At E3 last night Hideo Kojima made his comeback after his unceremonious end with Konami last year. The split which is far from being called amicable, ended the development of the Silent Hill sequel and seemingly put the brakes on a collaboration between the famed developer and director Guillermo Del Toro.
During the Sony conference to a great deal of surprise, out came Hideo Kojima, we hadn’t expected him to make an appearance, all his studio Kojima Productions has provided us with lately has been some frankly exciting looking work pertaining to the logo.
Kojima had brought with him what can only be described as an acid tip of a trailer. The game is called Death Stranding and what we know about it is only that it has Norman Reedus in it, a returned collaborator from the crushed Silent Hill experiment with Konami.
From this point it takes us on a close up journey through a beach or desert made of black sand, interspersed with what appears to be bones and the bodies of crabs. Slowly we start to see what appear to be human hand prints in a black substance.
The trail of black handprints brings us to the naked body of a man wearing a pair of handcuffs on one wrist, its Norman Reedus. The trailer follows him as he stands up holding a baby, he looks pained, as we’re getting a close up on his (very detailed) face the baby turns to oil.
Then, tiny little baby oil hand prints appear and disappear on his legs and lead a trail to a pile of dead fish and whales. With five figures hovering in the sky looking down on him. To say it’s the strangest trailer shown at E3 in recent memory is an understatement.
It didn’t really tell us anything. It was deeply, fantastically strange, and it left us wanting a bit more. An argument could be made that it was the most successful teaser there for that very reason, it made us want to know. I’m sure that we’ll get more, equally as strange trailers for the game in due course, but what is clear is that Death Stranding and its weird reveal are going to be talked about for quite some time.