Latest news with #postApocalyptic
Geek Tyrant
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
Trailer for the Mystery Horror Thriller WOKEN - "Open Your Eyes. Fear the Future." — GeekTyrant
Dark Sky Films has released the trailer for its mystery thriller Woken , about a woman who wakes up from an accident with no memory of who she is, and the human race is on the verge of extinction. The synopsis reads: 'In a post-apocalyptic world, this isle provides a safe haven from a pandemic that has decimated earth. Anna (Erin Kellyman) wakes up pregnant and unable to remember who her husband is. 'Nor does Anna recognize Helen and Peter who are supposedly helping her get her health back. Disbelief in what she is being told leads to a horrible revelation and Anna having to contend with existential issues brought on by man's destruction of the planet.' This looks interesting enough to make me want to check it out. It seems to have Children of Men vibes, but leans into horror. The movie is directed by Alan Friel, making his feature directorial debut and it will be released in select theaters and on VOD starting July 18th, 2025.
Yahoo
29-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
28 Years Later: 17 Behind-The-Scenes Secrets You Probably Didn't Know
28 Years Later has been in cinemas for just over a week, but it's fast becoming one of the most talked-about cinematic events of the year. Landing rave reviews from critics and a great reception at the box office, the long-awaited latest instalment in Danny Boyle's iconic post-apocalyptic horror franchise has most definitely lived up to the hype. Starring Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ralph Fiennes and newcomer Alfie Williams, the third instalment in the series follows a survivor community living on an island, before some of the group leave to uncover the secrets and horrors that lie on the mainland. And this is only the first in a whole new trilogy continuing the story, with sequel 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple having already been shot and due for release early next year. To tide you over before then, though, here are 17 behind-the-scenes secrets about how the new movie was made… The Oscar-winning director famously shot 2002's 28 Days Later on digital cameras, giving the movie its distinctive grainy look and kinetic urgency. But for the new sequel 28 Years Later, the Trainspotting director went for something a little different. According to IGN, certain sequences were shot with iPhones, sometimes using as many as 20 at a time. Danny described that method of shooting with a rig as 'basically a poor man's bullet time', referencing the iconic slow-mo effect pioneered by The Matrix. 'Wherever, it gives you 180 degrees of vision of an action, and in the editing you can select any choice from it, either a conventional one-camera perspective or make your way instantly around reality, time-slicing the subject, jumping forward or backward for emphasis,' he said. 'As it's a horror movie, we use it for the violent scenes to emphasise their impact.' While the director outlined the technical reasoning for shooting on iPhones, there was also another important consideration that motivated his decision-making. 'Filming with iPhones allowed us to move without huge amounts of equipment,' Danny told Wired in an interview. 'A lot of Northumbria looks like it would have looked 1,000 years ago. So we were able to move quickly and lightly to areas of the countryside that we wanted to retain their lack of human imprint.' While this was seemingly partly a creative decision, it feels like a particularly significant choice from the director, whose 2000 movie The Beach infamously drove tourists to the picturesque Thai island where it was filmed and caused significant coral reef damage. View this post on Instagram A post shared by 28 Years Later (@28yearslatermovie) 28 Years Later's grim Bone Temple site featuring a towering pyre of human skulls took around six months to construct, with the design team using over 250,000 replica bones and 5,500 skulls, according to Time Out. This set was located in Redmire, a village and civil parish in North Yorkshire, with production designer Carson McColl claiming: 'There was something about that location that felt that it's remained unchanged for a long, long time'. It may have come as a bit of a surprise to cinemagoers to see Northumberland's famous Sycamore Gap tree briefly featured in one scene, given that it was felled in an act of vandalism in 2023, resulting in two men being found guilty of two counts of criminal damage. Standing for over 150 years, it was made internationally famous in 1991's Robin Hood: Prince in Thieves starring Kevin Costner. However, as 28 Years Later only began shooting in May of last year, The Beach director revealed how he recreated the tree with the help of some special effects. Speaking to Sky News, he explained: 'It had already been destroyed by the time we came to film, so we recreated it for the same reasons that you see the Queen in this… all the things that have happened to us in the last 28 years have not happened.' The tree stump still stands, which could take another 150 years to return to its former glory. 'So we've recreated it deliberately to say that it was still growing… which is a wonderful tribute,' Danny added. Speaking at a Newcastle gala screening in June, the director hailed the North East region of England as a 'magic' place to make movies. Not only did he describe the area's landscapes as 'spectacular', he revealed that one location in particular drew him up North for 28 Years Later. 