizations.
• Photo Mode screenshots taken in HDR no longer appear to be washed out.
• DualShock 4 triggers no longer need to be pressed fully to register input when using Steam Input.
• Various bug fixes related to the Map user interface.
• Various bug fixes and improvements related to graphics.
• Various input and user interface related improvements and bug fixes.

Death Stranding 2 released for PC last month after a year of PS5 exclusivity. "By turns sentimental and ridiculous, Death Stranding 2 nonetheless offers the best marriage of mechanics and meaning in Hideo Kojima's storied career," Wes Fenlon wrote in his review.

Fan casting is fun. For instance, who do you think would make a good Solid Snake in a Metal Gear Solid live-action film?

Well, if you ask Reacher's Alan Ritchson, his answer might be: Reacher's Alan Ritchson. The extra-large action star sure seems to think he'd be a good fit for the role, as he posted an image on Instagram (AI generated, I'm assuming) of a poster from his new Netflix movie, War Machine—but with Ritchson looking for all the world like Solid Snake.

"The Dream," are the words Ritchson used to accompany the image, so I'm guessing he'd be up for the role of Snake in a live-action Metal Gear Solid movie. "La Li Lu Le Lo," he added, a reference to The Patriots, the secret organization controlling the US in Metal Gear lore—indicating Ritchson might be more than just a casual fan of the games. He might be a full-on, die-hard Kojima nerd.

That's cool. It's kinda fun when a celebrity turns out to be a fan of games, like Henry Cavill's nerdy Warhammer obsession or Elijah Wood's affinity for chill puzzlers on Steam Deck.

Unfortunately for Ritchson, he may have missed the boat to Mother Base. We've been waiting for a movie adaptation of Metal Gear Solid for a while now—like, 20 years—since Kojima announced the film way, way back in 2006. All sorts of names have been floated for the role of Snake in the past couple decades, from Viggo Mortensen to Hugh Jackman to Christian Bale. Nothing really stuck, but in 2020, Oscar Isaac was finally announced as the film's Solid Snake.

Of course, that was six dang years ago and as far as anyone knows, production on the film hasn't actually started and it's still in the scripting phase—which could mean that even if the movie does get made, there's no guarantee Isaac will still play the role.

As for Ritchson—I don't think he's right for the role. When I think of Snake, I think of stealth, and when I think of stealth, I don't think of a guy who is eight feet tall with shoulders as broad as a Humvee. Is he really gonna crawl through ductwork? Do they even make ducts that big? How can he sneak up behind someone without calling attention to himself because he's blotting out the sun? And there is simply not a cardboard box large enough for Ritchson to crouch beneath. His role as Snake might have to remain just a dream.

Metal Gear Solid 5 famously released in two highly disproportionate parts, with its short (but highly replayable) prologue Ground Zeroes releasing roughly a year before the full-fat Phantom Pain.

This has always struck me as an odd decision. Prior to Ground Zeroes' release, Hideo Kojima claimed he split off the prologue because he wanted to give fans something to play. Yet I've always believed pressure from Konami played a big role, especially given how The Phantom Pain itself was noticeably unfinished (though still brilliant) when it launched, and Kojima's departure from Konami shortly after the game's release.

In any case, I've often wondered whether the two games would be spliced together at some point, especially since Konami renewed its interest in making games. And after a fashion, it has finally happened, though neither Konami nor Kojima were involved.

Once again, the modding community has rappelled from PC gaming's transport helicopter to execute this ambitious reunification mission. Created by modder RLC and uploaded to Nexus Mods by CapLagRobin (via GamesRadar), the simply titled "Ground Zeroes" mod for The Phantom Pain grafts the standalone prologue mission into the larger 2015 experience.

Getting Ground Zeroes to work in The Phantom Pain requires a bit of prep. You'll need to install Snakebite Mod Manager and the latest version of Infinite Heaven, which is a location & mission addon system. You'll also need to download the US Naval Prison Facility map. Oh, and you'll need to own both TPP and Ground Zeroes.

Once you've downloaded and installed the mod, it will add the Ground Zeroes mission to the mission list on the iDroid in the helicopter. The mission will also trigger automatically after players complete Episode 1 of The Phantom Pain, suggesting it acts more like a flashback than a prologue.

It somehow even includes fulton support in Ground Zeroes, which apparently was a nightmare to get working because GZ has ceiling collision issues that don't exist in MGSV: TPP. The mod comes with a full list of known issues but most (not all) are relatively minor things like shaders not working properly in cutscenes or missing audio, which hopefully over time we'll see a few fixes for.

This is, of course, a mod that includes an element of guesswork. We know that GZ was always supposed to be a part of MGSV: TPP, but Kojima's never spoken in-depth about exactly how it would have been implemented, and whether we would have played the existing prologue, flashbacked to GZ, and then returned to MGSV: TPP.

Amusingly enough this has some in the MGS community speculating about whether we can ever expect a mod with the fabled mission 51 for MGSV: TPP. This was mentioned briefly in some of the MGSV: TPP extras, and an unfinished cutscene exists, but nothing else that modders could use: mission 51 will always be the true phantom pain. The bigger question is that, now modders have shown how it's done, will Konami try anything interesting with the upcoming Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol. 2, which includes both games.

At today's DICE Summit, a gathering of industry veterans paid tribute to Call of Duty and Titanfall co-creator Vince Zampella, who died in December. Joining the likes of Todd Howard, Randy Pitchford and Ted Price was Hideo Kojima, who, according to Gamefile, sought advice from Zampella when founding his own studio Kojima Productions.

“He gave me a lot of support and advice,” Kojima said. “He showed me his studio, and I incorporated some of the good aspects into our own studio.”

Kojima also revealed that he had discussed the possibility of developing a Metal Gear Solid first-person shooter with Zampella, just before leaving Konami. Given the timing—Kojima left Konami in October 2015—it sounds like it would have been a Respawn first-person shooter. At the time, Respawn was working on Titanfall 2.

Separately, Geoff Keighley, who was also in attendance at the event, says Kojima had "many discussions" with Zampella about a first-person Metal Gear Solid game. It's hard to glean how advanced these discussions were, but if there was more than one discussion it was probably more than just a fun idea.

Of the few Metal Gear games made without Kojima's direct involvement, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is the most widely loved (though notably, it wasn't embraced at launch). It proved that the series could extend beyond Kojima's "tactical espionage action" focus, with Platinum Games turning in a blisteringly fast character-action game.

Metal Gear is still in the hands of Konami, and Kojima's now working on Physint and OD, so it's highly unlikely we'll ever see a first-person Metal Gear Solid game. Still, it's fun to imagine what it could have looked like.

Every now and then I forget that Death Stranding 2 isn't on PC, and by "every now and then" I mean every time I think about it. That's not a slight against Death Stranding 2, it's just kind of an unusual situation these days because, well, why isn't Death Stranding 2 on PC? As former Sony honcho Shuhei Yoshida said in 2025, releasing PlayStation games on PC is "almost like printing money."

Anyway, it looks like maybe, possibly, Death Stranding 2 might be headed our way soon. And not just because of the 'all things in their time' factor: Hideo Kojima may be subtly hinting at a looming release.

"Didn't have much time today for editing," Kojima posted on his English-language X account (via GamesRadar). The image is accompanied by a photo of a PC monitor displaying the words "A Hideo Kojima game," which admittedly could be anything—Kojima Productions is still working on OD, PhysInt, and an unnamed game being made in partnership with Niantic—but beneath that is a Death Stranding calendar for 2026.

Here's the full-size pic:

The timing is notable. The original Death Stranding launched on the PlayStation 4 in November 2019, and then came to PC in July 2020—an eight month stretch. Death Stranding 2 hit the PlayStation 5 in July 2025, eight months after which comes March 2026, which is now just a few weeks away.

There's also the fact that an age rating for a PC version of Death Stranding 2 popped its head up, briefly, on the ESRB website in November 2025. Whoops!

And, in case you'd forgotten (or just hadn't heard), a State of Play showcase is happening on February 12—this coming Thursday. That's a pretty solid opportunity to tell the world that one of your big exclusives is finally making the PC move, especially if it's coming as part of a (purely hypothetical at this stage) 'Director's Cut' release.

All of this is entirely speculative, but a good number of responses to the message seem quite confident that a PC announcement is assured—or are at least very hopeful it's incoming. Myself, I wouldn't go as far as to express any sort of certainty but I do think it's a pretty good bet. For the record, though, I don't think this has anything to do with Kojima's last-minute decision to pull out of his GDC keynote—it's not as if he woke up last Wednesday and decided, 'Time for the PC port!'

Anyway, we may or may not get the scoop at the upcoming State of Play, but it's likely enough to be worth watching just in case (plus there will probably be other cool things revealed too). It begins at 2 pm PT/5 pm ET, on YouTube and Twitch.

Hideo Kojima knows a thing or two about making videogames—he's made a few you may have heard of, like the Metal Gear series and the Death Stranding games. That's probably why he was set to headline this year's Game Developers Conference as its keynote speaker. But with GDC now just a month away, there's bad news for the conference and everyone hoping to hear what he had to say, because he's not going to be there.

Word of the last-minute withdrawal came from the Kojima Productions X account:

"We regret to inform you that Hideo Kojima will no longer be able to attend this year's GDC Festival of Gaming," the message says. "We understand that this will be disappointing for fans and attendees who were looking forward to hearing him speak, and we want to offer our deepest apologies. While Hideo Kojima is unable to attend in person, Kojima Productions is still excited to be part of this year's festival, with members of the team presenting during the week."

A reason for the sudden change in plan wasn't given, so my initial thought went to the recent GDC State of the Game Industry Report, which found that nearly one-third of non-US game developers have cancelled plans to travel to the country because of immigration and gender identity policies. The theory doesn't really hold up, though, because as the message states, other members of Kojima Productions will still be attending the conference.

There's been no further updates on the matter from Kojima Productions, and maybe more interestingly, GDC has reposted the studio's message but has otherwise not confirmed or commented on it. As I write this, the Kojima keynote page on the GDC website is also still up, perhaps suggesting that the conference was caught by surprise by the cancellation.

Whatever the reason, it's led to considerable speculation and concern online, and more than a few complaints about jump-scare reactions to the announcement's "we regret to inform you that Hideo Kojima..." intro.

It's also a blow for GDC. Kojima's planned address, 'Restarting from Zero: A Message to Creators Considering Independence,' sounds like it would be particularly relevant at a time of ongoing instability throughout the games industry. That was echoed by GDC president Nina Brown, who said Kojima's presence as keynote speaker "sets the perfect tone for what this new era is all about: fearless creativity, bold ideas, and elevating the entire game-making ecosystem. His journey embodies the spirit of reinvention that so many in the industry are navigating right now."

In a statement provided to PC Gamer, a GDC representative said it couldn't provide more details on Kojima's decision to withdraw from the showcase than his studio provided on X.

"We understand that this will be disappointing for fans and attendees who were looking forward to hearing him speak," the rep said. "While Hideo Kojima is unable to attend himself, Kojima Productions are still very much part of this year’s festival, with Ildar Vaveev’s talk presenting a complete overview of the technical process behind the creation of the 3D UI Voxel map for Death Stranding 2. Kojima Productions has offered their deepest apologies, and has wished everyone at the GDC Festival of Gaming a fantastic event."

I've reached out to Kojima Productions and will update if I receive a reply.

Hideo Kojima, being a man obsessed with movies, has a bit of an eye for aesthetics. From the lush greens of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater to the smattering of golds, blues and black in Death Stranding, he has spent decades working on games that stand out from the first screenshot. It's no surprise then that Asus' most recent collaboration with the creator looks pretty snazzy.

Announced at CES 2026, Asus' collab with Kojima Productions includes custom colourways for the ROG Delta II gaming headset, Keris II gaming mouse, Scabbard II mouse mat, a custom carry case, and finally the ROG Flow Z13.

This collaboration is a very white and gold affair, with iconography largely left to Kojima Productions' iconic Ludens character. Designed by long-term Kojima collaborator and Kojima Productions lead artist Yoji Shinkawa, Ludens is somewhat of a high-tech knight figure and effectively the mascot for the company. Shinkawa says, "I wanted to create a gadget that belongs to Ludens", and he says the tech "has its essence."

The only real letdown for me here is the presence of the ROG Flow Z13. We tested the laptop/tablet hybrid early last year, and its beefy Ryzen AI Max is underpowered for such an expensive gaming device. Though its CPU chops certainly rock, the GPU lets it down at its price point. It's not as convenient as a handheld gaming PC and not as powerful as a comparable gaming laptop.

In fairness, the Flow Z13 is a powerful productivity tablet, and one that could serve well for a developer, but Kojima Productions is a video game company, and there are much better ways to play its games than on the Flow Z13.

The Kojima Productions collaboration comes with a neat Death Stranding delivery-style carry case, and the gold on the back certainly makes it look luxurious, but I would have much preferred if a ROG Zephyrus, Strix G16, or even a ROG Ally donned this collab's colours. With how lavish it is, even an Ally X could be better served wrapped in gold and white.

