If you ask me, Hideo Kojima is inarguably the king of the video game trailer. Going as far back as that incredible Metal Gear Solid 2 E3 trailer, his trailers have been jam-packed affairs that build excitement for whatever mad stuff he’s working on this time around. I would watch those Metal Gear Solid 5 trailers on a near-daily basis while waiting for it to come out. And the latest Death Stranding 2 trailer was no different; the action-packed gameplay trailer instantly shot the game right to the top of my most anticipated games list. But even though details like the new Solid Snake and a reference to a Gackt MGS2 slipcase have been noticed by fans, Kojima clearly wants fans to find more.
"If you look closely at the game system, there are a number of clues," Kojima said in a tweet posted earlier today. While he didn’t go into too much detail about what he wants people to find in the trailer, he did give one clue. "For example, the SSS highways — you will see that some areas have a roof." Now, I’m pretty attuned to Kojima’s cryptic nonsense, but I don’t really know what the significance of highways having roofs now is. Perhaps we’ll be able to create tunnels between islands instead of taking a boat like in the original?
The other clue was a bit more interesting, however. Kojima said, "Also, the structures glow brightly like convenience stores at night." That in itself isn’t exactly interesting – outside of perhaps implying the world is in a much better place that stores can exist (but maybe I’m taking it too literally) – but it's those last two words, ‘at night.’
While Death Stranding had weather effects with the Timefall rain, one thing it was notably missing was a day/night cycle. The trailer itself did show some scenes at night, but it was unclear if these were set-piece moments (like the battlefield chapters) or part of the standard open-world gameplay. We’ll need to wait and see.
Kojima recently said he needed an actor to surpass Mads Mikkelsen for the role of Neil in Death Stranding 2, which is how he landed Luca Marinelli for the game.
