With less than two months to go now before launch, people are finally getting a solid idea of what playing Hideo Kojima’s next game Death Stranding will actually look like. This week has seen Kojima deep-diving into game at the Tokyo Game Show with a beefy 50-minute gameplay demo, and as it turns out he had even more of it to show off in a follow-up livestream.
Whereas the first livestream provided a generally all-encompassing overview of the open-world gameplay, this time Kojima kept things centered on a single location. This location is a safe-house where players will be able to take their character, Sam Bridges, and take a break from all the strange supernatural things they’ll have to contend with in the world outside.
According to Kojima, players won’t actually play as Sam while in the safe-house, instead interacting with him as a “soul.” In this way, they’ll be able to essentially command him to do things like take a shower, inspect his tools, study up on missions progress, and interact with his mysterious companion, the Bridge Baby, or BB. Players will also be able to engage in more lighthearted activities like making funny faces in front of a mirror that can take pictures of them with the push of a button.
But Sam won’t just be a passive puppet for players to boss around. The demo shows him occasionally directing the player towards where he wants to go, and if cheeky players try to zoom in on certain parts of his body, he will straight-up punch the camera. It wouldn’t be a proper Kojima Productions game if there wasn’t some amount of weird fourth-wall-breaking humor included.
The demo touches upon several other things, but perhaps the biggest shown is the customization aspect of Death Stranding. This will range from things as simple as putting on a pair of sunglasses and changing their color to things with a more tangible effect on gameplay. Since the third-person (and first-person) gameplay in Death Stranding will revolve around delivering packages across the open-world setting, players will be free to customize Sam’s backpack with various items to make him capable of carrying more. Players will only have so much space to add these items, however, so they’ll have to choose how they customize wisely.
There have been two livestreams for Death Stranding at the Tokyo Game Show so far, but Kojima is expected to host one more. What that one will show, fans can only guess, though it’ll likely have a lot to share like the previous two. Kojima Productions has been generous with information in the past month, which is definitely nice for the fans after years of nothing but enigmatic cinematic trailers giving more questions than answers.
Death Stranding releases on November 8 for the PlayStation 4.