'The first reason we're here is Holy Island,' he explained, according to Cultured North East, referring to the island also known as Lindisfarne. 'It's a wonderful premise for a story, and the idea of a tidal causeway island is captivating. People get that idea very quickly,' he continued. 'So in many ways it's the perfect setting for this kind of film and this kind of idea.' It goes without saying that Danny Boyle's movies are iconic for their music choices, from Underworld's Born Slippy in Trainspotting to A.R. Rahman's Jai Ho in Slumdog Millionaire. Of course, the music for 28 Years Later was never going to be an afterthought. Scottish hip-hop group Young Fathers were tasked with this mighty responsibility, with Danny describing them as 'sort of like the Beach Boys, but so hardcore' in an interview with Rolling Stone UK. 'It was a huge risk because they'd never done a movie before and it's that thing with any pop group, are you gonna trust the whole movie to them? But you go yeah! Yeah!' Can you remember the last time a movie trailer sent chills down your spine like this one did? The terrifying chant that you hear in the teaser – which also features briefly in the film – is a recitation of the poem Boots by Rudyard Kipling. Kipling's poem was first published in 1903 and was intended to capture the monotony of soldiers marching in war, while the recording used in 28 Years Later is more than 100 years old, recorded in 1915 by the actor Taylor Holmes. Holmes' recitation of the poem starts quite formulaic, but grows more frenzied by the end, and is considered so disturbing that it has even been used by the American military to train soldiers to resist psychological torture, used in what is called SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) schools. Director Danny knew that they'd found the right vibe for the trailer as soon as he heard the chilling poem for himself. 'And then we watched the first trailer that Sony sent us – Alex [Garland] and I remember it vividly – and there was this [recording] on it, and we were like, 'Fucking hell!' It was startling in its power,' Danny told Variety. 'The trailer is a very good trailer, but there was something more than that about that [recording], about that tune, about that poem. We tried it in our archive sequence, and it was like it was made for it.' The recording made its way into the trailer on the suggestion of Megan Barbour, then director of music at the Buddha Jones agency, who knew the recording via someone who had actually been in the SERE training. 'We wanted to work off the strength of the visuals and didn't want a lot of dialogue,' David Fruchbom, Sony EVP of global creative advertising, told Variety. 'Buddha Jones [submitted] three different teaser trailers, and the one that had 'Boots' was clearly the way to go.' With more than 80% of the film being shot at North East locations including Holy Island, Hexham and Waskerley in County Durham, 28 Years Later provided an opportunity for locals to be in the movie. Among extras was Hexham town councillor Roger Higgin, who told the Hexham Courant: 'It was a great experience, and it's fabulous that so much of the region provided the locations and the cast. I'm confident it'll be an amazing film.' Another extra called Peter Thompson put himself forward for the opportunity because he heard casting was looking for runners and cyclists. 'I do a lot of cycling around South West Northumberland,' he shared, being chosen as one of the 'infected'. A supermarket worker called Laura Fulguzi was stacking shelves in Asda when she got the message that she'd been selected, according to the BBC. With the movie taking place nearly three decades after the rage virus infected society in his original story, Danny highlighted the logic behind one very key detail. 'I mean, if you're recently infected, you'd have some clothes, but if you've been infected for a long time, the clothes would just disintegrate with the way that you behave,' he told People. In other words, the infected are naked. However due to the presence of now 14-year-old Alfie Williams in the movie, fully naked actors were not allowed on set under the Child Sex Offences Act. 'We never knew that going in, it was a nightmare,' Danny added. 'Interestingly, because there was a 12-year-old boy on set, you're not allowed for anybody to be naked, not really naked, so they look naked, but it's all prosthetics,' he elaborated. That only came to light during a conversation with the intimacy coordinator on the set. 'So it's like, 'Oh my God,' so we had to make everybody prosthetic genitals.' When the trailer for 28 Years Later arrived, excited fans believed they had spotted an infected character who bore an uncanny resemblance to Cillian Murphy – who, of course, starred as bicycle courier Jim in 28 Days Later. Before this was debunked, the internet ran wild with fan theories, suggesting that his character had succumbed to the virus in the new version of the story. Speaking to Empire, Danny admitted that he waved away concerns that people might mistake the mystery character for Cillian. 'I showed my girlfriend the trailer and she said, 'People will think that's Cillian.' I said, 'Don't be silly,'' he said. 