For once, the unflappable Hideo Kojima was overwhelmed. Even close to four decades of game-making experience didn’t prepare him for his biggest tribulation so far: developing Death Stranding 2: On the Beach during the covid-19 pandemic.

“I thought I can’t pull this off. [I can’t] meet people or scan people, or shoot with people. I almost gave up. And also the staff were all remote, and I became sick as well. I thought it was just the end of the world,” he says through an interpreter as part of a group interview in Sydney. “I’ve been creating games throughout my career, but Death Stranding 2 was the most difficult challenge.”

Even his initial scouting of Australia, where Death Stranding 2 is predominantly set, had to be carried out remotely via Zoom, with Kojima painstakingly directing a local contact to document the landscape on his behalf. “Looking at it from a camera and to be there is totally different, so that’s disappointing.”

For Kojima, those experiences led to a different approach for the sequel. His own sense of isolation that arose from having to develop Death Stranding 2 with a remote team saw him reconsidering its tale – yet it’s also this isolation that led to Koj …

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