Death Stranding 2 is my favorite online game this year, even though you never directly see any other players

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach might not be the kind of game that jumps to mind when you think of online gaming. After all, this is a delivery adventure where most of the time you're jogging up hills or riding bikes along roads with heaps of packages in your backpack in order to please NPC mission givers. At no point do you see any other players actually playing the game. And yet Death Stranding 2 isn't just one of my favorite online games of the year, but maybe ever.

Often when I think about online games I think about blasting headshots in Call of Duty Black Ops 6. Slurping juice in Fortnite as I dash away from the encroaching circle. Taking shots at the goal from way too far back in FIFA – erm, EA Sports FC 24. Drifting corners in Mario Kart World! Not games like Death Stranding 2 which, on paper, is mostly a story-focused solo journey. Yet here I often feel closer to the player base than I even do in MMOs like Final Fantasy 14.

Should we have connected?

In fact, you can play the entirety of Death Stranding 2 offline. But I simply can't imagine doing so. There was a brief window when I was working on my Death Stranding 2 review where the servers had to go offline for maintenance before it launched. I just couldn't bring myself to keep playing during that time, disconnected from other players – preferring to wait instead.

Death Stranding 2's online features never get in the way, but are wonderfully impossible to avoid as well. Silently matched with other players the game determines to be nearby, your connections will come from how you all affect the world together, shaping a shared experience by simply hoisting your delivery pack onto your shoulders and playing the game.

The most obvious connections are the tools, structures, and resources left behind. Dropped cargo, for instance, will be labelled green instead of blue and have an attached playertag if it's something another player left behind. There's always a warm feeling when approaching a mine to get my mitts on, say, a pile of ceramics, only to find a hefty stash has already been left there by another player. Thank you, friend!

Likewise, deployed ladders and climbing anchors for ascending and descending verticality will, when planted, also appear in the world of others. Almost everything you place this way can be liked by other players, the game giving you a constant feed of who is making use of what. The same goes for larger structures – bridges arcing across wide rivers, ziplines to ease travel across mountains, or generators to keep Sam and his vehicles powered up over long distances.

There's an immense satisfaction to be had in seeing a structure you carefully placed start to do numbers – I knew that was a great place to drop a timefall shelter to protect packages. And it also keeps them from deteriorating due to the timefall rain. If they're useful enough, players will even share resources to upgrade those utilities for everyone. You may return to a generator you placed hours ago only to find it's been supercharged, and that someone has set it to display fun holograms and play pop music.

Of course, you could do a lot of this construction solo. Simply place your own generators for your own exclusive use, or your own ladders. But you're limited with the amount of maximum chiral usage you have access to (kind of like old school The Sims), meaning it'd simply be impossible to build in the same way all on your own without sharing with one another – and it'd make the world feel way less lively.

Likewise, larger, fixed points of infrastructure, such as auto-pavers for stretches of road or for monorail track, require an immense amount of resources to construct. Sure, it's easier than ever to acquire the necessary numbers in Death Stranding 2, but by pooling resources these can be built and maintained much more easily. But beyond the practicality, there's just a greater appeal in contributing to these alongside several players rather than just on your own.

While you'll have to put the resources down to finish most of these off, it's nice to see the odd time where others have helped you out by finishing a complete stretch on their own, or to see notifications that players have been using a stretch of road I helped to complete (IGN France, you're welcome).

In our footsteps

Similarly, extra vehicles are often left by players where you'll need them, or populating garages. You might even find other players have left useful cargo in shared lockers at distribution centers. Players even change the world unintentionally. If enough people walk the same routes, the ground becomes worn down, turning into natural pathways that are also mechanically easier to traverse, and even represented on the map.

It's not just about building things either, as these connections to other players can come in handy when the action peaks as well. While you're often reminded to bring your own weapons right before a boss fight or enemy encounter kicks off in a main mission, you're actually well taken care of by other players – guns, grenades, and health-restoring blood bags often litter these battlefields.

They'll keep coming to help out as well – when the tar surfaces to spew nastiness at you during scuffles, goopy representations of other players also emerge, hoisting up packages to throw your way containing more gear. Level up your APAS enough and you can even use your connections to enable them to share gear you've not unlocked. It felt pretty special to take down one particularly fearsome boss when I ran out of my own ammo by catching a thrown lock-on rocket launcher from another player mid-air, unloading explosives at it for the finishing blow.

That's the kind of experience you can't have playing completely on your own. But simultaneously, Death Stranding 2 allows you to enjoy that feeling of online player connection without having you jump through hoops to join lobbies or parties – it's simply the default state of the world. It's not an in-your-face type of shared player world, but something that feels more subtle and natural, allowing you to stay immersed in its strange world.

While Death Stranding 2 isn't very full-on with the nature of its online play, it's so important to every mechanic in the game, and so completely present at all times, that it's the most I've felt connected to other players in any game. All while keeping us quiet, smiling strangers passing in the night – off on our deliveries, while supporting one another.

Yearn for more direct interaction? Check out our best co-op games!