'I ignored her. So I've eaten a bit of humble pie since.' First there was 28 Days Later, then 28 Weeks Later (directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, while Danny stayed on as executive producer). Surely the logical sequel would be 28 Months Later? Well, that was definitely a possibility at one point. 'There was a time when Months was absolutely on the table,' writer Alex Garland told Polygon. He even wrote a script under that name, but his relationship with the director became rocky after they worked together on the 2007 movie Sunshine together, before they later patched things up again. Speaking to NME in a 2022 interview for the anniversary of 28 Days Later, Cillian himself noted that completing the trilogy could be tricky: 'I think there's a problem with that, in that I'm 20 years older…' However they seem to have solved that problem by going with Years, instead, but we don't know how much was carried over between scripts. It might be the last movie you'd expect to influence a zombie thriller in 2025, but Ken Loach's iconic 1969 coming-of-age drama Kes was a big inspiration to writer Alex Garland. 'I ripped off this film called Kes, a very unexpected thing to rip off in a zombie movie,' he explained in an interview with ScreenRant. 'The script I delivered and Kes, both focused on the experience of a young lad, and because I am ripping it off, I wanna direct people to the source material.' We know scouser Jodie Comer is a master of accents, but when it came to playing a Geordie in 28 Years Later, she turned to inspiration in a very unlikely place. Speaking in an interview with Elle last year, the Killing Eve star revealed that she'd been watching old clips of Cheryl Tweedy from ber X Factor days to prepare. Jimmy Savile and 28 Years Later are two things you would never expect to find in the same sentence. Yet, in the new movie there's a truly wild twist that references the disgraced media personality (yes, seriously). At the end of the film, 28 Years Later introduces Jack O'Connell as cult leader Sir Jimmy Crystal. Jimmy and his followers can be seen wearing white-blond wigs and tracksuits, bearing a striking resemblance to the late presenter who, after his death in 2011, was accused of sexually abusing hundreds of people, including children. According to Danny, that's completely intentional, explaining to Business Insider: 'He's as much to do with pop culture as he is to do with sportswear, to do with cricket, to do with the honours system. 'It's all kind of twisting in this partial remembrance, clinging onto things and then recreating them as an image for followers.' 'He's a kaleidoscope, isn't he?' writer Alex noted, referring to the movie character. 'A sort of trippy, fucked up kaleidoscope.' Early on in the film, we see a young Jimmy watching Teletubbies in a group of children before the 'infected' break in and wreak havoc. As he makes his escape, the boy contemplates bringing a Power Rangers toy with him, but ultimately leaves it behind. When we see Jimmy and his followers, many have pointed out that their fight sequences references both Teletubbies and Power Rangers in a crossover no one could have predicted. After years of speculation about whether the 28 Days Later franchise would be revived at all, Danny Boyle has since confirmed his plans for a brand new trilogy. The next film, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, was actually filmed back-to-back with the new movie, and is currently slated to come out 16 January 2026. The Marvels writer Nia DaCosta will be directing that one in place of Danny (who is staying on as a producer), with Alex Garland having once again written the script. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Danny explained that it would have been 'insane not to' shoot consecutively, due to practical and financial considerations. 28 Years Later is in cinemas now. 28 Years Later 'Alpha' Chi Lewis-Parry Answers Everyone's 1 Big Question About The Film 28 Years Later Director Explains Why New Film Reverses Major Plot Point From Previous Sequel 28 Years Later Viewers Are Still In Shock From That Teletubbies Callback In The Wild Final Scene
CBC
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Death Stranding 2's delivery game world is even stranger than before. It almost works
Sam Porter Bridges is having a day. His off-road delivery vehicle — which looks like a Zamboni with shock absorbers and all-terrain wheels — is trudging slowly across the rocky, sandy plateaus of Australia when a small earthquake suddenly hits. A boulder about the size of the off-roader crashes into it from above, tossing Sam out of his seat. Dozens of items stored inside, from critical medical supplies to misplaced children's toys, are strewn across the ground. Sam — played by Norman Reedus, digitally recreated in astonishingly precise detail — groans as he gets to his feet. He picks up every item from the ground and throws them back into the off-roader, now dented and covered in dust, before getting back on his route. This is the essence of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, being released Thursday. It's the latest game for the PlayStation 5 by longtime video game director Hideo Kojima and his studio, Kojima Productions. If the idea of playing as a futuristic Amazon delivery worker sounds tedious and boring, that's because it is — by design. Through that tedium, however, it can become a solemn, thought-provoking meditation for its players on the nature of human connection. Unfortunately, Kojima's trademark storytelling puts overlong exposition and celebrity over substance, dragging the game down under