Asus have even gone for a fun tagline mashup here, mixing Kojima Productions' "From sapiens to Ludens" with Asus' "For those who dare", making "for Ludens who dare". This phrase is present on every bit of tech in the collaboration, lining the top of the headphones, side of the mouse, edge of the Flow Z13, bottom of the carry case, and the centre of the mouse mat.

We don't yet have a release date or price for any of this gear, though it's expected to launch in Q1 (according to Polygon). The Z Flow 13 is arguably the highlight, and the standard AI Max 390 version retails for $2,000, so it'll likely cost you many pretty pennies to get Ludens on your gear. Well, that's if you're against the idea of using a couple of tactical stickers and a bit of gold paint.

Hideo Kojima has done a new interview with Wired Tokyo, as part of a series where participants answer quickfire questions submitted by the public. There's a fair amount of familiar ground trodden, including some gushing over his favourite film directors, but one slightly unexpected answer came when Kojima was asked what game he's played the most.

"Super Mario Bros., definitely," answers Kojima without missing a beat. The 1985 masterpiece probably doesn't seem like the most obvious source of inspiration for a creator known for cinematic excess and overarching narrative ambition but, as Kojima goes on to point out, it's one hell of a good game.

"Played it for a year. I was a college student. I skipped school to play at home," laughs Kojima. "Without Super Mario, I probably wouldn't have been in this industry. Yeah. I can't really play it now, though. It's a side-scrolling action game. Mario just goes left to right. Basically just jumping. But there's a dash button, use that and the jump subtly changes the trajectory to attack or dodge."

That's exactly what set Super Mario Bros. apart from other platformers of the time, the balance and subtlety in speed and how that would affect your jumps. It's a game that still feels good to play now thanks to how much Nintendo wrings out of those two buttons.

"It had almost no story," continues Kojima, "but it felt like you were on an adventure. When I saw that, although it was pixel art with no story, I felt this medium would one day surpass movies. It was the catalyst that brought me to the game industry."

Super Mario Bros. is hardly alone for the era in being narrative-light, but what Nintendo did was craft an amazing and varied visual world filled with surprising elements, incorporating influences from Japanese folklore to Alice in Wonderland: Why do you think he gets bigger when he eats a mushroom? The Mushroom Kingdom was just background in a way, sure, but it felt like a world and, as Kojima says, an escalating adventure through one.

Elsewhere in the interview, Kojima is asked about his predictions around technology in MGS2. He says the game "is often mistaken for a story about AI, but it's about digital society… It wasn't about AI, but interweaving digital data gaining a will of its own. That was the story. So, well…. 24 years have passed. It has become somewhat of a reality. I didn't predict it, but rather a future I didn't desire, but unfortunately we're heading there."

Hideo Kojima has chosen to cap-off 2025 by doing an interview with Wired, as part of the publication's Tech Support series: where the great and the good answer quickfire questions submitted by the public. Much of it is stuff that any seasoned Kojima-liker will be familiar with, such as praising 2001: A Space Odyssey to the heavens, though it is nice to see his love for the original Super Mario Bros. remains so pure.

One question put to Kojima (timestamp) relates to Metal Gear Solid 2, saying that AI control in the world is "becoming a reality" and asking whether Kojima predicted this era. To sum up in a sentence, and obviously spoilers ahead, MGS2 takes a very weird turn in its second half, with 'reality' collapsing around the protagonist Raiden as the player sits through a series of monologues about digital control, junk data, and our inability to parse the bewildering amounts of information created by the modern world. And that's simplifying things.

"MGS2 is often mistaken for a story about AI, but it's about digital society," says Kojima. "MGS1 was about DNA. What isn't left in DNA are memes. That's when I thought about the shift from analog to digital."

Kojima is here referencing memes as defined by the biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, a book that's a massive influence on early MGS, rather than specifically internet memes. The concept is an idea or behavior that spreads by imitation from person to person, and indeed also has this aspect of virality to it: something almost self-propagating and alive.

"In digital, everything remains," continues Kojima. "Like social media today. Even graffiti remains without deteriorating. The internet connects everything. And opinions are exchanged directly everywhere. MGS2 explored what human life would become then.

"It wasn't about AI, but interweaving digital data gaining a will of its own. That was the story. So, well…. 24 years have passed. It has become somewhat of a reality. I didn't predict it, but rather a future I didn't desire, but unfortunately we're heading there."

Unusually for him, I almost think Kojima's being a little modest here. MGS2 doesn't predict AI in quite the sense that the question suggests, but many of MGS2's big themes are in-step with issues we face around AI: aspects of social control, of how information is curated and presented, of how it is accessed or otherwise.

MGS2 didn't predict AI churning out Disney slop and resurrecting beloved performers in zombie routines, but it did recognise that big data would be a big problem for social cohesion and in particular focused on the idea of misinformation. We've all seen that in action. Kojima's observation that "even graffiti remains" has a lot underlying it.

It's been a busy old year for Hideo Kojima and Kojima Productions, with the release of Death Stranding 2 earlier this year (the inevitable PC version is yet to be given a release date), two film adaptations of the series—one live action, one animated—in the works, as well as an anime being cooked up at Disney+. Oh yeah, there's also the three other games the company has in development: horror title OD, espionage game PhysInt, and an untitled collaboration with Niantic (of Pokemon GO fame).

Kojima's been doing a round of interviews to see out the year, and the latest with the Japanese outlet Ananweb sees him reflecting on all of these game projects. As ever, Kojima says he doesn't think of Death Stranding 2 as "finished" because "I actually wanted to continue until around September."

Kojima says that the studio's games "have to be unique and sell to a certain extent. This is difficult. Our previous game, Death Stranding, was too unique, so we had to carefully adjust the balance to broaden the audience for this one." The example he gives is a snowy mountain that's twice as high as anything in the previous game:

"When we gathered monitors and played it for the first time, everyone fell from the top of the mountain to the bottom. Once you fall, you just keep rolling, so most people were angry," laughs Kojima. "When I checked it out, it felt like you had to go and stop over and over again, like taking three steps and taking a 10-second break, before finally climbing up. To me, this was the best, but I realized it just wasn't good enough. We should have made a separate mode for that, but in the end, I'm glad that many people enjoyed it."

Kojima Productions held a 10th anniversary celebration on September 23, during which the studio offered some updates on its other projects. The man himself is in his favourite mode: teasing away with promises and hints.

As regards OD, on which Kojima Productions is collaborating with Microsoft, Kojima says "you might think it's a standard horror game, but it's something completely different. I can't say what it is yet, and I don't know if it will work. We've made games that haven't been done before, like games where you can't be found or games where you have to make deliveries, but the system is the same as other games… There are lots of hints hidden in the trailer, so if you think about it long enough you might figure it out."

That may sound like something different, but not so with PhysInt. "Because it's an espionage game, you can make it in your sleep," laughs Kojima. "For example, there's a soldier who infiltrates, and when he's discovered by the enemy he's attacked, and when he takes them out one by one he uses sneaking... No matter how it plays out, it's fun and easy to make."

Kojima says PhysInt will have "new gimmicks" and pursue one of his pet obsessions, crossing "the line between film and game." Most interestingly, "we're thinking of working with filmmakers not only in terms of cast but also staff, but we wonder how it will turn out. Times are changing so quickly these days that the social structures and themes I'm trying to depict in the game may soon become a reality."

Quite: we live in a world after all where you can buy a Death Stranding exoskeleton. Kojima ends with a brief fantasy about "a life where I make the best-selling product, earn money, and then go back to work after a long time and ask, 'How's everyone doing?'" That does make him sound a little like the Fonz, but Kojima's point is "it's not my job to make the best-selling product, and I don't know what to do when I'm at home with nothing to do." Still, we needn't worry about him retiring anytime soon: "I want to keep working with my hands forever."

Hideo Kojima has a new side-hustle: voice acting. Weary of finding new ways to put Norman Reedus in videogames, the Metal Gear and Death Stranding creator is trying life on the other side of the (sort of) camera. He will be a large mole, which is also a name that could be in Metal Gear.

No, really. Per Mantanweb (translated by Automaton), Kojima will serve as the voice of Officer Paul Moledebrandt, the finest and presumably most visually disadvantaged member of the cop shop in the Japanese dub of Zootopia 2. Sure. Why not?

Kojima did not, it seems, have to audition for the role, but was actually asked directly by Disney Animation Studios suit Jared Bush, CCO at the House of Mouse's animation arm. Why? Incredible question. Kojima doesn't say, but I like to hope Bush is just a massive Death Stranding stan.

"I’ve had many cameo appearances in live-action films and games, but this is my first experience dubbing for an animated theatrical film. And it’s from Disney, of all places!" said Kojima. "What’s more, it’s the sequel to my favourite film, Zootopia! On top of that, I received an offer directly from director Jared Bush, so I was extremely honoured and accepted without hesitation."

Putting aside for one second that I do not remotely believe Zootopia is Hideo Kojima's favourite film—though he does call it "the pinnacle of Disney's filmmaking", so what do I know?— he sure does seem genuinely chuffed about being in the sequel.

Anyway, Zootopia 2's Japanese version hits theatres a few days from now, on December 5. "Since I’m usually on the directing side, actually experiencing acting myself taught me a lot." You heard it here first: cop-moles a dead cert for Physint and/or OD.

Udo Kier—the impossibly prolific German actor that you and I will readily recognise as Yuri from Red Alert 2, Command and Conquer: Yuri's Revenge, and Hideo Kojima's upcoming OD—has died aged 81. His partner, Delbert McBride, confirmed the news to Variety.

Kier appeared in over 200 films in the course of a long and remarkable career, and was perhaps best-known for his partnerships with Andy Warhol, Lars von Trier, and Werner Herzog. Though he also found time to appear in music videos for Madonna, Gwen Stefani, Korn, and others.

So a varied career doesn't even begin to describe Kier's time on screens big and small, but to me he will always, first and foremost, be the utterly magnificent/absurd Yuri from Red Alert 2 and Yuri's Revenge—a Transylvanian psychic who usurped control of the Soviet Union and launched an invasion of the United States, ultimately being defeated in Antarctica and imprisoned in a Psychic Isolation Chamber. Kier's unhinged performance helped define the games and is a big reason they continue to loom so large in the minds of fans.

Kier was also slated to appear in Hideo Kojima's upcoming OD, appearing in the game's first reveal trailer in 2023. It's unclear how much of this work he was able to complete before he died. On X, Kojima posted a tribute to Kier, writing that "When we met in Milan at the end of September, he told me how much he was looking forward to the shoot starting up again next year.

"He was full of energy then too, making me laugh with his usual 'Udo-isms.' I still can’t believe this. Udo wasn’t just an actor. He was truly an 'icon' of his time. We’ve lost a great 'icon.' There will never be another like him. Udo, rest in peace. I will never forget you."

"I'm very happy that so many people like the game," Kier said in an interview around Red Alert 2. "And if you really want to see me back, you have the address on the box. Just write to Westwood and say, 'We cannot get enough! Make another game with him!' And I'll be back… I'm trying to surprise you next time, to do something different, maybe more evil, maybe more irritating. But I still love you."

I was going to say that 2019's Death Stranding is a singular experience, but I guess these days that's no longer true. The game's sequel was released on PS5 earlier this year, with the inevitable PC version yet to be given a release date, while two film adaptations—one live action, one animated—are in the works. Now Hideo Kojima has announced yet another Death Stranding tie-in is being developed for Disney+, and this time it's an anime.

Death Stranding Isolations is the working title for the anime, which is due on Disney+ in 2027. Side note: every time the name is mentioned the press release puts "(Working Title)" after it, so I hope it's clear this is a working title. Hideo Kojima will act as executive producer on the series while Takayuki Sano, who has a list of anime credits longer than Kojima's Hollywood phonebook, is on directorial duties. The lovely art that accompanied the announcement is by Ilya Kuvshinov (Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045).

The anime tells a distinct story within the universe, following a young man and woman on adventure and told through a "traditional, hand-drawn 2D animation style" by "some of Japan’s top animation talent at E&H production".

There's also a story synopsis with an incredible opening:

"Lonesome souls of the dead manifest in the physical world, reaching in search of the living. However, the connection they create triggers a massive explosion that eradicates anything of this world—a phenomenon referred to as the Death Stranding. These events wipe out nations as well as civilization itself. People who remain are now isolated, withdrawn, and without connections. As humanity stands at the brink a legendary porter set out to transport both cargo and wishes of its senders, reconnecting people in the hope that they might still be saved."

The synopsis goes on to make clear that this is happening somewhere else in North America while Sam Porter Bridges is trudging around, and offers up some meaningless verbiage about a story told with "a bold and yet subtle touch". After alluding to some of the characters involved the teaser ends: "And now, comes another explosion…"

I do find Hideo Kojima's relentless franchise-ing quite amusing (earlier this week I wrote about another of his schemes: a freaking Death Stranding exoskeleton), but you have to wonder just how much appetite there is for three separate adaptations of a game that features characters called Die Hardman. I think Death Stranding is an absolutely brilliant game, but it's also one that works because of the vibes rather than the (often ludicrous) story beats and overarching narrative. Perhaps both movies and the anime will turn out to be excellent. But I won't be Holding My Breathman.

