Death Stranding 2’s new trailer has sent us down the rabbit hole

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach finally has a release date — June 26 — and as he is wont to do, writer and director Hideo Kojima revealed this information in a lengthy trailer of a bunch of the game’s cinematics. As the world’s foremost Death Stranding obsessive, I’ve watched through this footage dozens of times to look for small details that might hint at what the sequel will entail. And now, to convince myself this hyperfixation was necessary for work, I’m sharing the fruits of my labor with you.

Just to be clear: spoilers ahead for Death Stranding, and potential spoilers for Death Stranding 2 (if my predictions are correct).

Neil, aka ‘Fake Snake,’ might be the new Cliff Unger

One of the many new characters appearing in Death Stranding 2 is a man named Neil, played by Italian actor Luca Marinelli. The first time we see him, he’s being interrogated by an unnamed American agent who insists Neil is a criminal for “illegally entering our country on multiple occasions.” (The first Death Stranding was packed with sociopolitical commentary, and this scene similarly reads as a nod to the United States’ real-world hostility toward undocumented people under the first and now second Trump administration.) Neil angrily alludes to doing the country’s “dirty work,” which is revealed in the next scene to be smuggling brain-dead pregnant women across the border from Mexico.

Death Stranding players probably noticed a lot of similarities between Neil’s job and the backstory of Cliff Unger, the soldier with whom protagonist Sam Porter Bridges has several confrontations over the first game’s story. It’s eventually revealed that Cliff is after Sam’s BB — the monster-sensing infant attached to Sam’s suit — because he believes the child to be his own son, who was kept alive by an organization called Bridges through an experimental procedure when his pregnant wife was declared brain-dead following an accident. Cliff tried to escape with his son from the Bridges facility but was killed in the process — a series of events that would ultimately result in the eponymous Death Stranding apocalypse.

If the old-school Bridges logo present in Neil’s scenes is any indication, his early appearances in the trailer take place during a time pre-Death Stranding when the organization was experimenting on children born to brain-dead women as a way to research the world of the dead. In later cinematics, however, Neil is seen suiting up in a uniform reminiscent of Solid Snake from the Metal Gear series and accompanying a group of soldiers through a war-torn city, similar to how Cliff’s afterlife was presented as a perpetual battlefield from which Sam had to repeatedly escape. I think Sam will be confronted by Neil in much the same way, and we’ll learn of this newcomer’s ultimate intentions as the story progresses.

BB won’t be a constant companion, or will at least fulfill different functions

The status of Sam’s Bridge Baby – or BB – who at the end of Death Stranding escapes the confines of her pod and is named Lou is very confusing in the Death Stranding 2 clips we’ve seen so far. In some scenes, Lou’s aged accordingly, while brief bits of gameplay showing Sam either traveling with no BB pod or with one that contains a newborn infant, much like in the first game. Has Sam been supplied with a new BB in Death Stranding 2 now that Lou is free to live as a normal human baby? One might think Sam would hold a negative view of the technology after learning he was the one of the first BBs, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Automated enemies join the goopier ones

At various points in the trailer, Sam can be seen fighting off robotic enemies. One looks octopus-like, mimicking the tarry, mutated sea-life appearance of enemies from the first game. Another appears to be a driverless motorcycle that Sam must dispatch from the back of his own bike. Others are simply humanoid robots.

Debra Wilson’s character has two right hands

Mad TV alum and frequent video game actor Debra Wilson plays a woman named Doctor in Death Stranding 2. Doctor has two right hands. Clumsy dancers are said to have “two left feet,” so maybe Doctor having two right hands means she’s really good at what she does? That sounds like something Kojima would do.

Look at Dollman, oh my god

I just thought this was cute.

Ropes and sticks

Death Stranding opened with a quote from Japanese author Kobo Abe’s “Nawa” — an English translation for which is available here courtesy of Tim Rogers — describing ropes and sticks as two of humanity’s oldest tools. “The stick to keep the bad away, the rope used to bring the good toward us,” Abe explained. “They were our first friends, of our own invention. Wherever there were people, there were the rope and the stick.” And while that first game didn’t delve too deep into Abe’s philosophy, this set of symbols seems to be the crux of Death Stranding 2’s plot.

For example, the logo for Drawbridge, the new organization that appears to be taking Bridges’ place in the story, reads: “Both Stick and Rope, To Protect and Connect. Together, for Tomorrow.” While Death Stranding was very much about the strength of connections, Death Stranding 2 asks if the pains brought about by connecting with those around us are worth the benefits. “A world divided made whole with a few ‘sticks’ for encouragement,” the trailer’s narration says as it nears its climax. “The more we seek to unite the people with metaphorical ropes, the more essential ‘sticks’ seem to become.”

Metal Gear Rex, is that you?

And finally, as Heartman — modeled after Danish film director Nicolas Winding Refn — integrates the tar-sailing DHV Magellan atop the head of a gigantic monster, we can see for the first time the ship looks just like nuke-launching robot Metal Gear Rex from the Metal Gear Solid series.