Imagine a world where babies are stored in life-support jars, humans are stalked by oily ghosts, and the American president is played by Lindsay Wagner, the helter-skelter-haired star of 1970s cult TV show The Bionic Woman. This is the dystopian milieu of Death Stranding, which will hit shops soon, just in time for the hectic Christmas period. In this epic video game, by far the most controversial of 2019, players must traverse a future America to reconnect its “chiral network” (a posh internet), while dodging mysterious BTs (beached things). For reasons unknown, the living and dead coexist, with the protagonist able to connect to the “other side” via a “jar baby” in an artificial womb. One recent demo focused on such gimmicks as urinating to create mushrooms.

Wagner is not the only star to feature. Acclaimed video game director Hideo Kojima and his team have also created incredible likenesses of The Walking Dead’s Norman Reedus, who takes on the lead role of delivery man, as well as Mads Mikkelsen and director Guillermo del Toro. Most agreed to perform because they’re fans of Kojima’s work, especially his multimillion-selling Metal Gear Solid series. Wagner took more persuading, though.

“This year I turned 55 and maybe tomorrow I’m going to be dead,” Kojima said recently. “Every time I work on a project, I make it like it might be my last. I thought I’d ask Lindsay, as the person I admire the most.” Kojima met Wagner in person and spent more than three hours, punctuated by tears, explaining how Death Stranding wasn’t a traditional violent game.

Star-studded ... Death Stranding features The Walking Dead’s Norman Reedus, left, on an epic quest. Photograph: Kojima Productions

Since the game was announced in 2016, its plot and gameplay have remained mostly under wraps. The bizarre snippets that have been released have obsessed the web: 7.7 million people have watched Reedus’s protagonist studiously adjust his backpack, while 6 million caught French actor Léa Seydoux eating a space slug to keep away the “timefall” (a rain that causes people and plants to rapidly age and die). It all adds up to a remarkable show of faith in Kojima, whose notorious Twitter account oscillates between creative musings and carefully staged pictures of Bento boxes.

While Kojima’s fans include Del Toro and Kong: Skull Island director Jordan Vogt-Roberts, many remain unconvinced, irritated by his celebrity posturing and the game’s apparent lack of substance. A notably ill-judged (or possibly mistranslated) tweet recently landed Kojima in trouble for promoting himself – instead of the hundreds of developers who have worked on the game.

In his defence, Metal Gear Solid 5 does contain copious credits after each of its 50 missions – but Kojima has also appeared in his own games as a “critical VIP” while also being referred to as “God”. When talking about Death Stranding, he recently proclaimed: “My mission is to create a genre that does not currently exist, and which takes everyone by surprise.” One of MGS5’s themes is the importance – and fallibility – of messianic leadership, which can’t be lost on a perfectionist who finds fault with the texture of a doorknob.

Cult figure … Lindsay Wagner plays the US president. Photograph: Kojima Productions

Death Stranding’s core theme is connection. “There are so many things happening in the real world, in America, in Europe,” Kojima said in April at the Tribeca film festival. “Everything is connected by the internet, but we’re not connected in the real world these days. Players will have to reconnect the world in the game. You feel very alone, in solitude – but you’re trying to connect.”

Kojima is an anomaly in the video game industry: a self-styled auteur, obsessed with minutiae and at odds with focus-tested, apolitical, annualised sequels. His influences include Stanley Kubrick, Joy Division, David Bowie, Alien, James Cameron, The Selfish Gene, Nicolas Winding Refn (who also appears in Death Stranding), the moon landings, Kobo Abe … the list goes on. He is to games what Kanye West is to music: an easily parodied all-or-nothing performance artist who blurs the lines between his public persona, games and reality.

Kojima’s work is relentlessly provocative, often outraging fans on release, only for his intentions to be later understood. MGS2 angered many by teasing the return of grizzled badass Solid Snake, then forcing users to play as androgynous J-pop reject Raiden, but its story also explored the politics of data surveillance and information control more than 15 years before the topics became headline news.

Once you’re tuned in to how he operates – each pre-release trailer, interview, public appearance and tweet feeding a giant guessing game, complete with red herrings – you start to see connections and conspiracies everywhere. The Metal Gear Solid community’s ability to crowdsource solutions has kept pace with Kojima’s increasingly obtuse meta-puzzles. Fans took less than a day to unlock the secret ending in Kojima’s horror curio PT by deducing – despite no obvious clues – that you needed to plug a microphone into the PlayStation 4.

At its core, Death Stranding is an open-world adventure combining The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s limitless freedom, MGS5’s interlocking upgrade system and Dark Souls’ asynchronous online world. In addition to leaving equipment and warnings for other players, you’ll be able to pool resources, creating bridges to “connect” the barren world. Some speculate that Death Stranding will be radically transformed by its players’ philanthropy, perhaps evolving into a hi-tech network of roads and cities.

Riding high … Death Stranding. Photograph: Kojima Productions

Kojima’s hints imply the game’s government organisation Bridges, who want to reconnect the US, aren’t as noble as they seem. Will players be invited to join the game’s terrorist faction, the Homo Demons, to fight for an alternate vision of the greater good? If so, the shared online world would become a battle of competing philosophies.

Others speculate that Death Stranding is about transhumanism. Or that it’s a video game about video games. (Death Stranding’s stick, rope and ladder might be a metaphor for the evolution of gameplay, an unlikely tribute to Donkey Kong.) Or perhaps it is a walking simulator. “At the release of my games,” Kojima told Comic Con, “people might say, ‘Ooh’ or praise it, but after five or 10 years, people will start to evaluate what it was about. Same as 2001: A Space Odyssey or Blade Runner. Creativity is so homogenised, generalised and perfumed, and algorithms dictate everything. It becomes important to counter that.”

On 8 November, we’ll find out if Death Stranding has been playing us all along – or if the truth is stranded at the point where the guessing ends and the argument begins.