Finding hills a bit tougher in middle age? No longer bounding up those mountains like you used to? Well folks, Hideo Kojima has done it again! The latest collaboration from Kojima Productions is, unsurprisingly, a world first: a freaking exoskeleton modelled after Sam Porter Bridges' Death Stranding 2: On the Beach outfit.

Exoskeleton maker Dnsys is the partner in this enterprise and worked with Kojima Productions art director Yoji Shinkawa on the design. The exoskeleton is based on an existing Dnsys model but altered to fit the Death Stranding aesthetic, with things like lights that show the battery level dotted on the frame.

"We designed this exoskeleton with the same passion and precision as if it were built for the world of Death Stranding," says Shinkawa. "Every detail was refined to bring the game’s futuristic vision into reality, creating something Sam himself might wear. Wearing it feels as if the world of Death Stranding has come to life, where imagination and reality finally connect."

Then we get to the claims of what this thing does. Forget about your useless old bones because this baby offloads up to 200% of the wearer's body weight from the knees. Erm… 200%? Don't think too hard about the figures because we've got "intelligent gait control" for your clumsy ass, which will improve balance and stop you falling over halfway up Everest.

Obviously exoskeletons have genuine use cases, and for some people can be a transformational quality of life tool. But let's be real here, this one is an expensive cosplay gimmick.

And we're not done with the boosts! Buy this and you'll instantly gain 15.5 miles more hiking range, and 9.3 miles more vertical range. You'll also feel up to 44 pounds lighter during vertical movements. Now let's talk about, and I quote, LEG ENHANCEMENT. 50% more power in your steps!

Well, I hope we're all feeling suitably bad about our brittle bones and flabby flesh. The exoskeleton has four hours of battery life and a quick-swap battery system, so presumably you could wear it all day and go around, I dunno, delivering shopping to old ladies or something. Death Stranding 3: The Uber Eats Years.

If you too want to "experience game-like mobility in real life" then the Death Stranding exoskeleton goes on-sale on December 2. The price is yet to be announced but the regular dual-leg Dnsys Z1 system that this is based on costs $1,500, so expect to pay a few hundred more in Kojima tax.

In a recent interview with Time Extension former Konami executive Christopher Bergstresser revealed that, way back in 1999, the company was approached by the Wachowskis with an offer to make a Matrix videogame. The Matrix was released in June 1999 and had quickly become a smash hit, with this meeting apparently taking place in the runup to the film's theatrical release in Japan in September 1999.

"The Wachowskis were big fans of Kojima," said Bergstresser. "So Kazumi Kitaue, Kojima, Aki Saito (who still works with Kojima), and I were at the Konami HQ, and we got a call from the Wachowskis, who wanted to come in and meet with Kojima. So they did!

"The two of them came in with their visual effects guy, and effectively they said to Kojima, 'We really want you to do the Matrix game. Can you do that?' Aki translated this into Japanese for Mr. Kitaue, and Kitaue just looked at them and told them plainly, 'No.' We did still get to enjoy the Matrix Japanese premiere and afterparty, though."

This came as news to Hideo Kojima despite his supposed presence in the room at the time. He recalls meeting the Wachowskis on multiple occasions, but was never aware such an offer was made. Kojima's own recollection of events varies slightly from that of Bergstresser, which is perhaps to be expected after nearly three decades.

"I was surprised to see on social media that the Wachowski sisters had 'offered me a Matrix game project!' back in 1999," said Kojima on X. "In all these 26 years, no one ever told me such a conversation had taken place. At the time, we were mutual fans and exchanged emails. The Matrix hadn’t been released in Japan yet, but I had already seen it in theaters in the U.S. and at a preview screening.

"When the Wachowskis came to Japan for promotion, I believe I met them three times. In the morning, we had a Famitsu interview in Shinjuku—that time, Geof Darrow joined us for the talk session. In the afternoon, they were invited to the headquarters of Konami’s CS Division. Back then, I was Vice President of KCE JAPAN, a wholly-owned subsidiary. When I arrived at the headquarters, their meeting with Mr. Kitaue, the head of the CS Division, had just ended.

"I joined them afterward, and we chatted for about an hour without an interpreter (Aki wasn’t even there). I think John Gaeta, the visual effects supervisor, was also present. That evening, I attended the premiere screening and party, where I also met Joel Silver. Even then, there was no mention of an offer."

Per Bergstresser, the Konami higher-up (Kitaue) turned down the offer because Kojima was roughly a year into development on Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, an enormous project in its own right. Kojima himself acknowledges this would have made things difficult, but you can tell he's still a little irked he never even knew about it.

"At that time, I was already extremely busy with MGS2 and probably couldn’t have accepted the offer right away," says Kojima. "But if someone had told me, maybe there could’ve been a way to make it work."

The meeting in fact turns up in Kojima's development diary for MGS2: on August 25th 1999 Kojima notes meeting the Wachowskis and Geof Darrow in Shinjuku, around The Matrix's Japanese premiere.

What's perhaps most intriguing about this scenario is the Wachowskis' ambitions for Matrix tie-in games, which they wanted to be a legitimate part of the cinematic world they were building. The license would eventually go to Shiny Entertainment, which first produced Enter the Matrix (2003), designed to intertwine with The Matrix Reloaded at key plot points, before the (much better) Path of Neo in 2005, which was built around retelling some of the setpiece battles and offered a wild alternative ending with a city-sized Agent Smith.

Given Kojima's obvious love for the series, which definitely influences elements of later Metal Gears, and his general cinematic obsession… well, it would've been interesting to see what he and Konami could've done with it. Sadly Konami chose the blue pill on his behalf, so we'll never find out how deep this rabbit hole could've gone.

Hideo Kojima has written an essay for the Japanese magazine An-An (spotted by Automaton) on one of his favourite topics: the 1970 World Expo held in Osaka, Japan. Kojima has often touched on this event in his writings, and the impact that his repeated visits had on his young mind. This time around, he's even crediting it with inspiring Metal Gear and Death Stranding.

Expo '70 was organised around the theme of "Progress and Harmony for Mankind", and featured participation from 76 countries and 32 organisations. It had a theme song, Haruo Minami’s 'Sekai no kuni kara konnichiwa' (Hello from all over the world), which Kojima is a little obsessive about: the song repeats the "hello" refrain many times as well as talking about humanity "holding hands" across borders. It's actually a bit of a bop.

"When the Expo opened, I had just finished elementary school," writes Kojima. "I was able to visit the site many times. I went there dozens of times [...] At the Soviet Pavilion, I waited in line for over two hours, with a line stretching around the perimeter. Unfortunately, the American Pavilion, where I was hoping to see the 'moon rock', was too crowded, and I missed it."

Remember that moon rock, because we'll be returning to it at the end. Kojima remembers borrowing his dad's new automatic camera and taking loads of photos, as well as the commemorative badges that were handed out in each pavilion ("children collected them and showed them off to each other").

"I experienced the 'harmony between the future and the world' up-close at the Expo," writes Kojima, and recalls meeting famous artists, writers, designers, and saying hello and shaking hands. "Technology, science, design, fashion, history, the world, culture, and society. It's safe to say that those 'hellos' shaped who I am. Shaking hands with the Expo changed my life and my vision of the future. In my life, 1970 marked the boundary between BC and AD."

Kojima says the point isn't just that the Expo blew him away with cutting edge technology and future visions, but "showed me the diversity of countries, ethnicities, races, religions, customs, and histories from around the world… Without that Expo, my future-oriented approach and globalism would never have developed. Neither 'Metal Gear' nor 'Death Stranding' would have been created."

It's not hard to see the influence: both series feature characters from all over the world, focus heavily on the intersections between geopolitics and technology, and wrestle with various notions of what the future could or might look like. Metal Gear Solid V's entire subtext is about the dangers of cultural homogenisation (no laughing at the back), while more recently Death Stranding 2 sees Kojima return to his pet theme that the internet might be terrible for us, actually. And almost every game Kojima has made has some sort of legacy theme, and musings about the kind of world we want our children to see.

Kojima is writing about Expo '70 because recently he attended Expo 2025, a follow-up of sorts that even has a theme song paying tribute to the original theme song: hilariously, Kojima notes that the 1970 song repeats "hello" 35 times, but in the new song "'hello' is only repeated eight times."

Perhaps this contributed to a "strange feeling" about the whole thing. "I wanted to see for myself how 'globalism' and 'visions of the future' have changed over the past 55 years, and how the baton will be passed on," writes Kojima. "[But] I didn't get that sense of a tremendous future like I did as a child. It wasn't thrilling or exciting. Just a ceaseless, predictable tomorrow stretching on and on.

"It wasn't that there was no 'future'—rather that I couldn't ascertain the next 'tomorrow' for myself. The 'future' I dreamed of at that Expo—I've already experienced most of it. Robots, videophones and moving walkways have become commonplace. The tomorrow that this Expo promotes is one that children will witness."

Kojima says this is why Expos are really for children, and with his recent streak of fatalism notes that the real future is "something old people can never know."

Then he has a little bit of a swipe at the organising committee, and what he clearly sees as a lack of ambition. Apparently a "large number" of them came to see him six years ago to solicit ideas for Expo 2025. "Their pitch, including the idea that transportation to the venue would be via the existing subway, seemed to lack a sense of the Expo or a sense of the future in every respect," says Kojima.

"It wasn't just the exhibits, but even the means of transportation and waiting lines that needed to evoke the 'coming 22nd century.' I offered a variety of ideas and insights, as well as proposals from a creator of the gaming generation, but the young bureaucrats, who had no experience of that Expo, simply smiled wryly and said, 'We don't have the money.' I haven't had any contact with them since."

Things you never say to Hideo Kojima: "we don't have the money." But there's something weirdly affecting about how Kojima is grappling with his mortality here, and coming to terms with his changing perceptions. Even his grumbles about the young bureaucrats seems to unknowingly fit that motif: Kojima is getting old.

However, I believe I've ascertained the real source of his disappointment. Remember the moon rock? At Expo '70 this was a rock that the Apollo 12 astronauts had brought back from the moon. At Expo 2025, our man wanted to right this wrong.

"I was never able to see the 'moon rock' brought back by Apollo 12," writes Kojima. "That was a regret. Now, after 55 years, I was getting my revenge. I was finally going to come face-to-face with that rock!"

Alas!

"In my excited state, a kind staff member at the American Pavilion whispered to me, 'This is not the rock exhibited at the previous Expo, but a different rock brought back by Apollo 17.' There was no doubt that it was a moon rock, but my revenge was not to be had."

I have only one principle, and it's this: never skip a cutscene on a first playthrough. It's served me well my whole life except for that four hours at the end of Death Stranding, and I'll keep to it until I die.

But maybe I've been missing out, because it turns out that if you determinedly skip through the cutscenes in Baby Steps—Bennett Foddy, Gabe Cuzzillo, and Maxi Boch's putting-one-foot-in-front-of-another simulator—you unlock an entire, brilliant bonus cutscene. Or punishment cutscene, depending on how you feel about the whole thing.

As showcased by YouTuber Cuttyflame, successfully skipping "around 30" or so of the game's cutscenes—harder than it sounds: skipping cutscenes requires passing an ever-more-complex series of minigames—will eventually lead protagonist Nate to straightforwardly give up on trying to act out cutscenes towards the game's end.

Rather than, you know, do a proper cutscene, Nate and chill donkey-guy Moose will acknowledge the player's lack of interest in their narrative, sit down, drop character, and embark on a cutscene that puts even Kojima to shame.

What proceeds is effectively a 28-minute podcast between Nate actor Gabe Cuzzillo and Moose actor Bennett Foddy, in which the pair discuss everything from The Joker, to Foddy's Game of Thrones rewatch, to the proper definition of a broccoli rabe while chatting about how the player will almost certainly just skip this cutscene too. As the pair note, quite a lot of work goes into making these scenes, you know, and here you are just barrelling through them. How rude.

It's a genuinely brilliant gag and, also, kind of a funny listen, too. I would subscribe for several more episodes of the Cuzzillo/Foddy podcast, if only to find out what the pair ended up getting for lunch.

An event called Beyond the Strand celebrated the 10th anniversary of Kojima Productions, and has served up new looks at various Kojima projects, including… a credit card?

The livestream chat was immediately inundated by two words: "debt stranding." The card will be issued by Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, the same bank that gave Kojima a loan when he was founding the company, and launch in late 2026 in Japan only. Yep: back to the glory days of region locking we go!

The announcement didn't come with a look at the card, but there is a promise that it will somehow unlock unique experiences as well as pay for your shopping. Users will collect points that can be redeemed for Kojima Productions items, which will presumably include in-game items and merchandise.

Kojima didn't have much else to say about the card, but then what is there to say about a credit card? Even a Hideo Kojima credit card, with a low, low APR set by Hideo Kojima?

Oh yeah, a kojima productions credit card, of course. Makes sense. What.

— @papapishu.bsky.social (@papapishu.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-09-23T16:02:32.555Z

"In order to spend money with your Kojima Productions Credit Card™ you'll have to use it three different times," jokes Lunatious on resetera. "First, when the card is at room temperature. Second, when the card is at freezing temperature. Third, when the card is at a hot temperature. Only then will you complete the transaction."

