The ‘Death Stranding 2’ Trailer Is Here, and One Character Looks Awfully Familiar

We’re just a few months away from what’s already certain to be one of 2025’s most debated and discussed video games: Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. Arriving nearly six years after its polarizing predecessor, what we’ve seen of the new game from industry auteur Hideo Kojima—including the pre-order trailer below, which rolled out on March 9—presents tantalizing questions but few concrete answers.

So: What do we know about Death Stranding 2? Read on:

How much time do you have? The Death Standing franchise is set in a post-apocalyptic world in which the United States has collapsed due to the emergence of “Beached Things,” or BTs—strange, dead creatures that spark a variety of devastating effects when they appear, including nuclear-level blasts and rain that rapidly ages anything it touches.

When the first game begins, the country has been reduced to the United Cities of America, and the remaining survivors are heavily dependent on couriers who brave the elements to deliver supplies from one place to another. The player controls one such courier, Sam Porter Bridges (Norman Reedus), the adoptive son of the UCA president, who reluctantly agrees to fulfill her dying wish: “Making America whole again.” Traveling from east to west, you deliver packages, sneaking around BTs and squaring off against hostile raiders, as you attempt to establish a communication network that could bring the country back together.

Everyone agreed that the game was doing something unique. Not everyone agreed that was a good thing, and Death Stranding drew both passionate detractors and passionate defenders. I’m in the latter camp — though like many who played it, I initially disliked the game before coming around to loving it. As I wrote in 2019: “What was initially tedious about Death Stranding eventually felt meditative; what was initially ridiculous eventually felt riveting; what was initially ponderous eventually felt profound.”

Also, Mads Mikkelsen was in it.

Walk around, mostly. Before it was actually released, creator Hideo Kojima proudly announced that Death Stranding would be the start of a “totally brand new genre” of video game. In practice, that claim was a little overblown. Death Stranding is a third-person action game with plenty of familiar mechanics: sneaking past enemies, shooting guns, and driving vehicles.

The game’s major innovation was an asymmetrical social system in which players were rewarded for helping other players. When crossing, say, the jagged mountains of what used to be Colorado, one player could spend the time and resources required to create a gondola, making it significantly easier to cross from one peak to another. That gondola would then show up in other players’ games to help them along. There were minor in-game rewards for putting in this extra effort, but mostly, people did it to be nice. That also synced up nicely with the game’s (frequently inscrutable) plot, which concluded on a relatively hopeful note that implied a new era of rebuilding, even as Sam himself went off the grid.

Apparently not. A sequel, titled Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, drops on June 26, and the newly-released trailer sets an ominous tone. It’s full of nightmarish imagery, including giant monsters, squid-like apparitions, and gun-toting masked psychos, before the text “WE SHOULD NOT HAVE CONNECTED” flashes on screen.

There’s a reason, perhaps, for that dark tone. In 2022, Kojima revealed that he had written a totally different sequel, but scrapped the entire thing and started with a fresh concept inspired byt the COVID-19 pandemic. Kojima’s career-long interest in political commentary—a relative rarity in an industry often afraid to alienate a vocal contingent of reactionary gamers—seems poised to continue in Death Stranding 2, which includes a character tasked with smuggling people from Mexico into the United States and an explicit commentary on the “uniquely American philosophy” of gun culture and its impact on person-to-person connections.

A mix of old characters and new ones. Despite his apparent retirement at the end of Death Stranding, Norman Reedus returns as Sam Porter Bridges. (One caveat: Kojima is legendary for pulling twisty shenanigans on players, and never more so than in 2001’s Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, which led players to believe they’d be playing as franchise mainstay Solid Snake before swapping him out for Raiden, a polarizing new hero, just a few hours in. It’s probably smart not to take anything for granted here.)

Also returning: Léa Seydoux’s Fragile, an ally and potential love interest for Sam; Higgs, a villain played with scenery-chewing gusto by Troy Baker; and—most importantly, if you like things that are adorable—Lou, the baby (or, in Death Stranding lexicon, the “B.B.”) who Sam toted around on his travels. No word, yet, on whether “Clueless Gamer” Conan O’Brien will make another cameo.

Elle Fanning joins the cast as Tomorrow, who seems to be allied with Higgs, and Shioli Kutsuna appears as a mysterious character named Rainy. Kojima also loves to stunt-cast his favorite filmmakers; Death Stranding had roles for Guillermo del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn, and Death Stranding 2 casts Mad Max director George Miller and In the Fade director Fatih Akin in supporting roles.

And then there’s the character that, following the latest Death Stranding 2 trailer, instantly kicked off a fresh round of feverish internet speculation: Neil, a smuggler played by Italian actor Luca Marinelli.

A little backstory is required here. Prior to Death Stranding, Hideo Kojima was best known as the creator of the groundbreaking and widely beloved Metal Gear franchise. After shepherding Metal Gear for nearly 30 years, Kojima’s relationship with developer Konami hit choppy waters with 2015’s Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Even a decade later, the circumstances of that schism remain murky, but the end result was that Konami and Kojima parted ways, with Konami retaining the rights to Metal Gear and Kojima starting his own company to launch Death Stranding and, now, Death Stranding 2.

The most intriguing parts of the Death Stranding 2 trailer suggest that Kojima has found a way to smuggle some of his Metal Gear ideas into the Death Stranding universe after all. The new trailer includes a shot of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Heartman piloting a giant robot that looks awfully similar to Metal Gear Rex, the super-weapon at the heart of the original Metal Gear Solid.

Even more striking is the shot of Marinelli donning a bandana that makes him the spitting image of Metal Gear protagonist Solid Snake. The trailer reveals that Marinelli’s character is named Neil, so he’s probably just legally distinct enough that Kojima can get away with it (even if he cheekily posted, all the way back in 2020, that Marinelli would look just like Snake if he put a bandana on).

What is Kojima really up to here? That’s one of many questions that will only be answered when Death Stranding 2 drops on June 26.