the oceans of tar that cover his post-apocalyptic setting. WATCH | Does this trailer for Death Stranding 2 make any sense? It doesn't to me The first Death Stranding, released in late 2019, told the story of a world where humans retreated into underground bunkers, each one shut off from the rest of the world. Critics praised Kojima's tale as eerily prescient when, shortly afterward, much of the world was hunkered down during the COVID-19 pandemic, fuelled by deliveries from Amazon and Uber Eats. The world's dreary state is thanks to a phenomenon called the Death Stranding, which unleashed spectres of the dead — known as Beached Things, or BTs — onto the world of the living. If they consume a living human, it sets off a nuclear-sized explosion called a voidout. Fearing total obliteration, civilization fled underground. Sam, a lone porter, was tasked with braving the BTs and other supernatural threats to deliver critical goods and connect the major American cities to the Chiral Network — a sort of internet powered by the afterlife. On the Beach starts about a year later. Sam sets off on a new mission to connect Mexico and later Australia to the Chiral Network, with the help of a crew called Drawbridge. Celebrity sightings Drawbridge's mobile base abounds with familiar faces from Hollywood: Lea Seydoux as a woman named Fragile (former organizer of a porter service for fragile goods); Shioli Kutsuna as Rainy, a woman who summons rain wherever she walks; and Elle Fanning as a mysterious ingenue Tomorrow. The narrative is doled out in short, cryptic scenes that are equally filled with Kojima's love of bizarre imagery and his thundering lack of subtlety. Quiet moments with Fragile and the crew hint at a story with warmth and humanity, shot and digitally choreographed with finesse and beauty betraying Kojima's long-documented love of cinema. But then Dollman (literally a talking doll) will recount everything you've seen, unpacking every intended metaphor to make sure you're not missing a thing. The bloated script does little to express the characters' personalities, instead relaying reams of bone-dry dialogue and proper nouns like a technical manual. A glossary will grow to include hundreds of terms — and you'd better know your Timefall from your Chiral printers if you hope to figure out what any of this is about. More unnerving are the faces that tell you the story along the way. Each lead actor is rendered in state-of-the-art graphical detail, but the technology's emotive range seems extremely limited. Seydoux speaks while frozen in a pensive gaze, and Kutsuna is almost always stuck in an unsettling wide grin. Building roads and bridges — literally Thankfully, you can ignore On The Beach 's insipid plot for hours at a time with Sam's workaday job. And if you grow to enjoy the game's unusual mechanics and missions, you may even like doing it. Most of your time will be walking, climbing and driving from one location to the next, delivering critical goods and connecting people to the Chiral Network. With few distractions, it's easy to get lost in the loop. I spent hours planning delivery routes and picking up lost cargo along the way. And few things in gaming this year are as satisfying as loading building materials like metals and ceramics at a depot, which then 3D-prints a pristine road for you to drive along, making deliveries a joyride instead of a treacherous quest. It's also during the boring missions that Reedus's Sam shows the most personality. When planning out routes, he'll repeat a motto that the worn paths are the safest. If you teeter on the brink of losing your balance but regain your composure, Sam will say, "Yeah, that's how it's done," like a high school football player impressing his coach with a safe play. One of Death Stranding 's quirkiest details is how it connects other players into a sort of network of porters. Structures you build or leave behind, whether they're a simple ladder to climb a steep hill or a bridge to cross rushing rivers, may be seen and used by other players. Everyone's working together to make the treks easier for those who come after — not to mention leaving Likes and neon emojis to encourage fellow players. Short of Splatoon 's social spaces filled with enthusiastic art and graffiti, it's probably the most positive social network around today. Combat is substantially expanded from the previous game, with enemy encampments dotting the landscape and several missions forcing you to infiltrate them, taking out enemies with silenced tranquilizer pistols or menacing electric swords. It harkens back to Kojima's Metal Gear games, which set much of the blueprint for stealth action games. But it's mostly a drag in Death Stranding, as Sam teeters his weapons and equipment on his back while hyper-competent enemies harass him with sophisticated weapons. Death Stranding 2 showcases Kojima Production's greatest strengths and weaknesses. In an industry that constantly walks the tightrope of massive profit and mass layoffs, it's a miracle anyone gets to make a game as esoteric and unbothered by shareholders' expectations as On the Beach. But that doesn't make it inherently fun. As you drive across a mostly barren Australia, players may find it the perfect way to ponder the profundity of human connection that comes with a simple delivery. But if you want a coherent dramatic story that takes less than 50 or more hours to hint at what is even happening, you're better off walking away from this one.
