Star-packed, Covid-shaped 'Death Stranding 2' drops this week
Japanese video game legend Hideo Kojima releases "Death Stranding 2: On the Beach" this week, a star-studded PlayStation sequel inspired by the Covid pandemic.
Kojima has said the follow-up to the meditative 2019 game, in which "Walking Dead" star Norman Reedus played post-apocalyptic deliveryman Sam Porter Bridges, is "about connection".
"The social situation was that everyone was divided" when development began on "Death Stranding" in 2016, Kojima said as he presented the new instalment at Los Angeles' Summer Game Fest on June 8.
"I said, let's get connected. Right after that, we had the pandemic, and my fiction became a little reality" as people communed over new digital channels, he added.
"Death Stranding 2", which drops Thursday, reflects Kojima's hope that people will rediscover analogue ways of being together following the years of isolation, he said.
The first "Death Stranding" was a hybrid between a hiking simulator and a classic action game.
It was set in a gloomy, fantastical science-fiction universe where characters are aged by the rain and carry foetuses that warn them of dangerous ghostly creatures nearby.
Reedus's character Bridges had the job of reconnecting the last outposts of civilisation in a devastated United States following a disaster.
This time Bridges's adventures will bring him to Mexico and Australia, in a story that 61-year-old Kojima -- creator of the equally fantastical "Metal Gear" stealth action saga -- said was completely rewritten in light of Covid-19.
"I already had the DS2 idea but I had to scratch that off because I experienced the pandemic. So I rewrote," he said.
"It's a new connection... I put that in the game system and I want everyone to experience that," Kojima added.
French actor Lea Seydoux -- a star of films like James Bond adventure "No Time to Die" or Quentin Tarantino's World War II romp "Inglourious Basterds" -- returns in 3D form alongside Reedus.
But new big-name talent is also along for the ride, including American actor Elle Fanning and the likeness of "Mad Max" director George Miller.
French singer Woodkid composed the score for the new episode.
Kojima Productions, the eponymous studio the developer founded in 2015 after leaving Japanese giant Konami, said in March this year that the first "Death Stranding" had more than 20 million players.
The franchise is also broadening to other media, with a feature film and an animated film in development with American studio A24.
Kojima is already turning his bottomless energy to other projects, including a horror game, "OD", co-written with American director Jordan Peele ("Get Out", "Nope") and developed in partnership with Microsoft.
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Daily Maverick
3 hours ago
- Daily Maverick
La Ronde: Seduction, sex and ennui as a comedy merry-go-round
At the Baxter in Cape Town, a young, energetic cast puts a fresh spin on a play that once caused riots. The result is a hot, funny take on sex as a commodity in the never-ending game of human intercourse. Director Leila Henriques' 2025 revisitation of Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen opens with a bang, although not the kind you'd anticipate from a play that is basically a series of sexual trysts, each one prologued by some or other power game involving seduction, coercion, insistence or out-and-out trickery. While there is plenty of sex throughout this play about how playing the game is often far more entertaining than actually scoring, it's actually the opening dance scene that feels closest to a full-blown human orgy. Tempered by astute choreography and performed with intense sauciness by the ensemble, this joyous, energising romp made me want to jump out of my seat and join the giddy, propulsive spectacle. It was in many ways the biggest seduction scene of them all, and I certainly wanted in on whatever was coming next. There's so much heat in that opening scene, in fact, you wonder where the cast's stamina for the ensuing vignettes of sexually motivated power games will come from. But it's more than a mere attention-grabber. The throbbing music combined with the manner in which these fine actors dance and jive not only sets the scene, but says plenty about the moment we're in. This club's beats-per-minute are sky-high and given the rapturous state of the dancers, they're presumably high too. There's a sense of them being caught up, that they're in step with a beat so fast, so furious, so motivated by what's coming next that there's unlikely to be a pause to appreciate the moment. It's as if the human souls that dwell within these flesh-and-blood characters are not entirely home. Whether they're high on drugs, hormones, lust, competitive spirit or simply high on life is neither here nor there. It's said that we live in an age of distraction, and yet here's a cast of laser-focused actors determined to hold the attention of an audience for whom sitting still and paying attention is anathema, runs counter to the prevailing obsession with more, more, more. Playing at the Baxter until 12 July, La Ronde, which shares its name with the beautifully dreamy Max Ophüls French film version of Schnitzler's play made in 1950, has been reimagined for a younger generation, one that – thanks to the pervasiveness of information these days – means there's very little you can do or say that's likely to shock or surprise. Communal contemplation Except that, when you do in fact do or say or show certain things, those young people do in fact gasp and titter and loudly suck in their breaths. Theatre's power is in the ritual of the shared space, the communal contemplation of ideas and thoughts and experiences, and there is something in the candidness of actually uttering ideas out loud that still has the power to infiltrate even the most blasé imaginations and seen-it-all-before minds. Henriques has dragged Schnitzler's original German-language play happily and bawdily into 2025, and she has found relevant touchpoints for a generation of know-it-alls, transforming a play from a buttoned-up Victorian era into an energised romp that is both accessible and entertaining. And