Death Stranding 2: On the Beach review – a hypnotising art-house game with an A-list cast

This is a mystifying and provocatively slow-paced game with more celebrities than you would find on a Cannes red carpet
PS5; Sony / Kojima Productions

What is Death Stranding 2 trying to say? It's a question you will ask yourself on many occasions during the second instalment of Hideo Kojima's hypnotising, mystifying, and provocatively slow-paced cargo management simulator series. First, because during the many long and uneventful treks across its supernatural vision of Mexico and Australia, you have all the headspace in the world to ponder its small details and decipher the perplexing things you just witnessed. And second, because the question so often reveals something profound.

That it can stand up to such extended contemplation is a marker of the fine craftsmanship that went into this game. Nobody is scribbling down notes to uncover what Doom: The Dark Ages is getting at or poring over Marvel Rivals' cutscenes for clues, fantastic as those games are. It is rare for any game to invite this kind of scrutiny, let alone hold up to it. But Death Stranding 2 is a different kind of game, one with the atmosphere and narrative delivery of arthouse cinema, light of touch in its storytelling but exhaustive in its gameplay systems, and the tension between the two makes it so compelling. At first you brave one for the other; then, over time, you savour both.