Death Stranding’s gruesome new trailer has babies, toenails, actual gameplay

Hideo Kojima and Norman Reedus are back to break our brains with an outlandish new trailer for Death Stranding. It’s still hard to make sense of what Death Stranding actually is, but the imagery sure is evocative. You’ve got babies, terrifying invisible monsters, and maybe something about environmental collapse?

Oh, and there are a couple of new faces here, too: Léa Seydoux, of Blue is the Warmest Color fame, and Lindsay Wagner, who you might know from The Bionic Woman. Better yet, this E3 trailer showed what appeared to be actual gameplay, which feels huge for a game that has largely relied on cinematic trailers. While the PlayStation Blog notes that the camera here will be slightly different than what players experience, “The first half and the last sequence in particular are most representative of the actual gameplay.”

We also get a slightly better sense of what Death Stranding is about: apparently Sam, the character played by Norman Reedus, has to make a delivery. Presumably, the package is the baby. Here’s the PlayStation blog:

Sam is unlike any other hero you may have seen in games before. A typical hero is usually some sort of elite or someone with a military background. Sam is not. He is a working man of sorts — a hands-on professional. Someone with a skillset akin to a blue-collar worker.

We don’t know when Death Stranding will actually come out — likely, this one is going to be cooking for a while. Honestly, though, for many people the Death Stranding game has already begun: every new trailer is another opportunity to figure out what Kojima is teasing. It’s like an ARG or something. By tomorrow, Kojima fans will have dissected this trailer and found a ton of tiny details that tease something grandiose. Let’s hope the final product can match all the hype. For now, enjoy another wild trailer.