Video game auteur Hideo Kojima's first game since leaving Konami, Death Stranding, finally has a release date: November 8 for PlayStation 4 consoles. The news came at the end of the game's most revealing "gameplay" trailer yet, though as you might expect from the enigmatic Kojima, Wednesday's trailer raised more questions than it answered.
Yes, we've seen long and utterly confusing trailers for this game before, but this one comes with a semblance of a plot anchor. From what we can tell, the game revolves around a United States that has been torn asunder by some kind of plague or extinction event. The hero, Sam, played by actor Norman Reedus, is asked by the president "to help us reconnect, to make America whole." To which the character Sam replies, "You're the President of jack shit."
Yet clearly Sam is compelled to do something. This trailer shows him generating ladders and ropes to scale rocky cliffsides, getting into melee fisticuffs, hopping on a stylish, three-wheeled military vehicle, stealth-crawling through tall grass and alongside giant tanks, shooting guns, and scanning environments to discover, and stealth-sneak around, spooky creatures made of dust.
We also see Sam remark about a force known as "BTs," which seems to be triggered by rain—and while some faceless soldiers hate the stuff, other creepy characters (like a guy who warps around with magical powers and then licks a woman's face because, uh, Kojima) seem to invite those rains. In Sam's case, that glowing tube-baby we've seen in other trailers seems to be the key to surviving BTs and recognizing spectral forces that float through the stuff, and when the rain comes, Sam plugs the "bridge baby" chassis to his suit to "plug into the other side."