There are few pleasures in life as rich and thrilling as those offered following the spectacle of a Hideo Kojima game as it crawls into the light. The feints! The sleights! The babies, in the case of Death Stranding, sloshing around in those fluey amber sarcophagi! Kojima is a wonderful game designer, but what he really excels at these days is this. The protracted and bizarro reveal, often employing Geoff Keighley - these are strange times - as the platonic ideal of a straight man.
Death Stranding
Key events
12th June 2018
8th December 2017
The new trailer for Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding is sci-fi craziness at its best
2nd December 2016
Death Stranding's second trailer is even stranger than its first
14th June 2016
The latest trailer for Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding reveals Troy Baker will be joining the English voice cast.
Death Stranding gets lengthy gameplay and story trailer
Seydoux you think it'll be out soon?
"Give me your hand in life... give me your hand in death... give me your hand in spirit." - Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding finally has a gameplay trailer and it's... predictably weird.
The trailer featured a lot of Norman Reedus' character climbing, over hilly, rocky, mossy and mountainous terrain - carrying a big backpack, then what looked like a body, and getting very sore feet.
Lots of atmosphere-building, basically - we could probably expect no less - but the thing to note is that a lot of it was actually gameplay: specifically the hiking and what looked like a stealthy section as Reedus' character sneaks past a swathe of those terrifying, floating enemies using some kind of brilliantly sci-fi dowsing machine powered by a... foetus?
Sony E3 2018 conference live report
Nioh 2, a new Remedy game and a fair bit of weirdness. All of the news as it happened.
Nioh 2, a new Remedy game and a fair bit of weirdness. All of the news as it happened.
Why Hideo Kojima fans reckon Death Stranding is set in Iceland
They're not mossing about.
Hideo Kojima has spent the last week teasing a new trailer for Death Stranding - and now fans think the game is set at least in part in Iceland.
We're getting a new Death Stranding video at E3 in June and creator Hideo Kojima is already teasing the fetus-fuelled game's inevitable star turn at the show.
Well, the good news is, Death Stranding is playable
And Mark Cerny's played it.
That weird Death Stranding trailer - the one with the thumbs up fetus inside Norman Reedus' throat - is rendered in real-time on a PlayStation 4 Pro, developer Hideo Kojima said during the PlayStation Experience.
Hideo Kojima took to the stage at The Game Awards to reveal a new trailer for Death Stranding and it's... well, I'm not sure what it is.
The video stars a virtual recreation of The Walking Dead star Norman Reedus, who along with some other characters faces off against mysterious invisible monsters. At one point we travel inside Reedus' body, via his mouth, and see a baby who gives us a thumbs up. Really.
It's impossible to get a sense of what kind of game Death Stranding is from this latest video, which is a cut scene in classic Kojima style, but there's a definite horror vibe. Death Stranding is published by Sony, so expect it out on a PlayStation console of some description at some point in the future.
Hideo Kojima shows off his fancy new studio
Going indie.
Now superstar video game designer Hideo Kojima has gone indie, he's faced with running his own studio. And what a studio it is.
Guillermo del Toro is not creatively involved “at all” with Death Stranding
“I'm just a puppet in his hands.”
We were all very excited to see Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro appear in the latest trailer for Hideo Kojima's highly anticipated, highly mysterious game, Death Stranding, suggesting that maybe the storied director would be heavily involved in its creative process, just as he allegedly was with the cancelled Silent Hills project. But it looks like that's not the case this time around.
Hideo Kojima has revealed the engine that Kojima Productions will be using for Death Stranding, with the new studio electing to partner with Guerrilla Games and using the Decima engine - as used in the forthcoming Horizon: Zero Dawn.
Death Stranding's second trailer is even stranger than its first
Its a Mads world. And is that... Guillermo Del Toro?
Hideo Kojima just revealed a second trailer for Death Stranding at The Game Awards tonight.
The new trailer confirms what we pretty much already knew: that Hannibal and Men & Chicken actor Mads Mikkelsen will star in it alongside Norman Reedus.
What we didn't know is that the game will feature a character who looks suspiciously like Hellboy director Guillermo Del Toro, who was slated to collaborate with Kojima on the now-cancelled Silent Hills project. Could he be involved, or is this just something wacky for the trailer?
Death Stranding is an action game with an open world
Hideo Kojima stars during Sony's Tokyo Game Show media briefing.
Hideo Kojima has talked a lot about his new game, Death Stranding, since leaving Konami, and during Sony's media briefing this morning he talked about it again, but this time with a new snippet of information.
Death Stranding looks to co-star Mads Mikkelsen - rumour
Hideo Kojima's favourite actor.
Hannibal actor Mads Mikkelsen appears to have a role alongside Norman Reedus in Hideo Kojima's mysterious PS4-exclusive Death Stranding.
Hideo Kojima is still very much on his world tour, it seems, and having only recently sampled the breakfasts of Brighton (a woeful hash brown, some miserable button mushrooms and a tiny little sausage - come on Brighton, we can do better than this) he popped up at this weekend's Comic Con to unveil the first 30 seconds of Death Stranding, and indeed every forthcoming Kojima Productions game.
I love a good conspiracy theory. That's not to say I ever believe them - mostly I just enjoy snorting into my coffee while marvelling at the mental gymnastics that excitable, like-minded communities or fandoms are capable of. The best ones are a perfect blend of the ridiculous, a dash of wishful-thinking, and just enough facts to make the whole thing plausible. But, just ask the Game of Thrones crowd; sometimes, just sometimes, theories can hit the mark, even years before their intended reveal. And if not? Well hopefully they were ridiculous enough to be entertaining.
"Hello everyone - I am back!"
VideoWatch: Six strange moments from E3 2016
It's this week's Eurogamer Show.
E3 week is always a hectic affair. Typically speaking nobody has had enough sleep, everyone's had far too much caffeine and there's never not a huge stack of things on which to report. Small wonder, then, that it often takes for the show itself to close before we get the chance to reflect and realise just how weird E3 actually is.
There are some pretty wild theories about what's going on in Kojima's Death Stranding
Strand up and be counted.
If nothing else, Hideo Kojima's newly unveiled Death Stranding was the most baffling thing at E3 this week, its short teaser packing in a whole world of enigma as it introduced the PlayStation 4 project from the director's new studio.
Sony and Hideo Kojima announce Death Stranding
Reedus a happier bedtime story!
The exciting Sony-Hideo Kojima partnership has produced fruit: a new game called Death Stranding. It stars Norman Reedus from The Walking Dead.
Death Stranding was unveiled at E3 by Hideo Kojima who introduced an unsettling trailer he said was running in real time.
In the trailer, the camera pans across a beach, showing a dead crab - fittingly for the 10th anniversary of Sony's Giant Enemy Crab E3 episode - and then a body, Reedus' body. He's naked and handcuffed, and near him lies a baby. He picks the baby up but it disappears.