The upcoming horror game OD got three minutes of in-game footage, and looks an awful lot like a do-over of the Kojima-directed P.T. (with more candles). PhysInt also got a poster and an early cast list, and unsurprisingly seems very Metal Gear-coded. Finally, Kojima's announced yet another game, or excuse me, "new experience", being created in partnership with Pokemon Go developer Niantic.

Job hunting is miserable. In fact, perhaps the only thing keeping the motor of modern capitalism chugging is that it's marginally more miserable than working, and even games industry paragons have had to undergo the humiliating ritual of sifting through stacks of rejection letters from jobs they didn't really want in the first place. Like Hideo Kojima, for instance.

Kojima discussed his experience as a young upstart on the job market for An-an Web back in February, but the essay was just recently picked up and translated by the folks at Automaton. In it, the Metal Gear and Death Stranding creator says we all just narrowly avoided a world in which 'Hideo Kojima' was some guy no one knows working away quietly and tediously at a pharmaceutical company, and it's all thanks to the advice of a single HR person.

In the '80s, Kojima had an unemployable humanities degree (haha, um, imagine) from what he calls a "second-rate" university. His dream, unsurprisingly, was some sort of creative work, perhaps going to art school, but the death of his father when he was 13 years old pretty much put the kibosh on that. So in a very familiar turn of events, Kojima began applying to jobs he may not even really have wanted.

"My job hunting made me feel like I was a Showa-era detective trying to solve a murder case," writes Kojima, in the most Hideo Kojima way of describing this phase of his life possible. "Endless phone calls, mails, roaming around until the soles on my shoes wore down."

Relatable! Except these days we go through fewer shoes and more website forms that make you upload your CV and then fill in all the details from that exact CV on subsequent pages. Kojima hated it, of course, and hated it all the more because he felt like both he and all his interviewers were just trapped in a big game of lying. "Everybody was hiding their true selves; we could only act like chameleons trying to change our colors to adapt to each of the companies we were applying for. Those days of playing pretend felt far detached from job hunting one would do to chase their dreams."

But after chipping away for so long, Kojima finally got an offer… from a pharmaceutical company. Rather than graciously accept it, our Hideo sort of, well, snapped. He let it all out to the HR director who sent him the offer, telling them that he actually wanted to work in a more creative field. That director—possibly just trying to get a slightly emotional man out of their office—sympathised: "The HR director encouraged me: 'Kojima, I feel like you're more fit for a creative job—so go for it.'"

Apparently, that did it for Kojima, and rather than take the pharma gig, he promptly narrowed his job search to focus on industries he actually wanted to work in. "I didn't have to lie anymore. I talked honestly about the novels I wrote, about what I had created." As you almost certainly don't need me to tell you, he ended up at Konami.

"Two years after becoming a working adult," reflects Kojima, "I became the one sitting at the interviewer's desk, listening to the students' lies. By the way, those who conduct interviews also lie—they're representing the company, not their personal alignment. A place where lies meet lies, that's what interviews actually are."

Unless, of course, you're interviewing at Kojima Productions. "I'm not somebody who lies," says Kojima. "And it's not because I'm the representative of my company. I sincerely face each of the students who come to me. I even give advice to those who aren't suited for the job. Just like that HR director who changed my life, whose name I've already forgotten."

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: No game that actually exists can ever measure up to the games that got killed before they were released. Prey 2? Fallout Van Buren? Neither came out, so they get to exist in the realm of imagination forever, perfect and beautiful.

The most recent king of the genre is, I reckon, PT—Hideo Kojima's playable teaser (get it?) for the now-cancelled Silent Hills, made in collaboration with Guillermo del Toro. Konami has effectively obliterated all trace of the game from existence, but that doesn't mean people don't reflect wistfully on what could have been.

People like, for instance, Bayonetta director Hideki Kamiya (via IGN), who recently returned to one of his year-old threads on X to throw down the gauntlet over the game (kind of, in a very polite interpretation of throwing down a gauntlet). Per IGN's translation of the original Japanese, Kamiya wrote, "If it’s impossible to resurrect PT, Kojima should make a new game in the same style… If Kojima doesn't do it, maybe I'll give it a go."

A Kamiya-helmed PT sounds, well, kind of baffling. But baffling in a way I wouldn't mind seeing. It would also be very different from Kojima's effort: "I hate horror though, so it wouldn’t be horror… plus, I have no ideas." Sounds like a winner. Someone cut this man a cheque.

Kamiya's a well-documented PT fanatic, despite his professed dislike of horror. Indeed, the thread he returned to in order to make the challenge above was one in which he wrote that The Exit 8 ought to be regarded as a kind of "PT-like," but that PT's damnatio memoriae meant modern players didn't quite make the connection.

"That’s how innovative PT was," wrote Kamiya (translation by Automaton), "completely unique and without precedent, not to mention hugely influential on the developers who followed." Who knows? Perhaps the upcoming Kojima-led horror game OD will fill the PT-shaped void in our lives and cultural memory?

Great news: Hideo Kojima already knows just what he wants Death Stranding 3 to be. Bad news: some other poor sod is gonna have to make it, because Kojima's very busy converting Willem Dafoe into an Ogg Vorbis file or whatever it is he does these days.

Kojima let slip the news (via GamesRadar) at a recent Death Stranding 2 event in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (about which more later). "Well, I'm not planning to do [Death Stranding 3] at the moment," he said via translator, "Because the ending of Death Stranding 2 was my finale of 1 and 2. But I already wrote the concept of Death Stranding 3."

Promising stuff for anyone yearning to become a post-apocalyptic postman once again, but it's here that Kojima delivers the follow-up blow. "I hope that someone will create it for me," he added.

It makes sense that he's not super-keen on getting right back into Death Stranding. Between DS1 and 2, Kojima's been working on that series for the best part of a decade at this point, and it's understandable that he might want to focus on something different for a while, like Physint or OD, neither of which we know much about.

Plus, he's been chatting a lot recently about feeling his age, even going so far as to mention he has a USB stick filled with ideas, "kind of like a will," for people to turn to after he's translated into glory. If the now-62-year-old dev is feeling the years catch up with him, it's just one more reason to try out new stuff rather than sticking to the same-old, same-old.

So I can't say I'm hugely disappointed to hear that KojiPro won't be immediately getting to work on DS3, even as someone who very much enjoyed the thrill-a-minute delivery action of the first game and is eagerly awaiting the second's PC version. I am a little more iffy, though, on Kojima's choice of venue to drop this bombshell.

Saudi Arabia has long been criticised for using sporting events—including videogames and esports events—to 'sportswash' its international reputation. In other words, to get people thinking more about Saudi Arabia as a hip, modern destination for sports and games and less about stuff like the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

I struggle to imagine Kojima, never one to shy away from politics in his games, is unaware of that, and the choice not only to include Riyadh as a stop on the Death Stranding 2 world tour, but to put in an appearance at the Esports World Cup that was happening concurrently, leaves me feeling more than a little grossed out. Perhaps a side-effect of getting older, on top of a desire to branch out into new things, is that the lure of all that Saudi wealth becomes harder and harder to resist.

Konami sure is an odd company. On the one hand, it seems almost desperate to assure Metal Gear fans that—no, really—it has nothing but love and worship for the Metal Gears of old, and that it can be trusted to steward the series into the future. On the other, it's pathologically averse to ever saying the name of series creator Hideo Kojima, to the extent that it put out a whole Metal Gear retrospective without uttering his name even once. It's like the entire corporation is undergoing some weird form of de-Stalinisation.

But while the suits seem loath to say Kojima's name, the same can't be said for Noriaki Okamura and Yuji Korekado, lead devs on Metal Gear Solid Delta. In a recent chat with Inverse (via GamesRadar), the pair were only too happy to chat about Kojima, saying they'd love it if ol' Hideo set aside some time to try their remake of MGS 3.

"We are not sure what he would want to do, but we want to deliver this game whilst being very respectful of all the people that we previously worked with," said Okamura. "We would love for [Kojima] to see it too."

Which might be a problem, since in another recent interview Kojima was asked directly if he had any plans to try out the remake of the game some consider (it's me, I'm some) the best game he ever helmed. He was pretty direct: "No, I won't." Then he got a bit sidetracked talking about all the ways he knows to kill people. It was a weird interview.

Honestly? I find it all a little sad. Both Okamura and Korekado worked with Kojima on Metal Gears of yore back in the day, and I have to imagine it would mean a lot to get the big man's stamp of approval on their work—especially given how much Delta feels like their pitch to Metal Gear fans that they can be trusted to handle the series. Alas, Kojima's moved on to hanging out with Norman Reedus, and seems keen to leave the past in the past.

It's a strange one. We rather liked nu-MGS, scoring it 87% in our Metal Gear Solid Delta review, but I think Konami is going to have to get out from under Kojima's shadow sharpish if it really wants to prove itself with the Metal Gear series.

It's one thing to show you can preserve what makes the series so beloved in an exhaustively faithful UE5 remake, but to really prove itself, it's gonna need to take a big swing or two and have them pay off, whether they happen in a brand-new game or another remake. That'll be the real test of Okamura and Korekado. And no, I doubt Kojima will play that either.

We're a couple years into Konami remembering it owns this weird licence the kids are calling 'Metal Gear Solid'. It kicked off with the release (and subsequent repair) of the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol 1, and it continues in a matter of days with the release of Metal Gear Solid Delta—Konami's glitzy UE5-ification of 2004's Metal Gear Solid 3.

But what about new Metal Gear? Might Konami ever again—after the much-maligned Metal Gear Survive—try its hand at a brand-new Metal Gear without the stewardship of Hideo Kojima? And could it ever be as good as it was back in the day?

I suspect the answer to the first of those questions depends on how people take to projects like Delta, but as for the second, I put it to Snake actor David Hayter when he sat down to chat with PC Gamer, asking if it was possible for a truly great Metal Gear to be made without Kojima's guiding hand. His answer? Well, kinda.

"I think it's absolutely possible," said Hayter. "Will it be the same? No." Per Hayter, "There's no way to replicate his exact genius, his exact weirdness, his specific personality," so any future MGS that tried to do so would be doomed to eternal epigone status.

But take heart, because that doesn't mean there can't be another great Metal Gear, just that it won't be great in the same way as the games of yore. "I think there is a way to do a different generation of games… When I was a kid, I loved Tim Burton's Batman, and was like, 'Well, that's how Batman should be done.' And then Chris Nolan does Batman and you're like, 'Oh, that's pretty badass as well.' So will it be the same? No. Could it be amazing? Sure."

Still, Konami might be hunting around for someone who can properly take the Metal Gear reins for a while. "I've been a working screenwriter for 26 straight years and written on countless pieces, and I think I'm pretty good at it," said Hayter, "but I look at the Metal Gear scripts, and I'm like, 'I could never do this.'

"That's a singular voice… the tone of it, the execution of it is something beautiful that isn't done the way I would do it." Plus, of course, whoever becomes the new face of Metal Gear has to unknot all that lore. "Part of what I love about it is I can't keep all the lore in my head. I should know it better than anybody, but it's so complex and so profound that even I can't keep track of all of it."

I have to admit, I'm sceptical of Metal Gear's future sans Kojima. The series is so inextricably tied to his brand of research-heavy weirdness that I feel like any follow-on is doomed to feel either like it's doing Kojima cosplay or else like it's jettisoning everything that made the series unique and memorable. But that doesn't mean I don't want to see somebody try. I've been wrong before, after all.

Hideo Kojima's two great loves are scanning celebrities and just, like, saying things, man. He indulged the first of those to great effect in the making of Death Stranding 2, and now he's hit the interview circuit to indulge the latter. Do you know he could kill you? Like literally murder you stone-dead? He's a man on the edge, you know.

Kojima revealed his extensive training in the art of assassination in a recent chat with Ssense (via GamesRadar), where he also touched on his attitude towards modern big-budget game development, dismantling guns, and whether he's gonna play that upcoming Metal Gear Solid 3 remake (he's not).

The founding father of both Death Stranding and Metal Gear is a tad gloomy about non-indie development, it turns out. He says that, watching the parade of trailers at Big Geoff's Summer Game Fest, he felt like he was seeing the same thing over and over: "Even the visuals and the systems are pretty much the same, and a lot of people enjoy this, I understand, but it is important to put something really new in there for the industry."

Kojima, who's known for doing exhaustive and sprawling research for his games, sounds like he'd like other devs to adopt a similar tack. He recalls a visit to a specific studio making an MGS-like military-stealth game: "People who are making military games, they probably don't know how to dismantle a gun or shoot a gun, so that's kind of sad."

God bless the Ssense journalist who asked the vital follow-up question—prodding Kojima as to whether he knows how to dismantle a gun. "Yes, because I've been doing this training as well," answered Kojima (with, I like to imagine, a distant and steely glint in his eye), "and I learned so many ways to kill people as well."

Did he expand on that? You bet your bottom dollar he did not. He probably just means he's read up on a lot of different gruesome ways to bite it in order to prep for his many games in which people kill one another. But I'm equally prepared to believe Kojima is a master of ninjutsu in his spare time.

