More Death Stranding Details Emerge From Trailer, Site, and Kojima Himself

We are still reeling from yesterday's Death Stranding reveal, which had almost nine minutes of new footage and a release date. But while November 8 is a ways away, more details about the moment-to-moment play of Death Stranding have been trickling out from various sources, including Hideo Kojima himself.

While we pored over the US trailer for any extra information we could glean, it turns out the Japanese trailer for Death Stranding had some gameplay ours didn't. In one section (via Reddit) Sam appears to be fighting a large monster made of the oily goop that comes from BTs. Could it be a BT brought to life, a hallucination, or just a forest monster? No clue, but it looks cool.

On the official PlayStation page for Death Stranding, as pointed out on Twitter by Daniel Ahmad, some blurbs go into more detail about the gameplay. Your aim is to reunite a broken nation while delivering cargo, travelling across vast expanses and dealing with both supernatural events and bandits.

"There is no 'traditional' game over in Death Stranding," one blurb says. Losing your life in combat drops you into an "upside-down realm," where you have to search for a way back to life. This potentially explains some of the time travel and more dreamlike moments from the trailer. It also notes that combat and killing carries consequences. I'm getting big "The Sorrow" from Metal Gear Solid 3 vibes from this section.

There's also asynchronous online multiplayer, allowing players to send supplies and share safe houses with one another, without actually meeting up in the game world. A little Souls-y, but a neat way to incorporate multiplayer without completely upending things. Too many Norman Reeduses would get a little creepy.

Finally, Hideo Kojima tweeted a few things about Death Stranding, mostly some movie posters. But in one tweet, he adamantly declared the genre of Death Stranding, and it's... well, take a look.

Not sure we have a tag in the system for "strand" as a genre, but we'll get cracking on that. That said, it sounds like the focus is much more on the traversal and action portions, and not so much hiding from BTs all the time. That's at least a little relieving.

We'll know more as we get closer to the November 8 release date for PS4. Be sure to check out our Death Stranding guide to all we know so far.