Times
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach review — a stunning triumph
When Hideo Kojima releases a new video game, all eyes are on it. It's like a new Quentin Tarantino film hitting cinemas. It's history. The 61-year-old Japanese games designer made his name at Konami in the Nineties by creating the influential Metal Gear Solid franchise. A messy separation in 2015 led him to establish his own studio. The world expected another game like Metal Gear Solid; instead we got the divisive Death Stranding (2019), a post-apocalyptic walking simulator hailed as a masterpiece by some. Others, including me, thought it painfully meandering and pretentious. Now we have a sequel worthy of the masterpiece mantle (and despite that awful subtitle, On the Beach). Kojima has tweaked tons but has done so without sacrificing emotional complexity and beautiful writing. Death Stranding 2 is simply more engaging to play than its predecessor. He still doesn't want the game to appeal to everyone, though — and it won't. It's self-indulgent and filled with his famous buddies such as the Hollywood director George Miller (Mad Max). It remains bizarre and complicated but this is Kojima at his outrageous best. It's set 11 months after Death Stranding. Our hero, Sam (The Walking Dead 's Norman Reedus), has lost his job as a porter. He hides away with his adopted daughter, Lou, cleaning up her toys and wandering the mountains of Mexico. He's reunited with his pal Fragile (Léa Seydoux) but things go awry. Haunted by visions and grief, Sam goes to Australia via a strange portal. Like the rest of the world, the country is now a desert. Society is fragmented. People mostly appear as holograms. Spectral ghouls called Beached Things lurk in the rocks. Sam is tasked with connecting everyone to the Chiral network — this game's internet — by delivering goods to their camps. With connectivity comes knowledge and so the villains know where people are now. That means conflict and a new emphasis on action, something the first game sorely missed. Aside from traipsing across harsh terrain (which requires careful planning), Sam is armed with shotguns and grenades to wipe out bandit camps. There are shades of Kojima's Metal Gear Solid V in the tactical espionage and stylish shootouts. There are also spectacular battles against giant mechs and monsters, and thrilling set pieces such as a race on a futuristic bike through a burning forest to rescue a kangaroo. Kojima's games are always entrenched in cinema — here we get Denis Villeneuve (Dune) in the sweeping camera shots and David Lynch in the abstract horror. Death Stranding 2 is stunning and everything the first game should have been. ★★★★★ Available on PlayStation 5 from June 26
Gizmodo
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
‘Death Stranding 2' Is Hideo Kojima's Most Refined and Relentless Vision Yet
When Hideo Kojima—the man fashioned into a video game auteur out of his work on Metal Gear Solid—launched his debut title under the newly formed Kojima Productions in 2019, Death Stranding arrived shrouded in mystery and hype. Every Death Stranding trailer was full of cryptic imagery and spectral apparitions, and its stacked cast featuring Norman Reedus, Léa Seydoux, and Mads Mikkelsen set expectations sky-high. It was also first title to come from the creator following a messy and public exodus from Konami. Would Kojima once again rewrite the rules of game design? Upon release, Death Stranding didn't disappoint so much as it defied prediction. At its core, it was an immersive, slow-burning post-apocalyptic courier simulator. Players took control of Sam Porter Bridges, a pulp comics-esque naming convention of a protagonist suffering from aphenphosmphobia, an extreme fear of being touched, tasked with completing a herculean cross country trek across haunted landscapes by plagued by eldritch horrors with the help of a baby in a container on his chest—avoiding environmental hazards and balancing parcels on every available piece of real estate on his body to 'reconnect America.' Reductively, Death Stranding is regarded in gaming circles as a 'triple-A' indie game, with a weird (but not overly confusingly dense) world-building serving as the connective tissue propelling every careful footstep on Sam's odyssey. What Death Stranding lacks in conventional thrills, it made up for with sheer conceptual weight. And yes—it eerily echoed real life in ways no one expected. The game's premise, centered on isolation, bunkered survivors, and the life-or-death role of delivery drivers, landed eerily close to home mere months before the world locked down due to a global pandemic. It was dubbed 'the game that predicted 2020,' not a first for Kojima, and not unfairly. Being a 'big idea game' comes with its own set of challenges. Its narrative often gets buried beneath a slow drip of actual story progression, unraveling across long stretches of gameplay that make the usual open-world promise of 'you see that mountain, you can go there' feel strangely perfunctory. Former Kotaku writer Tim Rogers once likened it to eating your vegetables before dessert, but I'd argue it's closer to gaming's purest example of the carrot-on-a-stick design—except here, the carrot is a 10-minute cutscene stylized as gaming's navel-gazing at wanting to be cinema, and the stick is a seven-hour hike. Kojima's eccentric roster of superpowered, trauma-scarred outcasts occasionally interrupts the lonely, meditative rhythm of traversal with dense lore drops laced in pun-heavy dialogue. At times, it's profound; at others, it teeters dangerously close to groan-worthy. Much of Death Stranding's script leans into Kojima's newfound signature use of homonyms and wordplay—an approach that often thrives in Japanese, a language rich in double meanings and visual punning through kanji. There, it probably lands with layered nuance; in English, it falls somewhere between