Anyway, with that juicy information left dangling like a T-bone, Kojima mostly just stuck to the more prosaic ground of modern game dev. He reckons that the most interesting work out there comes from indie studios rather than the risk-averse goliath devs and publishers. He's far from alone—this is a note other major industry figures have been hitting recently. It was just under two weeks ago that John Romero said indies are the future of game dev. Though Romero didn't also suggest he could easily kill everyone else in the room.

His boredom at seeing the same things repeated endlessly in mind, you've gotta wonder how Kojima feels about Konami returning to the Metal Gear well with a remake of MGS 3. He's keeping (mostly) schtum, probably wisely, but he did let one thing slip: when he was asked if he intended to play the remake, he laughed. "No, I won't," said Kojima.

The UK has just recently passed the UK Online Safety Act, and despite almost 400,000 signatures being signed to repeal it, the UK government has stayed firm on its implementation.

Discord recently fell in line with this act, requiring age verification for certain servers, but unlike that, Xbox's new 18+ moderation can't be worked around with a few stills of Sam Bridges from Death Stranding. I know. I checked.

According to Microsoft's Xbox Wire blog, starting today, "players who indicate their account age as 18 and over, based in the UK, and signing into an Xbox experience with a Microsoft account will begin seeing notifications encouraging them to verify their age".

There are four ways you can verify your identity with Xbox. They are:

• Age estimation with webcam
• ID Verification
• Credit card check
• Check mobile number with mobile provider

The age estimation is the method that has caught some traction recently for other apps because, well, it's not very good. Any semi-real-looking video game character has managed to get around them, as long as there's a photo mode or some way of making their mouth or head move around.

However, the age estimation for Xbox is done with a partner named Yoti, and I couldn't seem to get around like I did with the Discord age verification. I used my actual face and got through the verification after just a little bit of adjusting my light and moving my hair.

For now, Microsoft will just regularly remind you to verify, like a Windows pop-up telling you to update. However, Microsoft states, "Starting early next year, age verification will be required for these players in the UK to retain full access to social features on Xbox, such as voice or text communication and game invites."

You will still be able to play Xbox games with your age unverified (and no note is made of age ratings on games you own), you just won't have access to social features.

If you don't live in the UK (lucky you) and think you've got off without these restrictions, the Xbox blog says, "As this age verification process rolls out across the UK, we’ll continue to evaluate how we can keep players around the world safe and learn from the UK process. We expect to roll out age verification processes to more regions in the future." Microsoft does say there's some nuance to the rollout outside of the UK and that it will be working with countries to create more bespoke solutions to age verification.

You can currently verify your identity via webcam on PC or via your mobile phone, and there's no method to do so directly from Xbox, though I wouldn't mind watching people try to verify their age via Kinect. It would be a good excuse to blow the dust off that era of Xbox.

Today saw the full introduction of the requirements outlined in the Online Safety Act in the UK, requiring "robust" age checks for users to access adult content online. People have already managed to find ways around at least some of these verification requirements after *checks watch* less than 24 hours.

Earlier today, our James stumbled across people using Sam Porter Bridges selfies to bypass Discord's age verification, from this post from DanySterkhov on X.

Naturally, we thought to take this infiltration method for a spin. The result? (Cue Deus Ex music.) James was able to bypass the new verification system and exfiltrate key NSFW data without alerting the system to intrusion. (They did it in the name of science).

Basically, it worked! We're enjoying smutty Baldur's Gate 3 fanfics on Discord again. Not that we couldn't anyways, we're all 18 or older here. Nor are we telling you to circumvent these restrictions. Adult content is for adults. But it is a fun hack, and a good way of keeping your actual face far away from Discord's age verification system, K-id.

K-id is able to verify users in one of two ways: Face Scan or Scan ID. The latter is fairly self-explanatory, but the former uses checks to verify how old you look to see if you're good to view whatever adult content you're hoping to view. Discord essentially demands age verification for the following:

• When unblurring or changing settings for the Discord Sensitive Media Filter
• When changing Message Request settings
• When trying to access age-restricted (18+) channels

Now, K-id claims it does not permanently store any video selfies or personal identity documents after a user's age is confirmed, so sayeth the Discord support page. That means it's not the end of the world if you did upload your actual face, in theory, though I understand some aren't too comfortable with that prospect either way. That also means it won't know you used Sam Porter's face once you're verified, as it has no way of 'checking the records', so to speak.

The method requires using a phone for the Discord age verification, opening Death Stranding's Photo Mode, and preparing a close up of Sam Porter, played by one Norman Reedus.

The K-id Discord ID verification is designed to weed out would-be imposters, and asks users to open and close their mouth to verify they're a real person. Thanks to Kojima's attention to detail, that's easy enough in Death Stranding, as 'Sam's expression' bar lets you pick through facial expressions. This requirement for facial movement appears to weed out, say, using an image of a game character on the cover of PC Gamer magazine, but it's not much of an issue for games or even AI to circumvent.

We weren't sure whether it would work for us because Sam was wearing his otter cap in our James' save file, but it worked just fine, and took about thirty seconds from start to finish. Thirty seconds for infiltration, and another thirty for Baldur's Gate 3 fanfic data exfiltration.

Now I suppose we shouldn't take the UK government's age verification requirements to have amounted to nothing because of this. It is just one of many possible age verification methods used across websites to answer the UK government's call for more stringent measures. It might not be so easy with other solutions.

But it's at least something to consider, along with the threat the bill might pose to our privacy thanks to vagaries of the language surrounding online encryption, as we shuffle ever closer to the gates of the digital panopticon. Still, I guess it tries to stop some people from seeing things they shouldn't, which isn't a bad thing; it's just difficult to get a bead on whether it actually will achieve that, and doesn't water down UK citizens' privacy too much in the process.

If you listen to the punters, you might believe that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33—a rather really very good videogame from Sandfall Interactive—rather embarrassed the modern RPG megastudios of today. How could this team of 30 (a bit more than that, actually) outdo the giants of the industry? For shame! Shame! (Just ignore the fact that Metaphor Re:Fantazio was excellent, it doesn't suit this narrative).

In actuality, I've always viewed Obscur as a love letter to these studios, regardless of my opinions on whether they've gone a touch wayward. While it's good for engagement to get folks invested in a war, I've never had the sense that director Guillaume Broche was anything other than a superfan of the games that very clearly fused themselves to his DNA, DNA which forged 2025's best Je-RPG.

It's nice to have that hunch confirmed yet again—Sandfall Interactive devs, including Broche himself, recently visited Square Enix's offices for "a creatively rich exchange of visions and ideas".

As seen in the X post (shared below), Broche was accompanied by lead programmer Tom Guillermin and co-founder and producer Francois Meurisse in a visit to the creators of Final Fantasy. You can also see Naoki Hamaguchi, the director of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, and Final Fantasy series producer Yoshinori Kitas in the photo.

It's a nice reminder—that I'm maybe a little cynical about people heeding—that game developers don't tend to engage in console-esque slap fights with each other, especially if they're making good games. If the adage "good artists borrow, great artists steal" is true, then you absolutely have to be a fan of the companies that inspired you—and I don't think I've seen a game that more lovingly combined its darlings than Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

On the flipside, it's nice to see Square Enix taking inspiration from its sprog competitors—though Square's not the only one to give them an invite. Hideo Kojima of Metal Gear and Death Stranding fame also had them over to talk shop, which is lovely to see.

Sandfall developers have well and truly established themselves as the popular new kids of the industry—a title I'm very much certain they deserve, even if their game endings need to stop ripping my heart out of my chest.

Microsoft laid off 9,000 employees earlier this week, cancelling games Everwild, the Perfect Dark reboot, and an unannounced MMO in the works at ZeniMax Online Studios in the process. Romero Games' new shooter fell victim to the massacre too. One game that apparently didn't get cancelled, though, is OD, the new thing from Hideo Kojima, with support from Xbox Studios, that was announced in 2023.

You'd be forgiven for forgetting OD. It's a game, Kojima said through a translator at the 2023 Game Awards, "but it's at the same time a movie, but at the same time a new form of media." The bizarre teaser, featuring Sophia Lillis, Hunter Schafer, and Udo Kier reciting a nonsensical sentence, wasn't any more informative.

Kojima's attention since then has presumably been taken up mainly by Death Stranding 2 (which still hasn't been announced for PC, for the record, but we remain confident it's coming), and some folks online have speculated that OD may have been forgotten and lost in this most recent Microsoft bloodbath.

Windows Central claims that's not the case, however, reporting sources that say Kojima's oddball project is still alive and kicking—although the site ominously adds, "for now."

That cautionary qualifier is probably called for. Pulling the plug on a new Kojima game at this point in the man's career might seem an unlikely move, but I'd say the same about telling John Romero he can't have a little bit of money to float a small team for a new FPS too, and look how that turned out. Microsoft is an AI company now and it intends to drop $80 billion-with-a-B on the tech in 2025 alone. That's an all-or-nothing bet, and with that kind of money on the table, no individual videogame or game maker is exempt from the axe.

For now, though, it seems that OD is still on. For now.

Death Stranding 2: On The Beach recently released on PlayStation 5 (a PC version is inevitable but yet to be announced) and, wouldn't you know it, Hideo Kojima has seized the chance to go on the interview circuit.

As well as being a brilliant maker of games Kojima is also a master of promoting them, and knows how to raise the audience's collective eyebrow: from saying he's bummed out that playtesters were enjoying Death Stranding 2 too much to pontificating on death and declaring "I will not pass on the baton: rather, I will crush the baton."

The fawning sometimes gets all-too-much but the reality is that Kojima, for all he knows how to P.T. Barnum things, also possesses the inestimable advantage of having something interesting to say. A longtime Internet obsessive, Kojima has re-framed Death Stranding's ostensible theme of connecting people such that in the sequel the question is now whether "we" should have connected.

In a new interview with the Japanese outlet Denfaminicogamer (and spotted by Automaton West) Kojima riffs a little on his previous comments about Covid-19 and the global lockdowns: essentially that it made him think being "too connected" wasn't great. Asked to explain what this phrase means to him, the Koj-cannon is turned on AI in righteous fashion.

"Rather than being 'too connected,' I think it's dangerous to make decisions because you're being guided," says Kojima (via an edited machine translation). "I'm not denying technology but, for example, AI on my smartphone introduces me to all kinds of things. I don't like that either.

"That's because I think 'coincidences' are necessary in human life. When you wake up in the morning and go to school or work, you might happen across a coffee shop. Or you might meet someone by chance. I think it's a series of such events, and the accumulation of choices, that creates your life.

"I worry that by becoming too connected online, we will be unknowingly led into a predetermined lifestyle."

Orwell created the idea of "Newspeak" to explain how a dystopian government would control thought: by limiting language itself, and thus the ability to have complex thoughts. How much more insidious a tool these self-inserting, thought-terminating, endlessly verbose AIs that we're being bombarded with could become.

Dystopia might be a bit much. But we have travelled fast to be here. OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman recently made the absurd claim he wouldn't have known how to take care of his newborn baby without ChatGPT, and thinks it's just swell that so many young people look to a Large Language Model for life advice (even when that advice is garbage!)

"I don't feel like we should do without the Internet now," says Kojima. "It's so convenient. I think we survived the COVID-19 pandemic because of the Internet. But I think it's dangerous to become so dependent on it. I think it's important to consider how you will use convenient technology."

Ever the PR master, Kojima says his answer is spoken by a character at the end of Death Stranding 2. "I'd like you to think about my answer. It's a 'choice' of how you want to live your life using this technology."

Kojima ties a bow on all of this by emphasising the Earthiness of human reality, the roads travelled and the lives that were changed along the way. But his final shot at AI is the reference to Hawaii, and how he talks about the way another recent fad portrays it.

"As long as humans have a physical body, I think they move as individuals… you all have travelled to get here today," said Kojima to the interview audience. "It might be by car, bus, or train, or it might just be a trip back-and-forth, but during that time you'll meet a lot of different people and see a lot of different scenery.

"You can go to Hawaii in the metaverse, but it's completely different when you actually go there. First you go to the airport [here], then you get on a plane, and when you arrive there, there are smells and temperatures that you can only experience there.

"I think that such adventures add color to my life, so I don't want to lose them."

Around the 25-hour mark of Death Stranding 2, one of Japan's most acclaimed film directors asked me to deliver a pizza to his neighbor a valley away—an anime VTuber who has withdrawn from humanity after seeing her weapons bent towards evil. "The one thing she still does seem to believe in, however," says the extensive in-game encyclopedia, "is the delicious taste of piping hot pizza."

By this point I've already tip-toed my way across craggy terrain to deliver fragile cargo without breaking it, and the trauma of dropping a box of records belonging to post-apocalyptic Australia's last living musician 10 hours before still haunts me. Thank god only 30% of them broke. This, though, is the first delivery I've had to make in Death Stranding 2 with a couple specific requirements—that the pizza stays flat, and that it's still hot when I arrive, which means I have to work fast. But time isn't my only enemy here: if I get rained on or have to ford a deep river, that wet pizza's going to get cold in a hurry.