pretty steamy, too. In the process of having Schnitzler's 1897 text leapfrog into 2025, it bypasses much of what has happened in the intervening century-and-a-quarter, though. When Schnitzler first wrote it, the mere idea of openly expressing lustful longing or talking publicly about sexual hook-ups was scandalous. When, in Berlin in 1920, the play was officially performed for the first time (there'd been an earlier unofficial performance in Budapest), a riot ensued. A show in Vienna in 1921 did not go down well at all; Schnitzler was compelled to ban his own play after he was charged with obscenity, and he was subjected to all sorts of public abuse, shamed as a so-called 'Jewish pornographer'. And this in response to a play in which any scenes of actual sex are entirely left to the imagination. Not so in Henriques' version. These days, the merry-go-round ride of sexual dalliances, far from bothering with innuendo and euphemism, is replaced by blunt and blatant tableaux of various forms of intercourse, oral sex and other bedroom pleasures and predilections, fetishes and misadventures that leave little to the imagination. We get, in fact, just enough of a hint of something borderline explicit without edging into the pornographic. If anything, these brief vignettes take on a comic energy, as if the audience is expected to subconsciously measure the distance between what's happening on stage and some altogether more graphic version of it that's already been witnessed elsewhere (an online meme, a film, a photo, actual porn). In other words, part of what gets a giggle or guffaw from the audience is that moment of shared awkwardness in response to seeing images from our over-represented private world reproduced by actors who are merely simulating a sex scene already witnessed elsewhere. It means that while La Ronde is a work of entertainment and a provocation for us to pay attention, it is also living evidence that we are no longer in uptight Europe of the 1920s, or even in an Ophüls movie from the middle of the last century. At the same time, it's perhaps a reminder that we are just as repressed as ever, trapped by our inexplicable obsession with sex. And that while such charged-up depictions of sex aren't likely to cause a riot or evoke scandal, they still speak volumes about our secret desires, our quietly repressed fantasies, our capacity to judge others in their chosen moments of bliss. The difficulty of doing this play effectively today links back to that opening dance scene, which instantly signals that we're not in Europe circa-1897 but in a contemporary world in which multitudes of sexual partners can be sourced via the swipe of a finger across a tiny screen. Casual sex today is so ordinary, so matter of fact, that the play's only truly shocking scene is an evocation of date rape, one which feels remarkably like a public service announcement, as though the depiction of some older 'gentleman' adding a drug to his victim's drink comes across as a kind of warning or reminder to the audience to 'be careful'. It's a crazy moment of near-documentary-style playmaking that's so different from, from example, Ophüls' 1950 film version in which the 'victim' completely turns the tables on the older gentleman, downing as much Champagne as possible so that she can, she says after the fact, blame her sexual indiscretion on the booze rather than on her willingness to be seduced. Not only has the moral centre shifted, but our world today is also one in which the HIV pandemic decades ago affected how people choose to sleep around and with whom. A major undercurrent in Schnitzler's play was that the carousel of sexual partners was effectively about venereal disease, that each of the encounters meant whatever STD the prostitute in scene one is carrying will almost certainly get passed along the daisy chain of romantic liaisons. That sort of warning nowadays seems almost old-fashioned. We are so familiar with every kind of proclivity, fixation and fetish, every sexual compulsion, all the possible genres of erotic desire and fascination, not to mention strategies of seduction, that the challenge for this show is to find newness where, quite frankly, there is barely anything left to excavate or scavenge. Is it weird that, more often than not, it was the non-sexual antics that I found a turn-on? Flipping the lid Moments such as that opening dance scene, with its compelling, compulsive, impulse-firing choreography? Or the outfit worn by Lyle October as he performed a gender-fluid character who flips the lid on Schnitzler's too-heteronormative original ('they' would have been 'she' if they'd stuck with the original)? 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I initially thought this was a criticism, that – yes – the strands linking each of the scenes could be cleaned up, tamed, better ordered and organised. But, upon further reflection, I think it's the messiness of it all that I liked best about this play. The sweat, the randomness, the wild costumes, the DJ who is there but (unlike the narrator in the Ophüls film) has no purpose other than to witness and hand out props, the mysteriousness of what it is that attracts one person to another, or makes them desire or lust or wish to dominate, humiliate, control, toss aside. It's the sadness in the eyes of the prostitute (played with such grace by Berenice Barbier), the banality of the overly-wordy speeches of the husband (played by Carlo Daniels), and the heartless self-gratification of Lyle October's soldier who, 24-hour pass in hand, is on a mission to screw as much as possible before he must return to barracks. Humans are messy, sex is messy, but nothing is messier than trying to make sense of it. Without the mess and the muck, we'd have no stories, no merry-go-round tales, and probably no reason to spend time in a theatre. DM
eNCA
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'Cezanne at home': show retraces artist's roots in southern France
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eNCA
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Trout Fresh, Waa Wei win Taiwan's top music awards
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