a dad joke and a freshman poetry slam stanza. Still, despite its long stretches of powerwalking monotony, the challengingly Metal Gear-esque moments of tactical espionage, Monster Energy product placement, and the memes about Norman Reedus and his funky fetus that spawned endless parody, there's a rich, strange beauty to the first Death Stranding. It's a game worth experiencing once, and then revisiting vicariously through those who have dissected its mythos in in-depth essays and lore videos. Its legacy is secured not just as a bold experiment but as a haunting artifact of the pre-pandemic world—one that resonates differently, and maybe more profoundly, in hindsight. Personally, while I appreciated the high-concept ambition of Death Stranding, I struggled with it and ultimately lost interest. It felt more like a conceptual art piece than a fully realized game. An intellectual exercise whose ideas overshadowed the experience and gratification of playing it. As someone who values creative works that marry emotional gravity with speculative cultural context, I often found Death Stranding's narrative throughlines reaching further than they could fully grasp. The worldbuilding fascinated me far more than the story it was built to support. Now, six years later, with Death Stranding 2: On The Beach, set to release later this week, I spent 65 hours to hit the credits (with hours left of pending deliveries still in transit, and roads unbuilt) of the highly anticipated sequel and feel nearly the opposite. Where the first Death Stranding felt like a conceptual mood board come to life, this sequel is more narratively grounded. It's like a musician remixing their greatest hits with a tighter production—fewer self-indulgent lyrical bars, more emotional clarity. Granted, it's still a story that's got its foibles. But this time it lands more often than it drifts into the faux profundity of its predecessor. Set 11 months after the events of the original game, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach picks up with Sam and his bridge baby, Lou, living off the grid. Fragile (Seydoux) arrives on his doorstep with a job that pulls the freelance courier back into the field. This time, the mission is to integrate Mexico into the United Cities of America's ever-expanding chiral network. Essentially, Sam is tasked with lacing up his boots and trekking across the continent, linking his USB dog tag key fob to bunker mailboxes and connecting settlements to their supernatural strand-based Wi-Fi. The game is self-aware enough to admit its familiar call to action—more trekking, more connecting—but framed with a wink. Rebuilding the world, one footstep at a time, shouldn't be too difficult since you've done it before and came out straight… until it is. Just as Sam nears the end of what seems like a modest fetch-quest, the story swerves dramatically, widening its scope to extend the network to Australia as well. From here, the narrative spirals into something far more ambitious, involving the return of Sam's rival Higgs (Troy Baker) and his newfound mech-ghost army, as well as a new antagonist not-so-subtly modeled after Metal Gear Solid's Snake, Neil (Luca Marinelli). Joining Sam on this escalating journey are fresh faces like Tarman (modeled after Mad Max director George Miller), Rainy (played by Deadpool Yukio actor Shioli Kutsuna), Dollman (modeled after director Faith Akin and played by Jonathan Roumie), and a mysterious girl named Tomorrow (Elle Fanning), alongside returning allies liked Deadman (modeled after director Guillermo del Toro and played by Jesse Corti) and Heartman (modeled after Nicolas Winding Refn and played by Darren Jacobs). In Death Stranding 2, managing Sam still feels like you've adopted a rugged, soft-spoken post-apocalyptic Tamagotchi. You're constantly tending to his hygiene with showers and potty breaks to get the blood, dirt, and gunk of the day off his person, recalibrating his loadout in a Tetris-like inventory grid that can quickly collapse like Jenga if a BT±the inky monstrosities that stalk the lands, injecting bursts of pulse-spiking horror into On The Beach's walking sim vibes on a dime—knocks him and his tower of cargo off balance. Between encounters, Sam needs snack breaks—munching stamina-restoring larvae, taking swigs from his canteen, or tapping into blood bags that serve as makeshift health kits during especially sticky scuffles. It's a loop that's both ritualistic and irksome, but weirdly intimate. Once I settled back into its rhythm, carefully balancing weight by holding down triggers, preplanning my cargo, and eyeing every lost parcel, and negotiating whether I should add it to Sam's burden as humanity's pack mule because it's destination is 'on the way,' I started to embrace the strange zen of it all. Unlike my first go-around with its predecessor, there's something endearingly relatable about overloading Sam with gear, teetering under the weight of ambition and generosity like a dad determined to carry all the grocery bags in one go, rather than humoring a second trip. It also didn't hurt that completing deliveries rewarded me with tools to make traversal less tedious by providing me material to construct roads to make traversal less of a pain in the ass, and tracks to add to a playlist so I can whistle as I work (so long as I was in areas I've given chiral network coverage to). This became even more manageable when vehicles and ziplines came into play, turning multi-trip dread into a cross-country trip with a rig built for warfare, or trucker hauls to build more pavement between settlements like I was Dwight D. Eisenhower. Dollman serves as Sam's ever-present companion throughout On the Beach, functioning like a clip-on belt charm meets hiking buddy. He fills the silence of On the Beach's often monotonous walking with commentary, assists with surveillance when attempts at stealth run sideways, and even