Death Stranding: Meet Heartman in New Trailer

If you thought that maybe, just maybe, Death Stranding was starting to coalesce into some semblance of sense, you can throw that thought away. During the E3 trailer this past June, we were introduced to the primary cast of Death Stranding, which included a pretty impressive list of actors. That said, while we got names and faces for everyone, we didn’t really get any context. I don’t mind being left in the dark, it’s honestly a lot of the fun of Kojima’s games — trying to figure out what the hell is going on from the trailers, which are artfully edited. Does make like… reporting on it a bit hard tho. Guierllmo Deltoro’s character is named Deadman… and that’s all we know. Léa Seydoux is playing Fragile… and that’s all we know. We do have a tiny bit of context for one of the characters now, tho, thanks to a special SDCC trailer that highlights Nicolas Winding Refn’s character Heartman. We’d previously learned that his character apparently dies every 21 minutes for 3 minutes of wandering the void, and now we get to see it in action.

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Like I said, a tiny bit of context. As goofy as the character sounds (yeah, I’m sure sleep is an incredibly huge issue), he fits right in with the rest of Kojima’s library of super-duper serious yet 1960s comics campy they’ve always been. I really love the way Kojima directs cutscenes, and it feels very homey to see his style again, even if it’s not MGS. The interaction is short and still doesn’t explain a whole hell of a lot, but we do get a confirmation regarding the “other side” seen in trailers. It is indeed the world of the dead — or at the very least some limbo in-between. We also see a pretty sizable collection of films, and a shout out to a real (and very public domain) film, Charlie Chaplin’s 20 Minutes of Love. I’ll be curious if there are parallels to be drawn with it, in some weird Kojima-y way. Checking out the other films on the shelf, the rest appear to be jokes, some parodies of other films (there’s one that looks conspicuously like The Evil Dead).

We’re eagerly looking forward to Death Stranding, and we’ll keep you updated. Death Stranding releases November 8th for PlayStation 4.