Death Stranding gamescom footage includes taking the piss, ghost babies, BBs

Despite two new character trailers and a few minutes of gameplay, I still have no f—ing clue what the hell is going on in the new Death Stranding footage.

During the marketing campaign of Metal Gear Solid 2, Konami and Hideo Kojima did the best they could to obfuscate the real focus of gameplay. Despite most of the game involving the player controlling the whiny Raiden, footage from the Tanker presented the case for a Snake-heavy game. Perhaps that kind of bait and switch will happen with Death Stranding.

I say that because after a few more character trailers and a Hideo Kojima sizzle reel from Gamescom Opening Night Live, in addition to more gameplay footage, I still have no idea what Death Stranding’s core gameplay loop will look like. At this point, I might not even want to, as when you have women characters tied to ghost babies by umbilical cords while ghost breastfeeding from a character named Mama, maybe it’s not that deep.

The Mama character video introduces her ghost baby born to the other side, still attached to her at the belly and floating like some sort of death strand. For some reason, she accentuates her continued development of breast milk and even grabs her breasts to accentuate that fact, highlighting the idea that maybe someone at Kojima Productions should learn what a woman is.

Speaking of weird biology ideas, the Bridge Babies (BBs) are what Sam uses to fuel a connection to the other side, with his rig using stillborn baby power (and connecting the baby to stillmothers’ wombs in resynchronizing) to detect the ghostly BTs that haunt him. The gameplay footage also showed Sam urinating to create a mushroom and connecting a social strand in the Midwest with Ludens Fan, voiced by Matt Mercer and portrayed by Geoff Keighley himself.

Between DualShock 4 Sixaxis movement to shake your baby, ladders leading to high heights and a lack of severe fall damage, I have no idea what to make of Death Stranding right now. It seems like we have an idea for two different games smooshed together, with neither of them one where women are treated as anything other than parental figures or objects of sexual interest.

For a little while, the only official place to see this Death Stranding gamescom footage is the watch the compressed Twitter video because Ubisoft claimed the YouTube live stream VOD on copyright grounds. That’s right, despite Ubisoft being a part of gamescom Opening Night Live, the entire show’s footage was previously claimed by Ubisoft before they wisely backtracked on the claim.