Even so, the Metal Gear Solid series delivered certain incredible pleasures that no other video games have — pleasures that are difficult to isolate or define. It’s perhaps easiest to explain them in terms of individual moments. Like the mind-blowing moment, in the first Metal Gear Solid, when a floating psychic named Psycho Mantis shows off his psychokinetic powers by moving your controller: After you place it on a flat surface, at his instruction, the game uses the controller’s built-in vibration feedback feature to make it travel around. There’s the moment near the end of Metal Gear Solid 2 when the events of the whole game are revealed to have been a virtual-reality simulation, and the no-nonsense colonel you’ve been taking orders from switches to a creepy robot voice and delivers a prescient monologue about the dangers of misinformation in the network era while the very interface of the game deconstructs and turns against you as your character runs around naked covering his privates with his hands. (Long story.) There’s the part in Metal Gear Solid 3 when, after a superintense boss fight with a 100-year-old sniper (again, long story), you climb a ladder for two full minutes, your elevated heartbeat slowing to a meditative pace as your feet clank on each rung.

The more that was revealed about Death Stranding, the more it began to seem like an entire game made up of such moments, in which you find yourself experiencing something you never expected you would in a video game — something you never even thought to want to experience in a video game, but you do, and somehow it works, and you are almost delirious with surprise and joy, and the experience lodges in your brain like a tiny meteor strike, such that every time you wonder at the mind of the person whose dedication to carrying out his ideas against all common sense gave you that experience, Hideo Kojima.

By the time I met Kojima in October, at his offices in Tokyo, I had played roughly 17 hours of Death Stranding, having received an early-review code two days earlier. It was one of the most fascinating and compelling but also frustrating and boring experiences of my long gaming career. In Death Stranding, you assume the role of Sam Porter Bridges (Reedus), a delivery man working in a postapocalyptic America that has dissolved into scattered communities in underground bunkers and cities. His is a treacherous job, because a mysterious event some years earlier — the Death Stranding — flooded the land with creepy humanoid monsters known as B.T.s, short for “beached things,” which appear whenever it rains and try to drag Sam down into a pit of black tar. Also, there are human terrorists and bandits. At the start of the game, Sam is tasked by the former president of the United States with reconnecting the country’s far-flung outposts via an internet-type technology called the Chiral Network. In order to do this, he must deliver supplies and equipment to the survivors, earning their good will so they’ll agree to join the network. For the rest of the game’s dozens of hours, you must deliver one load of cargo after another, fighting off the occasional enemies, human and B.T.

The plot of the game is preposterous, but its mood is not. The world of Death Stranding is like a depressed survivalist’s fever dream. It’s an unsettling mix of high technology, supernatural horror and pristine wilderness. The game’s vision of postapocalyptic America is a forbidding volcanic landscape of snow-capped peaks and mossy lava fields. Crystal-clear rivers testify to a near-total lack of civilization outside the angular gunmetal buildings that mark the entrances to underground cities and bunkers, where refugees hide out from the black rain. The game conveys the sense of a society both more advanced and more primitive than our own, where scattered bands of humanity struggle against forces of nature and death using superslick gadgets.

The process of gaining access to Kojima’s office had inspired in me a similar sense. In place of a reception area, there was a small white room with a round pillar at the center. A white panel on the left wall silently slid open to reveal a man in a black Kojima Productions T-shirt — this was Aki Saito, Kojima’s personal translator and the communications head of Kojima Productions. Through the door, I was greeted by a narrow hallway with a white, disco-style light-up floor and white walls that curved, tunnellike, into the ceiling. “This is what we spent all of our money on,” Saito said with a laugh.

The hallway, which bears a striking resemblance to the interior of the ill-fated spaceship in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” stands as a testament to Kojima’s twin obsessions of film and outer space. As a child, Kojima dreamed first of being an astronaut, then a filmmaker. He got his spacefaring dreams from watching the Apollo 11 moon landing and his filmmaking dreams from his father, a huge movie buff. His family had a tradition of watching a movie every night; by the time he was a teenager, he was making his own campy zombie movies with high school friends. It was only his father’s death, when Kojima was 13, and the family’s subsequent financial hardships that prompted him to seek out a career in the then-booming video game industry. In 1985, Nintendo published the original Super Mario Bros. Kojima was blown away by how the simple characters onscreen could convey a rich fantasy world. He became convinced that he might be able to fulfill his creative ambitions through game design, and the next year, he took a job at Konami.

We reached the end of the hall, and a door slid open, and there was a small woman with dyed pink hair in a large black hooded sweatshirt. This was Ayako Terashima, Kojima’s personal assistant; her fans know her as Touchy! on Twitter, where she has more than 50,000 followers and provides running updates on Kojima’s life. Tera­shima said that Kojima wished to show me a new trailer for Death Stranding that he had just edited. Saito and a Sony P.R. rep led me into a conference room with a long white table, tall-backed red leather chairs and chrome lights hanging pendulously from the ceiling.