Luckily I've arrived at the Pizza Chef's remote outpost in an off-road truck that keeps cargo flat and protects it from the elements. It's slow and difficult to maneuver through the thickly forested hills that surround the VTuber Data Scientist's shelter, but I still make it with time to spare. If I'd been driving my vehicle of choice for much of Death Stranding 2, though, the faster, more maneuverable (but less cargo-friendly) tri-cruiser motorcycle, I'd have had to come up with a totally different plan—maybe ditching the bike and opting instead to fabricate a floating cargo carrier, which hovers above the ground and stays happily horizontal so long as you don't saunter off a cliff.

Even one of Death Stranding 2's silliest missions is nudging me to pay attention to just how many choices and tools are at my disposal to get from one place to the next.

By the end of the game, when I'm crisscrossing the entire continent for deliveries and dodging dangerous mechs and even more dangerous ghosts, the game's no longer just suggesting I think about the weather, the types of bullets I'm packing, the types of gloves on my hands and the boots on my feet—it all matters. The exciting bit is how many fun options there are for dealing with every single challenge.

Back to the beach

Death Stranding 2 is out this week, though only on the PlayStation 5—like the first game, it's all but guaranteed to release on PC eventually, which is why I've spent more than 40 hours across the last two weeks delivering cargo across Mexico and Australia and watching some quintessentially mind-bending Kojima cutscenes. Reaching the end in the time I had to play meant I was too rushed to experiment with even half of this game's bottomless toy box of weapons and gadgets, but I've seen enough to recognize Death Stranding 2 as a PC game in console clothing, bursting with the kinds of intertwining, crunchy systems pioneered by immersive sims like Deus Ex.

"At the beginning it was a game focused on deliveries, something no one had ever seen before," game director Hideo Kojima said recently in an interview with Wired. "Now the public is familiar with the idea, so I wanted to give players more freedom, even those who want to fight, for example...

"You can avoid enemies by taking a longer ride around the map or by quickly passing a vehicle or motorbike through an encampment, or you can fight them. I wanted the choice to be up to the player. In case he chooses combat, we had to change the design of the weapons to make them easier to use. When we were working on these mechanics, I was a little worried, because many of the team members who worked with me on Metal Gear still work with me, and we kept asking ourselves, 'Does this feel too Metal Gear?' but we didn’t do it deliberately."

I'm happy to say that Death Stranding 2 feels Metal Gear as all hell—but not too Metal Gear, despite Kojima's team clearly cribbing from the open-ended stealth toolset they'd designed a decade ago in Metal Gear Solid 5.

When I played the first Death Stranding, I saw its focus on the granularity of cross country delivery as evidence that Kojima was in a new era of his career, one more interested in player creativity than linear storytelling.

Now I think that wasn't quite right.

Inside Hideo Kojima there are two wolves. One is obsessed with longform "cinematic" storytelling layered with confounding metaphors; it's desperate to say something about life through the medium of videogames. The other wolf is the one who thought it'd be cool as hell if food rotted with the passage of time (in MGS3) or if you could throw empty bullet magazines at enemies to knock them out (in MGS5), and reasoned that if Sam Porter Bridges is going to guzzle energy drinks to boost his stamina, well then he'd have to be able to take a piss, too.

In Death Stranding 2 both wolves are feasting and howling in a harmony that he hasn't nailed for 20 years.

Strands upon strands

When PC Gamer awarded Metal Gear Solid 5 game of the year in 2015, it was due to the triumphant freedom and creativity of the stealth action, "where the focus lies on user-generated stories by throwing together systems in two massive open worlds," which made up for the "weirdly half-baked" story. When Death Stranding (just barely) won our 2020 game of the year, the trek to reconnect a fractured, isolated society by walking from one end of America to the other was just so potent and cathartic it shone through the convoluted sci-fi premise Kojima had embedded it in.

Death Stranding 2 spends far less time explaining its setting, shifting the narrative balance towards planning and play right from the start. There are hours-long stretches where you'll barely spend any time watching cutscenes at all, though the final act does finally tilt hard in the other direction to try to pay off all the mysteries it sets up over the first 35 hours. (I'll have a more spoiler-filled dive into how that plays out later this week.)

The Australian environment is wonderfully varied; in a moment that will stick with me long after the details of the story fade, I drove my motorcycle headlong into a Mad Max Fury Road-scale dust storm, navigating by the shimmering highlights of my terrain scanner as lightning sizzled to either side of me.

Hours later I found myself in a blizzard on top of a mountain, an oxygen mask draining my exoskeleton's battery to combat passing out in the thinner air, relying on basic tools (ladders and climbing ropes) I hadn't needed since my earliest deliveries. At one point the new climbing gloves I'd just crafted were the only thing letting me inch my way up and over the peak's steepest point.

When combat became harder to avoid near Death Stranding 2's end, I failed an exhausting delivery that sent me through a huge nest of BTs, the ghosts that spawn pools of tar beneath your feet or wheels if you don't take great pains to sneak around them. After reloading and rethinking, I discovered the glory of DS2's coolest piece of new gear, a coffin surfboard that hovers above the ground. Where my offroad delivery truck slowed to a crawl in the BTs' muck and left me an easy target, the coffin board soared across tar even more efficiently than land. I surfed down the mountain's slope and through the BT zone so fast I never even saw them.

The first game eventually outfits you with a wide range of weapons and gadgets with specific use cases, but Death Stranding 2 quickly makes a point of giving your arsenal more versatility, with weapons able to incapacitate the human, mech, and BT enemies you'll end up facing. It's not just cleaner, but also made me more eager to rock up to enemy bases with a backpack full of weaponry so I could pivot from stealth to all-out combat.

On normal difficulty most enemies go down a little too easily to really make you work for a win, but as a delivery sim first and a shooter second, the balance feels about right. And I love the ways the obsessive attention to details in the simulation, like the angle of a slope that'll make Sam lose his footing, carries over to the weaponry—rifles with semi-auto and single-shot fire modes, the sharp shrapnel roar of the shotgun, the way powered combat gloves turn your punches into sizzling electric haymakers.

The day/night cycle affects everything from the temperature (no delivering hot pizza at night without a truck!) to how much power your vehicles use at night (turn those headlights off to conserve battery) to your chances of stealthing through a survivalist base undetected.

In one of the best examples of Kojima's wolves operating in rare harmony, new living puppet character Dollman (modeled after the face of one of Kojima's film idols) serves dual roles as an exposition mouth piece and a scouting device. When he's not chattering away, you can pluck him from Sam's belt and hurl him into the sky to survey enemy bases and mark baddies, before you yank him back by his string.

Kojima and his team have again looked at the open world, which so many big budget games treat as the perfunctory space you'll mostly ignore as you head from waypoint to waypoint, as a canvas for so many forms of expression: movement, strategy, isolation, comedy. While his style of storytelling hasn't changed that much since 2008's way-too-cutscene-heavy Metal Gear Solid 4, Death Stranding 2 offers so much more time and space for you to create your own stories.

And most of its growth as a sequel comes from the immersive sim playbook of priming the world for as many teensy little interactions as possible, and having the confidence to bet that players will revel in finding them.

Death Stranding 2 is absurd more often than it is profound, but precious few games attempt to be both, let alone succeed. I played most of it while the servers were offline, which meant I couldn't fully feel out how the multiplayer features—which see other players' roads, bridges, ziplines, and other helpful structures bleed into your own world—gel with its new narrative thrust "We should not have connected." But playing without them effectively amped up the weight and isolation of being a porter in this world, making the frequent needle drops of delicate, sometimes even mournful music land even better. (In one of my few complaints about Death Stranding 2, what seemed to be a bug stopped some of those songs from triggering when they should've, which was a real bummer).

This is certainly a maximalist sequel, throwing more of everything into the stew to enrich the combat and climbing and driving and talking and building (there are even new types of bugs to eat). That approach doesn't work forever; at some point too much stuff either dilutes the core flavor or can't save it from tasting stale. But there really isn't anything else like Death Stranding 2 except, well, Death Stranding. This one just goes to 11, and is pretty much always better for it.

We may be PC Gamer, but a Hideo Kojima launch is an industry-wide event, and as we speak, there are PS5-having PCG writers down in the Strand trenches attempting to make sense of the silly puppet man and how a game can be both horny and sexless.

You know the drill: Weird global simu-launch, it's all kind of confusing, and down below I've listed launch times by region for the standard and digital deluxe, "early access" (already a thing!) versions of the game.

When is the standard Death Stranding 2 launch time?

Sony has not provided one of those nice maps of the world with all the launch times, and also has the most confusing roll-out for this sort of thing I've ever seen, a "rolling midnight launch" where the easternmost time zone of a given "region" gets the game at midnight, with time zones to their west then effectively getting the game earlier in the day.

Unfortunately, the only concrete region-definers I've been able to pin down have been New Zealand for Oceania and the East Coast for the US, with corresponding times listed below. I don't know where Sony draws the line on Europe or Asia, and quite frankly I don't think it should have that power.

As a note, most outlets agree with the "rolling midnight" schema, but Game8 seems to argue that this only applies to the United States, and for the rest of the world, it's just midnight of whatever time zone you're in.

• 9 pm PT, June 25 (Los Angeles)
• 11pm CT, June 25 (Chicago)
• 12 am ET, June 26 (New York)
• 12 am NZST, June 26 (Wellington)
• 10 PM AEST, June 25 (Sydney)
• 8 PM AWST, June 25 (Perth)

When is the early access or advance access Death Stranding 2 launch time?

Same time of day, just two days earlier. Sony is providing 48 hours for early adopters to get a head start and lord it over their fellow gamers.

• 9 pm PT, June 23 (Los Angeles)
• 11pm CT, June 23 (Chicago)
• 12 am ET, June 24 (New York)
• 12 am NZST, June 24 (Wellington)
• 10 PM AEST, June 23 (Sydney)
• 8 PM AWST, June 23 (Perth)

Is there preloading for Death Stranding 2?

Yes, you should be able to preload Death Stranding 2 on your PS5 at the time of writing.

Is Death Stranding 2 launching on PC?

Lol, no. It took about eight extra months for the original game to come to PC, so set your expectations accordingly.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has an awful lot of fans, and Hideo Kojima is one of them. But the Death Stranding mastermind admires developer Sandfall Interactive not just for the game it made, but also for the way it was made: With a very small core team.

Speaking at an interview in Australia attended by Dexerto (via GamesRadar), Kojima said his own studio, Kojima Productions, has grown over the years. "It was like a team of six" when he first started out, he said, so "you could do everything yourself." Delegation became necessary as the studio expanded, "but sometimes, the idea doesn't really work out because it's a bigger team."

Sandfall Interactive's accomplishment—creating a blockbuster hit with a relatively small team—is what really impresses Kojima, and seemingly what he'd like to emulate. "They only have like 33 team members and a dog," he said. "That's my ideal when I create something with a team."

I like small teams too, in all things—any endeavour that involves more than six people, myself included, irritates me by default—but at the same time it's important to remember, and acknowledge, that Clair Obscur was not made by just those 33 Sandfall Interactive staff members.

As PC Gamer's Lincoln Carpenter wrote shortly after the Summer Game Fest, when host Geoff Keighley paid tribute to Clair Obscur as a "monumental achievement" made by "a team of under 30 developers," it's an inspirational legend but factually wrong: The core team at Sandfall is in the neighborhood of 30 people which is quite small by industry standards, but dozens of others were involved. The credits page on Mobygames says 412 people worked on Clair Obscur, which is a far cry from 33.

Kojima's comment still holds up: Many of the people listed in the Clair Obscur credits work at external contractors or are voice actors, and so in his ideal world they wouldn't be wandering around the halls of Kojima Productions causing stress and headaches anyway. And I absolutely meant it when I said I agree with him. As the old saying goes, after all, too many cooks gets on my nerves. But it's good to remember that sometimes the popular picture of a tiny, scrappy team doing everything itself isn't the whole picture: It takes a lot of people to make a big game like Clair Obscur or Death Stranding.

As for the team size he actually has to deal with, Kojima said during the interview that he told film director George Miller—they are mutual fans—not long after he founded Kojima Productions that he was trying to keep it under 150 people, a number Miller seems to have approved of. It grew to over 200 people during the Covid-19 pandemic, but Kojima apparently kept that to himself during a subsequent conversation, saying during the interview that he "couldn't tell that to George."

Kojima Productions' Death Stranding 2: On the Beach will release on PS5 June 26, with the inevitable PC version yet to be dated. It looks pretty wild and the trailers certainly suggest we'll be getting a lot more Metal Gear flavouring than the original, even if I could do without promo events where Hideo Kojima himself gets fawned over by the game's stars.

Old hand that he is, Kojima's been tootling around the interview circuit, and right now he seems to be in a bit of a maudlin mood. Kojima's already talked this year about things like a USB stick where he keeps his game ideas, intending to leave it for Kojima Productions' staff to use "like a will." He's got an idea for a game where you age and die, even if "no-one would buy it." Yes: the 61 year-old creator has reached that stage of life where a certain truth comes to the forefront of the mind. None of us are here forever.

One of Kojima's stops was over at GQ where, as well as being styled and groomed in a rather snazzy suit, he immediately launches into death, family, legacy, as well as how he feels about Death Stranding 2 in the runup to release.

