« Ma mère est devenue un cratère. » Il n'y avait bien qu'un Hideo Kojima pour ouvrir une histoire sur une phrase pareille. Ten years on from the game's creation at Kojima Productions, the studio has just unveiled the first footage from Death Stranding Isolations, an animated series landing exclusively on Hulu Disney+ in 2027. And while this first teaser still only drip-feeds a few scraps of plot, it already confirms that the world of Death Stranding has lost none of its strangeness — even if, right now, we're not remotely hyped...
First piece of good news: the series won't be retelling Sam Porter Bridges' journey all over again. The story takes place in North America, after the events of the first game, at a point when the chiral network has reconnected much of the continent. But this newfound unity hasn't erased the traumas caused by the Death Stranding. Some have chosen to reconnect with others, while some would rather keep their distance from a society painfully trying to rebuild itself. That's the case for a young orphaned girl, who grew up alone and refuses all human contact. Her line, “My mother became a crater”, hints at a particularly painful past, though the teaser offers no explanation as yet. She won't be alone at the heart of this tale, as an old man able to reconnect people by some mysterious method will cross her path, along with a female soldier trapped in a cycle of violence and a boy eaten up by anger.
So we find several themes dear to Hideo Kojima here: isolation, the consequences of our choices and the difficulty of reconnecting with others after a catastrophe. Death Stranding Isolations will use traditional 2D animation, directed by Takayuki Sano, with studio E&H Production at the helm, already known for Ninja Kamui and Bullet/Bullet. Character design has been handed to Ilya Kuvshinov, while Tow Ubukata, writer on Psycho-Pass, will handle series composition and the screenplay. Worth noting that this first trailer arrives as Kojima Productions keeps stacking up projects around its saga, with a live-action film directed by Michael Sarnoski (Pig, A Quiet Place: Day One) in the works and location scouting carried out in Iceland. Another animated feature, Death Stranding Mosquito, is also in development, but has no release date yet. On top of that there are the two games announced by the studio, OD, developed with Xbox, and Physint, the action-espionage project initially tied to PlayStation. Safe to say the next few years look busy for Hideo Kojima, whose creations will keep travelling well beyond video games.
