Hideo Kojima has been emancipated from the dying 20th century icon Konami. His final work under their crumbling umbrella was the incredible Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. It was unmistakably a Kojima experience but still you could feel the fumbling hands of Konami executives in its guts. Depressing DLC monetization and free-to-play mechanics shoehorned into the final chapter of one of the greatest series in the medium were just the start of it.

He then made an abortive attempt at re-starting the Silent Hill franchise in the quickly-becoming-legendary P.T. Now, though, we are getting a taste of what Kojima would make if there was no one telling him to make, and it is sure looks like Kojima wanted to make a horror game.

Death Stranding

The first title from his new studio, Kojima Productions, is an enigmatic thing called Death Stranding. I say "thing" because, beyond a handful of moments and imagery, we don’t know what the game is. The trailer opens on a low pan over dirty water and filth. Dead crabs, strands of black, and a baby doll dot the muddy ground.The camera turns upwards to reveal a man in a suit, director Guillermo Del Toro, holding a mechanical egg. He has a Frankensteinian scar circling his forehead and a glowing blue handcuff around his wrist.

It is revealed we are in a city destroyed by war. Low-flying fighter planes soar across a rainbow’d sky, trailing more umbilical strands of black oil. A tank, covered in meat, bones and corpses crosses a bridge trailed by marching skeletons in army fatigues. Viscous black material pours out of between the stones of the bridge. The main in the suit plugs a tube into his mechanical egg, revealing that it holds a living human fetus.

We are led into the darkness under the bridge where a patrol of skeleton soldiers emerge from the shadows, led by a smirking Mads Mikkelsen crying tears of that same black ooze. The skeletons, like the ones following the tank, are connected to Mads by umbilical strands. It is a hell of a thing.

Wild speculation

I haven’t read or digested any other analysis of the trailer prior to writing this. I felt it would be better to take it from the top of the dome, so to speak, and see what I made of it as a huge fan of Kojima. Here are some ideas about what I think might be going on here.

The surface reading of the trailer is pretty clear. A US Army experiment (we know it the United States government is somehow involved due to the badge Del Toro’s character is wearing for a fictitious agency/division named BRIDGES) involving the use of corpses as soldiers has gone terribly wrong, leading to an apocalypse. Del Toro is one of the scientists involved with this organization in this reading, and Mads Mikkelsen is the insane Army officer after his head. Again, a surface reading, but there is probably a nugget of accuracy in there.

We have no idea thus far what the gameplay, if any, will be like. Most of the public talk about this game so far has been Kojima hooting about his new facial scanning technology, nothing touching what the player’s actions will actually consist of (aside from taking place in an open world with non-competitive multiplayer). The addition of the skeleton soldiers, though, especially in their apparent capacity as drones, would suggest that some sort of combat or action (potentially stealth action, considering his prior games) is likely. I would love to be surprised, though. Surprises are wonderful.

This is another piece of conjecture, but I am going to assume that horror manga legend Junji Ito is working on this game as well. Guillermo’s collaboration is pretty uh, obviously present but Ito’s hasn’t been confirmed or acknowledged yet. We do know that he worked on Kojima’s unfinished Silent Hill project though, and this trailer basically screams Ito. Specifically it is extremely reminiscent of what I found to be his most disturbing work, a three volume comic called Gyo (Japanese for “fish”). In that comic a couple taking a vacation to the beach notice a fish with tubes coming out of it walking out of the water on tiny, robotic legs. Then more fish emerge. Then a shark. Humans become infected with what changed the fish and their bodies begin to bloat with vile gas. Robotic contraptions of unknown origin snap up their bodies and plug hoses into their mouths and anuses, powering spindly spider legs. In the trailer the meat tank, the dead crabs and dolphins and the umbilical strands all feel extremely Junji Ito.

The tone of everything released for this game so far screams “horror,” which isn’t surprising considering who Kojima is collaborating with. There has always been an element of horror in all of Kojima’s games, and specifically body horror (which I’ve written about previously), in subtle and direct ways. This though, a bleeding tank covered in viscera that is leading a platoon of skeletons by umbilical leashes, isn’t subtle. It feels like an overt piece of horror in a way Kojima hasn’t been able to do before, which is incredibly exciting.

Three men and a baby

Another piece of semi-baseless conjecture: the game is potentially set in a world without women. A world where men found a way to reproduce artificially, plugging robotic wombs into their bellies. A world of war, decaying filth and death, milked dry of feminine empathy. A noble scientist from the BRIDGES project protects the last female baby as the death umbilicals swarm like ants over the doomed planet, looking to end all life.

Or maybe it is a metaphorical look into a body ravaged by disease, with the artificial fetus being the last healthy organ.

Or maybe the baby is a clone of the US president, and the scientist is trying to take it to a special facility to accelerate growth so it can become a grown man and take control of the hellscape.

Or maybe we are all the baby?

Probably not. I am excited to find out for certain though.

For more, read Oliver Leach on the role of horror in past Hideo Kojima titles.