"So-so," says Kojima of his feelings towards DS2. "There are so many things I still want to change. I want, like, six more months. Today, I might be satisfied. But tomorrow, when I play the same place again, you have a different sense. I have to set the line myself, where I stop [...] there used to be a master [disc] and that was it. Now it’s like, OK, I’ll let it go this time and do it for a patch, or something."

Kojima goes on to talk about how much time he has left creating games, and says he wishes it took one year rather than three or four to make a new game. He again mentions the ideas he'll probably leave to Kojima Productions, and the responsibility he feels towards the staff. GQ raises a past quote where Kojima talked about (their paraphrase) "passing on the baton in the loop of life", and how he wants to be remembered when he does pass it on.

"I am not going to pass the baton to anyone—I will rather crush the baton," laughs Kojima. "I don’t need to give 'Hideo Kojima' to anyone. If I pass the baton to my staff and tell them to make things the same way I do, the company will not succeed and will go out of business."

Asked what he means by this, Kojima explains that influence is not such a straightforward path.

"Every day, if I tweet something that I like, a director or an actor or a musician contacts me," says Kojima. "They say, 'I’m a creator because of your games.' But they didn’t receive the baton of Hideo Kojima. They received my small fire. They’re not copying me. They’re not trying to be me. They have this fire, and they light up their own. And they’ll probably give that to someone else. There were legendary comic book artists when I was a boy. I didn’t become a comic book artist—I was inspired by them, I was influenced."

Excited about Death Stranding 2: On the Beach? So am I, and so I offer one piece of advice to you: don't bother watching last night's premiere event, which was held in LA's Orpheum Theatre, hosted by Kojima's best bud Geoff Keighley, and featured various Death Stranding 2 actors and creatives coming on-stage to talk about what a wonderful, magical creator Kojima is, and how special it is to be involved in such a production.

Maybe it's the Brit in me, but pass the sick bag. I will go to bat for Hideo Kojima's games, and I think he's one of the greatest creators gaming has ever seen, but his embrace of the auteur trappings (and the willingness of others to play along) has really gotten old.

Last night's event, which featured maybe 20 minutes of gameplay alongside an hour of talking heads praising DS2, told me almost nothing about the game's big themes or ideas that wasn't already known. And in labouring over cutscenes and lingering on Kojima's demands for cast and crew, it actually made the game seem like a more straightforward and less exciting sequel than I'd expected.

We got to see the game's opening mission, where Sam has to travel back to base with Lou (now a toddler), and Kojima made a big deal of the dynamic score: depending on how Sam's traversing the (gorgeous) landscape, different instruments fade in and out of the music. We also got to see Sam soothing Lou, which works much as it did in Death Stranding, and generally this whole segment could've been in the first game.

"It's a delivery game, I want to show the delivery process, but you might be bored," said Kojima via a translator, "of course playing it is fun, watching is different… remember, this is a delivery game." Keighley helpfully adds that "the deliveries are so beautiful, so incredible."

We got to see a cutscene starring Elle Fanning's character Tomorrow, which revealed that someone at Kojima Productions has spent an awful lot of time scanning the actor's feet. The character's powers involve her taking off her shoes then becoming some sort of tar sylph, who zooms around and dramatically boots a load of hapless soldiers as Sam looks on. All very nice but, honestly, Kojima's wuxia-style cutscenes are not why I love his games.

We then get one of the game's early boss fights, which features the Solid Snake-y character Neil. This was a sequence with some incredible visual spectacle, with the battleground framed by fireworks and Neil warping around with his soldier buddies, but anyone who's played the first game will find it all very reminiscent of the fights against Cliff.

That may well be an intentional echo in such an early fight, because Neil is clearly this game's replacement for the role Cliff played in the original, but again the effect was to make this feel like a much more straight-up sequel than the earlier trailers suggested.

There were new aspects to the game shown. The Neil sequence begins with the use of a tar cannon, a heavy weapon that can be used both offensively and to put out fires in the environment. We also see Sam using a blood boomerang, a grenade pistol and smoke grenades. Oh, and you can now choose to wear caps backwards… which is nice?

The panel consisted of Kojima, Keighley, Troy Baker (who plays Higgs), Shioli Kutsuna (Rainy), composer Woodkid, and Elle Fanning popped in with a brief video message. The event ended with basically a big actorly love-in, where the various participants were given one last chance to praise Kojima's genius, and came out with lines like "Hideo really understands what we go through as actors." He may well do, but I'm kinda sick of hearing it now, and I don't think Kojima's games need this kind of soft soap approach.

I know there's something very "old man yells at cloud" about getting annoyed with an event intended to promote Kojima's new game, which was just a load of people talking about how great the game is going to be and what a visionary Kojima is and what a privilege it is to work with him. But this kind of deification of creators doesn't do much for me, and I somehow ended the stream less excited for Death Stranding 2 than when it began.

I'll still play it, of course. But I'm left bewildered by how an event with the industry's #1 hype man and one of my favourite creators somehow dampened my expectations, rather than raising them.

Almost six years after Norman Reedus first picked up that baby in a jar and chucked his urine at goop monsters, Hideo Kojima has returned with Death Stranding 2: On The Beach.

Hideo Kojima's sequel makes an already ridiculous game even sillier, with giant ships, guitar-wielding cyborgs, and a ventriloquist dummy version of Turkish director Fatih Akin on show. Plus, the sequel is way more action-packed. You do still have to carry things though, sorry—there's just more pew pew in between the segments now.

From choice consequences to skill explainers, this Death Stranding 2 guide can help you with those walking and action moments—and more!

Death Stranding 2 choices and consequences

Death Stranding 2 gameplay explainers

You'll want to get the basics down, on top of understanding the sometimes head-scratching terminology in Death Stranding 2. So here's some quick and handy explainers on the essentials:

Death Stranding 2 locations

There is, as ever, a lot going on in the world of Hideo Kojima. In an interview published in a recent issue of French film magazine Le Film Français, Kojima spoke about his ongoing projects (via VGC): There's Death Stranding 2. There's the Death Stranding film adaptation in production at A24. And of course, there's Physint, Kojima's upcoming return to the tactical espionage action that secured his global reputation.

Unfortunately, Kojima told Le Film Français that it'll probably take the better part of a decade before we can play his Metal Gear successor. "Besides Death Stranding 2, there is Physint in development," Kojima said. "That will take me another five or six years."

Once Physint is squared away, however, Kojima told Le Film Français that he might finally turn his attention to directing a movie of his own.

"Maybe after that, I could finally decide to tackle a film," Kojima said.

During Physint's announcement at the January 2024 PlayStation State of Play, Kojima said Physint would be a "next-generation action espionage game" that is "also a movie at the same time in terms of look, story, theme, cast, acting, fashion and sound." Action espionage? Basically a movie? Inevitably wild casting and fashion choices? That checks all the Metal Gear boxes. (They're cardboard boxes, presumably.)

According to Kojima, we shouldn't be surprised to hear it, because he said in February 2024 chat that he's making Physint because we all kept demanding more Metal Gear. That's an interesting quote in retrospect now that we know Kojima Productions was already busy turning Death Stranding 2 into Metal Gear anyway, but I'm not complaining about a surplus of hypercompetent bandana-clad stealth goofballs.

What's curious about Kojima's conversation with Le Film Français is that he didn't mention OD, the horror game announced in 2023 as a collaboration between Kojima and Jordan Peele. Similar to Physint, Kojima described OD as a game that's "at the same time a movie, but at the same time a new form of media."

In January 2025, Kojima said that the productions of both OD and Physint had been suspended in 2024 because of the SAG-AFTRA strike. Kojima clearly seems willing to acknowledge Physint's ongoing development, but OD's current status is unclear.

If he does make an eventual pivot to directing movies, Kojima said it'll be the culmination of a life-long fascination.

"I grew up with cinema. Directing would be a kind of homage to it," Kojima said. "Besides, I’m getting older, and I would prefer to do it while still young."

Kojima's currently a spry 61 years old, and he's spent those six youthful decades as an open and unabashed movie nerd. It's hard to miss: Most of his oeuvre is a pastiche of 90s techno-thrillers, and he's been cramming familiar actors and directors into his game casts ever since his production budgets have supported it.

My only concern about Kojima's directorial debut is what kind of runtimes he'll subject theater audiences to. If Death Stranding had about four and half movies' worth of cutscenes in it, how long are his movies going to be if there isn't any pesky gameplay to get in the way?

As a 31 year old, I think constantly about my imminent death. After being assassinated by terrorists while rescuing a baby who is also the president from a burning building, how do I want people to remember me?

Fortunately, my contract stipulates that I will be embalmed and lie in state like Lenin in the centre of the PC Gamer offices until the end of time, but others don't have that luxury (we're short on desk space as it is). Hideo Kojima, for instance, is achieving immortality by cramming a USB stick full of ideas for his staff to use after he concludes his tenancy on Earth.

In a chat with our comrades at Edge magazine, Kojima said a serious illness during the Covid-19 pandemic reminded him of his mortality: "Until then, I didn't think I was old, you know? I just didn't feel my age, and I assumed I would be able to create for as long as I live." Sickness disillusioned him of that. "I couldn't create anything. And I saw lots of people around me passing away at that time. I was confronted with death."

Though Kojima recovered and is now full-swing on putting out Death Stranding 2, the experience stayed with him. He began to wonder how long he had left to keep doing creative work—"Perhaps I would have 10 years?"

It's that confrontation with mortality, says Kojima, that produced the pitch for Physint, but it produced something else, too: a USB stick filled with Kojima-brand ideas for his staff to pore through after he's gone. "I gave a USB stick with all my ideas on it to my personal assistant," said the man himself, "kind of like a will.

"Perhaps they could continue to make things after I'm gone, here at Kojima Productions… This is a fear for me—what happens to Kojima Productions after I'm gone. I don't want them to just manage our existing IP."

To be honest, I can't think of anything more Kojima than games still coming out with his name over the title sometime in 2150. If anyone deserves this kind of intellectual preservation, it's the guy who got a Game Boy Advance game made with a solar sensor built into the cartridge. You reckon the idea for a game where you get old, die, and forget how to move is on there? Hopefully Kojima's assistant backed it up, in any case.

No matter what reactions a Hideo Kojima game elicits from you, we can all appreciate swinging for the fences. Death Stranding is the sort of game that, in our profoundly risk-averse business, should have never gotten the sizable Sony-backed budget it did, but such is the power of Kojima's name.

Still, I have to imagine someone at Sony broke a sweat when they learned they were funding a delivery simulator that's light on action and heavy on contemplative vistas, especially considering how the first Death Stranding tested before it came out. In a recent interview with Edge Magazine (as shared by GamesRadar), Kojima revealed that most playtesters were repulsed by his post-Konami debut.

"I did a lot of monitoring tests for the first Death Stranding. I'd find that four out of ten people would love the game, and six would say it was a terrible game," he said.

They weren't mixed, and they did not find redeeming qualities in Death Stranding's cool gadgets or cooler peeing mechanic—60% of testers hated it. That's the sort of feedback that'd have me hammering backspace and starting all over, but Kojima went on to say that 40% approval is "a good balance."

Noting that big studio movies often require 80% approval before releasing, Kojima said, "I don't want to make games like that. I'm not interested in appealing to the mass market, or selling millions of copies. That's not what I'm aiming for."

In fact, he seems disappointed that those same playtests for Death Stranding 2 are way more positive, to the extent that he wishes "it was a bit more controversial." Sounds backward, but I know what he's getting at. The first Death Stranding relished in its inscrutability, what with all the Beached Things jargon and its slow-paced, sometimes hardcore hiking gameplay. It was the last thing you'd expect from your favorite director of stealth action games.

It's a testament to creative independence that Death Stranding came out, was as divisive as playtesters warned, but still found an audience, most of whom weren't looking for a post-apocalyptic hiking simulator. I did not know that I'd want to spend 200 hours scanning a mountain looking for the least treacherous rock to step on until such an opportunity arose. And despite Kojima's wishes, it did lead to selling millions of copies (which he must not mind, considering it earned him another big budget to make what he wants).

On the flip side, the almost universally positive buzz around Death Stranding 2 might have Kojima worried he's made an incremental sequel—more of what people liked, but not as unexpected or surprising as the original. More of the same (but better) is exactly what I want out of Death Stranding 2.

He might not admit to caring about the mass market, but he clearly cares about satisfying fans. The Metal Gear creator's career is one of balancing expectations with experimentation—a struggle that he's worn on his sleeve for decades.

Death Stranding 2 releases for PlayStation 5 on June 26 and, as it turns out, will be set predominantly in Australia. So I guess it makes sense that Hideo Kojima will be in Australia at around the same time to promote the game: he'll appear "in discussion" with Babe and Happy Feet creator George Miller, as part of the Sydney Film Festival.

Miller, who is also the creator of the Mad Max series, has an acting role in Death Stranding 2 as Tarman, so he's pretty close to the project, having sung the praises of the original Death Stranding back in 2019. According to the festival, the discussion will "explore the creative intersections between film and videogames, and the visionary approach each artist brings to their craft."

