Stranded Again, but Unable to Escape an Auteur's Themes
This is Lou, the child Sam saved at the end of Death Stranding by freeing her from an embryonic pod. Lou is a toddler now, at the mercy of Sam's clumsy single-dad shenanigans. You spend the first few hours of Death Stranding 2 toting Lou around in a custom harness, taking extra care not to trip while navigating pitched inclines. You watch as Sam cooks her breakfast, sings her lullabies and distracts her with toys.
This touching sequence is cut short, unfortunately, so that the real game can begin. When Lou is taken away from Sam (Norman Reedus), he is thrust back into the deeply familiar role of a porter designated with reconnecting a bunch of estranged cities and bunkers. Like in the first game, most of the action of Death Stranding 2 involves making solitary, perilous deliveries — across mountains, through forests, over rivers — in order to rebuild a world torn apart by its returning dead.
Though Death Stranding 2 has Sam connecting the forts and outposts of a ravaged Australia rather than the United States, its format remains the same. The game is less a sequel than a reiteration.
Many of these story beats overlap with those of the game's 2019 predecessor. There's still Sam's ambivalent relationship to power and his reluctant, if inevitable, obedience to shadowy figures and organizations who wind up revealing their true nature in the third act (a staple plot device of the series' auteur director, Hideo Kojima). The dastardly Higgs Monaghan, playfully embodied by a returning Troy Baker, appears intermittently to foil Sam's steady advancement. There are even occasional visits to an alternate dimension where Sam must do battle against a mysterious man with sad, beautiful eyes; Neil Vana (Luca Marinelli) takes over the position that Cliff Unger (Mads Mikkelsen) ably filled the last time around.
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