offers tips when you get sidetracked hyperfixating on building roads, by reminding you of your main objective. He's basically to Sam what Mimir was to Kratos in God of War, but filtered through Kojima's eccentric lens. Whether it's reconnaissance for combat or providing emotional ballast during the journey, Dollman's low-frame-rate presence is as functional as it is oddly comforting. While most of Sam's allies don't accompany you physically, they remain present in quieter, digital ways—checking in through social media-like SMS updates and snapshots of their day-to-day while you're en route to the next locale. These messages arrive as you slog through treacherous terrain, building roads, bridges, and generators across a landscape slowly being shaped by your own hands, like creating natural trails on a nature path, and by the footprints and constructive efforts of other players in the game's online asynchronous network. You can like their structures, read stray bits of encouraging signs, and even borrow their vehicles, creating a soft echo of camaraderie amid the isolation. It transforms what could have been a dreadful, monotonous string of fetch quests into something quietly meaningful. My deliveries and infrastructure work stopped feeling like solo busy work and instead became part of a larger, shared mission—a collective effort tethered to the game's thematic core. What's more, unlike the first game's narrative, which leans more into abstract meditations on connection, Death Stranding 2 is anchored in a leaner, plot-driven momentum, planting seeds of hope as you journey with Sam to his more personal story of overcoming loss and navigating a future for himself. I was reminded, in both subtle story beats and asynchronous multiplayer gestures, that I wasn't hauling this burden alone. Whether it was an anchor left on the side of a mountain that someone else left behind, or a message warning me of hazards on my route, there's a persistent sense that others, virtual or otherwise, had my back when a climb began to feel insurmountable. But among this broader feeling of connection it's Seydoux's Fragile who's the real anchor to On the Beach this time around. She captains Drawbridge, a submersible airship that doubles as the mission's hub and lifeline for Sam's motley crew, making her role feel far more central and emotionally resonant than before. And while Sam's band of allies mostly keep their presence to cutscenes, they're no longer just digital marionettes of Kojima's excessive lore dumps. They feel more like an evolving found family—integrated into the narrative and Sam's mission, not just orbiting around it. There's a greater sense that they're in the trenches with him, not standing on the sidelines posing dramatically for motion capture posterity. If all of the above has sounded overwhelming… it is. Kojima Productions has kept it in mind, with both a recap video that summarizes the broad strokes of its first game to get new and old players up to speed, and the inclusion of an interactive real time glossary that pings on the top right corner of the screen with the introduction of new proper nouns and terms, making it easy for players to keep Death Stranding's ever-expanding lexicon and story developments straight by referring back to Corpus, its heavily annotated virtual database tome. Away from its dense worldbuilding however, from the first frame of Death Stranding 2 Kojima is fully in his cinematic bag. The opening scene of the game is so photorealistic that I had to blink twice trying to decipher when it transitioned from drone footage to an in-engine render of a mountainside, which immediately asked me to walk from the top of a mountain to Sam's hidden abode. Death Stranding 2's tone is rich and indulgent, often bordering on decadent. There's a self-aware messiness to how it picks up the narrative shards of its first game. Some characters, like Mama (Margaret Qualley) and Die-Hard Man (Tommie Earl Jenkins), are benched, while others, like Fragile, are further expanded upon. Most prominently, On the Beach's plot reimagines its linear progression in favor of crafting a new odyssey that is less 'pandemic prophetic' and more centered on connections reinforced by the process of grieving, and rebuilding after suffering a tragic loss. While the game is literally about bringing humanity whole again by your lonesome, this time around its about uniting the entire globe as Sam terraforms Australia and Mexico, building bridges to reconnect the straggling, hikikomori vestiges of humanity. Gameplay-wise, On The Beach continues to oscillate between a meditative hiking simulator and a sprawling cinematic spectacle full of hype moments and aura—the latter dangling like a shiny reward at the far end of a grueling pilgrimage. I routinely tiptoed through ruins, mercenary outposts, and ghost-drenched wastelands, cradling Lou with each stumble or misstep as my carefully stacked tower of weaponry threatened to topple over. Its geometric minefield of picturesque terrain is still as oppressive as it could be in the first, if not more so, as I found myself dangling off cliffsides, braving torrential rivers, and inching up icy escarpments, one calculated movement at a time (albeit often followed by an improvised one). On The Beach is sequel-scaled, yes—but purposeful, not padded. What lands differently this time is Sam himself. He no longer marches forward as the gruff, unflinchingly obedient, and politically agnostic mailman resigned to his fate that he once was. Instead, he surprised me by questioning the very foundation of his mission. Not in intentionally sly (but groanworthy) meta jabs of the first game, where he compares himself to Mario looking for his 'Princess Beach,' but with sincere moral unease. Reconnecting the world doesn't sound as noble when it starts to look like he's just doing the legwork for post-apocalyptic imperialism for America, which he