Miller's Tarman is so named because whenever he appears in the Death Stranding 2 footage released thus far, so does tar. He also has a shiny black winged cat who I'm going to assume is made of tar. There is also a Dollman and Heartman in Death Stranding 2, who may or may not be conversant with Heartman, Deadman, and Die-Hardman from the original Death Stranding.

Tickets for the Sydney Film Festival event are available now, and start from $AU50. The event takes place on Saturday, June 14. It'll probably sell out fast.

A bunch of press got hands-on with Death Stranding 2 earlier this month (but not us, because it's launching as a PS5 exclusive). Honestly, it sounds pretty amazing. It's apparently much closer to a Metal Gear game than anyone had dared hope for, and despite being twice as long, gets into the good stuff much quicker.

In a recent episode of Hideo Kojima's podcast KOJI10, the Metal Gear and Death Stranding creator discussed some of the game ideas he's had relating to time. These should be taken with a pinch of salt, because Kojima's always loved spieling about how certain concepts would work in videogames, but at least one was almost part of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (both spotted and translated by IGN).

Time-based mechanics have been a minor theme in some of Kojima's past work, probably most famously with The End in Metal Gear Solid 3, an elderly sniper boss who can be beaten by simply…. not playing the game for a week (or moving your machine's internal clock forward).

Kojima also mentions that game's food system: the animals you hunt in-game for Snake's meals will go rotten after a few real world days have passed. This makes Snake sick, but they can also be used as a guerilla booby trap by being left near hungry guards.

"I’ve thought about having characters’ hair grow in games," says Kojima. "Originally in Death Stranding 2, I was going to have Sam’s beard gradually grow out over time, and the player would have to shave it. If they didn’t, Sam would end up looking unkempt. However, as Norman Reedus is a big star, I didn’t want to make him look uncool!"

Kojima says he might return to this idea in future, though it does sound awfully like Red Dead Redemption 2, where I've spent more hours than I care to admit carefully shaving and pomading Arthur Morgan.

Then we get into the good stuff: firstly, Kojima imagines a game where you control a character over their entire life.

"It starts out with the player being born, you’re a child and then gradually over time you become an adult," says Kojima. "In the game, you fight various enemies. Like with [MGS3’s The End], if you keep playing the game, you will become a 70 or 80 year old man. However, at this age you will be weaker, your eyesight will worsen. When you are a teenager you’ll be able to run faster but by the time you reach 60 you’ll slow down a bit."

Kojima says the character will have better physical stats when younger but, without quite explaining how, more knowledge and experience when older. This would apparently play into how you deal with the enemies. Despite the enthusiasm for this idea, Kojima concludes "But no-one would buy it!"

Another idea is some sort of weird food-making simulator where you're producing cheese or wine, and have to log in repeatedly over a long period of time to manage the process. I mean, fine, but at that point why not just actually make some cheese. Maybe Kojima was feeling hungry.

Finally we come to the wildest idea of all, which sounds like what would happen if someone made Memento into a game. In this "forgetting game" players have to get through the entire thing "quickly", because the main character gradually forgets abilities and information if you don't play every day.

Kojima says that examples of how this would work would be "how to fire their gun or what their job is." The endpoint of the process would be that, erm, the character forgets how to move in their entirety, and presumably you just log in and look sadly at your recumbent avatar. "Players would have to take a week off work or school to play it," laughs Kojima.

Death Stranding 2: On The Beach is due for release in June, though the inevitable PC version is yet to be confirmed: let's just hope it doesn't take eight months this time. Creator and director Hideo Kojima has been on the interview circuit and, among other things like constantly making Metal Gear comparisons, gives some surprising insights into the themes of both games.

Necessary context here is that, while Death Stranding was developed before the Covid-19 pandemic, it released a few months beforehand. Coincidence though it may have been, it made the game's themes of isolation, delivery work, and internet-style social connections seem absurdly prescient and, as time went on, even quite haunting.

"Death Stranding was developed before the pandemic," says Kojima to IGN. "There were movements toward division at the time such as the United Kingdom leaving the EU, and so both its story and gameplay were created based on my thoughts on that during that time. But then Covid started three months after [releasing] the game, and I was truly shocked."

Brief refresher: the United Kingdom narrowly voted to leave the EU in 2016, following a divisive national campaign riven with half-truths and misguided notions such as "taking back control." The UK officially left the EU in 2020 and, while opinions differ, the vast majority of economists regard it as an act of self-sabotage, and the political after-effects continue to be felt.

"Now in the 21st century, though, we have the Chiral Network... which is to say the internet," continues Kojima. "Spanish flu struck in the early 20th century, but we were able to survive this time because we were connected by the internet. We started working remotely, while concerts and live events vanished. We had no choice but to rely on the internet. Children couldn't go to school or play and had to stare at screens all day.

"I think we didn't have any other choice at the time. You'd turn on the TV and hear about how the metaverse was the next big thing, but that isn't how human communication works. You don't meet people by chance that way."

I'm very much here for Hideo Kojima just casually dismissing the metaverse, not least because he strikes me as being quite right. And what's interesting about Kojima's thoughts is where they lead to, which is essentially that he might have been too starry-eyed about the idea of people connecting in this way.

"This may sound strange, but I made the first game based on the theme of, 'We're in danger of being divided and isolated, so let's connect,'" says Kojima. "Then Covid hit after it came out. After actually experiencing that, I felt that maybe it's not such a good thing to connect so much. That feeling is foreshadowed in lots of different scenes and settings, including 'the stick and the rope.' I think there are portions that players will only understand once they reach the end of the game. What I felt during the pandemic is quite strongly reflected within this title."

Kojima goes on to talk about the strands that dangled down from the original's logo, which in the sequel dangle above the logo like puppet strings.

"It's kind of like the logo for The Godfather," says Kojima. "This applies to Dollman too, and you'll find enemies dangling from strands if you go to the weapons factory as well. I added a lot of moments that will make players aware of the presence of different strands. When you really think about it, what does it mean to be connected? I hope you'll play the game when it comes out at the end of June. You've all gone through Covid, so there should be something to resonate with for everyone."

Death Stranding 2: On The Beach is due for release on PlayStation 5 in June, and let's hope it doesn't take eight months to come across to PC this time. Creator and director Hideo Kojima has just done a big interview with IGN to accompany some preview coverage, within which he just cannot stop with the Metal Gear comparisons.

This has been a notable element of Death Stranding 2's marketing, even. The release of a 10 minute long trailer (yes, really) in March made the Metal Gear links overt, with new character Neil giving us a new version of Snake's bandana-tying, and a mech unmistakably reminiscent of Metal Gear Rex.

To be clear, Metal Gear remains a Konami property and none of these references or echoes are in any way official: but it does feel very much that Kojima, having firmly established himself and Kojima Productions, is now much more comfortable with his own legacy. To the extent that, when explaining the differences between Death Stranding and its sequel, he immediately reaches for the leap between Metal Gear Solid and its own sequel.

"I'd like to ask you to think back to the beginning of Metal Gear Solid," Kojima told IGN. "No weapons appear at first, and you only acquire them after going up the elevator. Placing weapons at the very start will cause players to pick them up and start killing enemies, so we consciously decided to not do that. But that part turned out to be unpopular, with some people saying they couldn't get up the elevator.

"Still, we had to design Metal Gear Solid so that players learned how stealth works. For Metal Gear Solid 2, we made it a little easier to use weapons and aim at specific parts using a POV angle, as many players were already aware of stealth games.

"It was the same for Death Stranding. There aren't many games about delivery, so we had to get people accustomed to it first. For the sequel, we wanted to allow players that want to fight to do so more freely. Players can use weapons, and it's now easier to drive cars and motorcycles. For the story, the first game was about Sam and Cliff, but this time one of the main themes is Lou and what her existence means."

Lou is the Breach Baby or "BB" that Sam carries around in the first game, though here she's now more toddler age. It is interesting Kojima picks out the vehicles: Death Stranding actually allows you to access a motorbike relatively quickly, though that brings its own traversal challenges. I thought the first game hit a nice balance of vehicles having real utility while also not trivialising how you get across the map, and I'll be curious to see if the sequel still manages to make the walking as impactful as it could feel in the first game.

Another open world element that casts Kojima's thoughts back to bygone times is the day and night cycle, though here the comparison comes from the very end of the Metal Gear series and the stupendously good Phantom Pain.

"We did [a day/night cycle] in Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain as well, but I wanted to properly include the passage of time in an open world," says Kojima. "Gazing at the sky as the sun rises and sets is something that couldn’t been done in the first game, in part due to engine-related reasons, but it's been put into the sequel."

Kojima goes on to discuss some specifics of lighting changes and his desire to control exactly how specific scenes look rubbing up against the dynamism of this system ("this is a game, not a movie").

"We also included the option to go to bed and wait for the morning before leaving," finishes Kojima. "This is something we've been sure to include because I imagine there will be players that don't want to travel at night. Metal Gear Solid 5 had a system where you could smoke to advance time, but this game does it in more natural ways, like going back to bed in a private room after waking up once."

I don't think you could get more natural than the Phantom Cigar, which always made me smile thanks to its "woooah-oooh" music and fast-forward effects, but good to know anyway that we'll have some control over when we do things in Death Stranding 2. Finally we come to what looks to be the biggest distinction between this and the original game, which is the emphasis on combat.

"It's not that I'm simply pushing combat," says Kojima. "The game is still fundamentally about cargo delivery, but combat has become more flexible. Some of the staff on Death Stranding 2 worked with me on the Metal Gear series, so there were times when people worried that it was getting a little Metal Gear-ish. My personal explanation for it is that we simply pursued more enjoyable combat. This is actually connected to the theme of 'we should not have connected.'"

Erm… so even Kojima's own staff thought it was getting a little bit too much like Metal Gear, but he just thinks that's because it's "enjoyable." Well OK! I mean, MGS5's probably some of the most fun I've ever had in an open world combat game, so bring it on. Kojima also adds that, while stealth is an important element of the game, "that doesn't mean that you will be forced into stealth: I don't even use stealth myself."

Finally I found myself rather amused by the fact that Kojima himself didn't fully engage with the Social Strand System of the first game, which refers to the semi-persistent building that players can engage in across the landscape. I love the idea of this and used it a little to create many smaller elements in the world, but when it came to larger projects like the giant highways I left it to others and just contributed the odd bundle of resources.

"When I play the game myself, I use ladders and make bridges, but I don’t build any of the highways; I just use what someone else made," says Kojima. "That's why I was concerned if people would really make roads themselves when the game came out, but it turned out that a lot of people did nothing but that. That was a pleasant surprise for me. I wanted to make sure that the sequel would have more interesting things to do for those players as well. The monorail is one such element."

Death Stranding 2 really does sound like it could be something special. My love for Kojima's games is no secret, and seeing him once again return to the rich vein of ideas that ran through Metal Gear feels like a long-overdue homecoming. It felt like the acrimonious nature of his split from Konami and the director going solo left him a little fearful of being too explicit about his legacy the first time around, but make no mistake: Hideo Kojima was and will always be Mr. Metal Gear.

We'll have to wait and see how that manifests in the full experience when Death Stranding 2: On the Beach makes its way to PC. But I'm happy to say one thing right now. Good to have you back, Boss.

New information about Death Stranding 2 is a little sparse, unless you count all the celebrity appearances on Hideo Kojima's social media accounts. But Kojima does sprinkle in a couple of details about the upcoming game between his celebrity cameos and movie reviews, like the fact that Death Stranding 2 will have an easy mode.

A Koji10 post, translated by Genki (via GamesRadar), reveals that Death Stranding 2 will have "a new special feature to help players who are not so experienced at action games." This special feature is a boss battle skip, something that will allow players who are less interested in fighting and more interested in the story to just fast forward through the gritty action with ease.

I'd be lying if I said that it doesn't sound appealing. I've been in countless boss fights where I wished that it could all be over with the push of a button, and I could just carry on with my journey. But that mostly happens in FromSoft games, where the whole point is the gruelling boss battles, and I'd be too stubborn to skip them even if I had the option.

But Death Stranding 2 is very different from a FromSoft game. Yes, there are some weird monsters, and the story is, well, creative. But the focus isn't on battles or builds here—it's all about the narrative and experiencing it for yourself. So while the fights in Death Stranding weren't very hard at all, I think it's still a great idea to make said story more accessible to those who perhaps aren't used to facing up against bosses on a regular or semi-regular basis, or just don't want to.

And it's not like you'll miss out on anything important if you choose the easy mode. Yes, maybe you won't get that winner's high from defeating a difficult enemy, but you'll get to read all about your fight afterwards. After skipping the fight, you'll get an image and some text descriptions about the battle, kind of like a short story.

There's a lot of support for the idea, but not everyone is happy about it, for the usual "you cheated yourself" reason. "I don't like it," one player says. "Learning is half the battle. It is okay if they fought on an easier difficulty, but don't take away the whole fight with a novelised scene."

Quite a few others seem to share a similar view, but I really don't see the issue. People should be left alone to experience any game the way they want—the idea that there's only one right way to experience a game is a boring and restrictive way to look at games. Let them skip boss battles, or don't, it's your game.