On The Beach About Metal Gear?

As an avowed Hideo Kojima opp, I watched the newest Death Stranding 2: On the Beach trailer with a mixture of confusion and annoyance. True to form, the meandering ten minute pre-order trailer was packed with bizarre imagery, strange and stilted lines of dialogue that make no sense out of context (and probably won’t even with context), and new and familiar characters yelling at each other and/or making out. I still have no idea what this game is about, but at the very least, it looks cool.

My experience of watching the trailer was, as I said, largely negative. I sank increasingly deeper into my chair as it dragged on. I sighed, multiple times. My partner, who was in the room, said, “It’s still going?” And then I saw it, the thing that I’m sure made many Kojima die-hards Leo point at their screens and cheer. Even I, a person who’s never played a Metal Gear game, recognised it, but instead of reacting with excitement, I groaned. “There’s no way,” I said out loud. The madman put Solid Snake in his game.

There’s a lot that ties Metal Gear and Death Stranding 2 together. For one, you have eyes, use them to look at the trailer. Much of it focuses on Neil, a new character who seems to be some kind of operative who’s called to smuggle pregnant women across the United States-Mexico border.

At the end of the trailer, he takes the bandana he’s wearing around his neck and wraps it around his head, looking a hell of a lot like Solid Snake. He then emerges from a burning church with a squad of soldiers who appear to also be on fire. Flickering lighting shows all these soldiers intermittently appearing as skulls, implying that they’re… dead? Who knows.

On top of that, the actor who plays Neil, Luca Marinelli, was actually posted by Kojima on Instagram many years ago, when he said Marinelli would be “a spitting image of Solid Snake” if he wore a bandana. Moments after this scene, a giant creature with the head of a mech that resembles Metal Gear are shown.

But wait, there’s more, apart from references in the first game. The new cover art looks like Metal Gear Solid 2’s Japan-only box art, which features Japanese popstar Gackt, who also appeared in commercials for the game many years ago. Coincidence? Absolutely not. There are no coincidences with Kojima.

What On Earth Is Kojima Trying To Say?

Okay, Neil is obviously some kind of stand in for Snake. But what does it all mean? Is Death Stranding 2 partly a eulogy for Kojima’s iconic series? Is it an exploration of Kojima’s contentious split with Konami, which has kept Metal Gear alive without his input after he started his own studio? I could not, for the life of me, even begin to form a coherent theory. Again, we still don’t really have any idea what this game is about or what happens in it. It’s incomprehensible, as always.

But when I saw this scene, I couldn’t help but tie it to the line that keeps popping up in the game’s trailers: we should never have connected. Then there’s one of the early scenes in the trailer, in which a woman tells Neil, “This thing between us, it was a mistake.” Neil replies, angrily, “No, it was not a mistake. It was not a mistake.”

Again, I’m just pulling stuff out of the air, drawing connections like Charlie Kelly with Pepe Silvia. Nothing makes sense. What I do know is that, characteristically, Hideo Kojima will approach this with all the delicacy of a sledgehammer and all the clarity of a brick wall. He’s settled on his imagery, and he’s going to bash us over the head with it, and we’re probably going to thank him for it. God, I hate everything about this, and that’s even before it dominates the discourse in June, only to be supplanted by Grand Theft Auto 6’s launch.

Systems

Released

June 26, 2025

ESRB

Mature 17+ // Violence, Blood and Gore, Partial Nudity, Strong Language

Publisher(s)

Sony Interactive Entertainment