surprisingly calls into question in the game's early stages. The seeds of conflict in On the Beach plant between reconnection and overreach, healing and haunting, and they give it a more chaotic, more human pulse. It's messier, less abstract, and far more emotionally legible than its predecessor. Moment-to-moment, the traversal remains the core attraction of On the Beach. You're not just moving, you're mapping, adapting, and experimenting. Think The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom's improvisation meets Phantom Pain's stealth improvisations when things break bad, and you're suddenly cornered without the proper tools to get from point A to point B. The gunplay combat is still there. Crank the difficulty up a notch to the highest difficulty, and the enemy AI gets surprisingly savvy and savage, allowing for Dishonored-style stealth and tense firefights that feel genuinely earned when you defeat waves of enemies. But that's never really where the heart of On the Beach lies. Where the first game made you slog for hours before it let its story moments rear their head, On the Beach hits its pace faster. While picking up the pieces of global tragedies, such as the pandemic, is still in the DNA of On the Beach's pathos, gone is the heavy reliance on it as an allegory. In its place is something more introspective, present-minded, universal, and grounded than it is speculative. Less 'look how prophetic and smart we were' and more, 'how do we pick up the pieces and properly reconnect?' Once you get used to the terrain puzzles of each of On the Beach's landmarks—when your instincts kick in and the map becomes muscle memory—those fetch quests start feeling therapeutic in a way. The traversal, not the combat, becomes the game's engine. Sure, the Silent Hill-coded BT encounters and MGS-inspired skirmishes inject tension and excitement, but it's the quiet rhythm between them that defines the journey. Sam now feels more like a protagonist in his own story. No longer a cipher for Kojima's pun-laden essays on connection, he finally clicks into place as he navigates the next steps in his journey alongside the mission he's been saddled with. The real drama, while compelling, isn't the firefights with Higgs or sussing out Neil's deal; it's whether Sam has the confidence to trust his legs, his gear, and the chart he's set for his journey. In the lead-up to On the Beach's release, Kojima confessed that early playtest feedback made him uneasy, not because it was negative, but because it was too positive. He purportedly worried the game might come across too mainstream, so made adjustments, presumably with the intent to make Death Stranding's friction more impactful, and occasionally more hostile, to its players. Around the 70 percent mark of the game, I felt the weight of that philosophy first hand, when the somewhat easy sailing of On the Beach's gameplay up to that point turned downright oppressive. There was a moment where I hated the game for a solid five-hour stretch, due to how granularly tedious, and outlandish, the delivery demands became. I still don't entirely love On the Beach having navigated that momentary frustration, either. However, I do appreciate how it made me value the things I didn't like about the first, namely the sense of place earned in Death Stranding's world by navigating it on your own two feet. I would never have imagined the game would have me go from abandoning a tower of weaponry on my backpack, to carrying an emu across a haunted mountain range, gazing from its crest to catch the sunrise, and hearing a rooster crow as if I had reached a sacred checkpoint. It's absurd. It's poignant. It's Kojima. New tracks to add to your playlist cue when near your destination, like divine applause. I started treating Sam like a Tamagotchi—testing his limits, suffering with him, learning to pivot when everything collapses. Your hubris becomes your strategy. Your journey becomes a ritual that I couldn't help but love, albeit in a masochistic sense, as a player. On the Beach's narrative speaks louder and clearer than its predecessor. Its story, while still strange, is more coherent—its symbolism less cluttered by its vocabulary. At times, it plays like a proof-of-concept for Kojima's inevitable foray into filmmaking. But there's beauty in its broken pacing. After surviving that five-hour gauntlet of pure punishment, the final act delivers in spades. Yes, the game is maddeningly back-loaded—but it's worth it. What's most surprising is how Kojima's signature penchant for weirdness, once a shield for abstraction, now feels like scaffolding for something more emotionally grounded. It's tighter, and stronger for it, and even willing to poke fun at itself to show it's learned from experience, to the point there were times I felt like I was sincerely laughing with Kojima, not at his trademark absurdity. On the Beach still demands a ton of patience. It still punishes, but it also rewards, with a narrative that feels sculpted rather than splattered. Where its predecessor felt like a rambling, late-night text, On the Beach is what happens when those thoughts are carved into marble for all to see. The glossary breaks, the combat struggles, the endless geometric trek, and, most of all, the exceptional acting on display from its stellar cast—they all contribute to a finale that lands with surprising elegance. If On the Beach proved anything, it's that Kojima—eccentric, indulgent, brilliant—still knows how to make the absurd feel resonant. This sequel isn't just an echo of the first. It's the payoff. It's the strange, painstaking journey I hoped for the first time around—and somehow, against all odds, it sticks the landing in spite of it all. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach releases on PlayStation 5 June 26. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what's next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
