Death Stranding

Death Stranding is a 2019 action game developed by Kojima Productions. It is the first game from director Hideo Kojima and Kojima Productions after their split from Konami in 2015. It was published by Sony Interactive Entertainment for the PlayStation 4 in November 2019 and by 505 Games for Windows in July 2020. A director’s cut version was released for the PlayStation 5 in September 2021, followed by a release for Windows in March 2022.

The game is set in the United States following a cataclysmic event which caused destructive creatures to begin roaming the Earth. Players control Sam Porter Bridges (Norman Reedus), a courier tasked with delivering supplies to isolated colonies and reconnecting them via a wireless communications network. Alongside Reedus, the game features actors Mads Mikkelsen, Léa Seydoux, Margaret Qualley, Troy Baker, Tommie Earl Jenkins, and Lindsay Wagner, in addition to the likenesses of film directors Guillermo del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn as supporting characters.

Death Stranding is an action game set in an open world, and includes asynchronous online functions. Kojima refers to Death Stranding as the first “strand game”, an original genre characterized by the game’s incorporation of social elements. Kojima compared this genre to how his earlier game Metal Gear—now considered a stealth game—was called an action game during its release because the stealth genre had not been established.