Death Stranding Recap

Death Stranding 2 on the beach is nearly here, and if you're like us, you could probably do with a recap of all the important events of the first game.

After all, it wasn't that simple to wrap your head around the first time, was it?

Here, we'll take you through the 2019 game's story as succinctly as we possibly can, as well as go through what we know about the sequel and where it could be going for its cast of characters.

But first, let's set the stage.

Death Stranding is a post-apocalyptic story, only instead of the end coming by zombies, nuclear war, or a giant asteroid, it came by an event known as, well, the Death Stranding.

The Death Stranding was a cataclysmic event in which ghostly beach things, or BTs, suddenly appeared in the world of the living, triggering a massive amount of simultaneous explosion-like void-outs all over the world that eradicated everything that was caught up in them, leaving nothing but craters in their wake.

As a result of the Death Stranding, previously undiscovered particles known as Kyrellium appeared in our world.

Rain turned into timefall that rapidly ages whatever it touches, and those BTs still wander around the world in rainy areas.

They're then pulled magnetically towards life if disturbed from their eerie hovering, and eventually cause more void-outs if contact is made.

Naturally, this has led the remnants of humanity to turtle up inside isolated cities, thus creating the need for transporters, those brave enough to make the journey to deliver essentials from one city to another.

Porters are some of the most valuable people in this death-stranded world.

Enter Sam Porter Bridges, who begins the story assisting body disposal specialists.

Ever since the Death Stranding, bodies need to be burned when they die, otherwise they will eventually necrotize and turn into BTs.

Anyway, on one such disposal job, things go bad.

Like, really, really bad.

A mysterious masked man seemingly controlling BTs sets them on Sam's buddy, and before he's able to kill himself, a giant BT swallows him whole,

triggering a void out and killing Sam in the process.

Well, kinda.

The thing is, Sam's a repatriate, which means that when he dies, his soul winds up in a place called the Seam, where he's able to guide his soul through water back to his body, enter through the mouth, slide down the esophagus where there's a baby who gives him a thumbs up, and the next thing he knows, he's back to life spewing tar out of his mouth.

Look, don't ask me how it works.

Ask Kojima.

Anyway, Sam gets picked up by a digitized Guillermo del Toro who goes by Deadman on account of him being well-acquainted with the dead.

Deadman sends Sam to see his adoptive mother, Bridget Strand, the first and last female president of the United States who also happens to be currently dying of cancer.

Bridget dies trying to convince him to head west and help her daughter Amelie in making America whole, leaving him with one final I love you in a cryptic,

Though still not convinced of taking up Bridget's vision to reconnect America, Sam agrees to take Bridget's body to the incinerator due to the corpse disposal team being voided out of existence.

Deadman wants Sam to burn it as well, thinking it no more than a tool, but come on, who could possibly kill that adorable little face?

Sam keeps the BB, and good thing too, because BTs quickly corner Sam inside the incinerator.

Thankfully, BBs allow the wearer to see where these specters are, giving Sam a chance to escape without triggering another void out.

Upon returning, Sam finally reunites with Amelie, who echoes Bridget's pleas for him to head west, establish the chiral network, and rescue her as she's been captured by a group of terrorists known as the Homo Demens, or Mad Men.

Understandably exhausted by all this, Sam takes a nap and awakens on the beach, where he once again finds Amelie, and after another plea for help and some ominous foreshadowing, Sam finally agrees, and thus truly begins this epic endeavor to reconnect the country and reestablish the United Cities of America.

Eventually, Sam makes his way to Port Knot City, and it's here that he has the reunion with the Masked Man from the beginning of the game.

We learn that his name is Higgs, named after the God particle, the Higgs Boson.

The particle of God that permeates all existence.

Higgs introduces himself with a classic villain monologue, all of which makes much more sense later on, and then, because he appears to be able to control them, sends his BTs after you.

After throwing a bunch of blood grenades at a whale, we set sail across the lake to the real meat of the game, the Central Region.

It's here that Sam gets to fully know Fragile, a fellow transporter who has a freaky umbrella that gives her the ability to teleport and an appetite for cryptobiotes.

She's also hungry for revenge against Higgs, as the two used to be partners before he used her to unwittingly turn Middle Knot City into a crater and almost blow up South Knot 2.

When Fragile was caught attempting to save South Knot City, Higgs offered her a choice.

Save the city by running through rapidly age-ifying timefall and throwing the bomb into a pre-existing crater, or save herself?

Judging by Fragile's scarred body from neck to toe, it's easy to see what choice she made.

Well, there it is.

You are a goddamn

This is all important because Higgs sneaks a bomb into Sam's cargo and makes another attempt at removing South Knot from the map.

Fortunately, Sam's able to spot the explosive in time and tosses it into a tar pit.

As he continues on his journey, Sam eventually gets swept up in a crazy storm and finds himself on a battlefield sometime during World War I.

This is where he meets Clifford, a character weak previously only known through BB's flashbacks.

Turns out, Clifford really wants that BB, and he's willing to turn his small army of Scala soldiers against Sam to get it.

But Sam fights his way out, and apparently only a few seconds passed in the real world while Sam was away.

I can't be right.

I was there for him.

For hours, it felt like.

Sam's next stop has him meeting Mama, a woman who is tethered to her dead baby, which floats above her as a BT.

What the?

Mama's story is a tragic one, but the short version of it is terrorists attacked a hospital where she was giving birth, she got stuck under rubble during the C-section operation, and her baby died while Mama lived, connecting them via a BT's umbilical cord.

I gave birth there in the rubble.

Mama informs Sam that the chiral density is way higher than she ever expected as a result of Sam connecting stations to the chiral network.

Even stranger, the limiter that she placed on the Cupid, the device that Sam used to connect the stations to the chiral network, is faulty.

She warns that if Sam continues extending the chiral network as is, he may actually cause another death stranding.

Maybe we're making things worse.

Maybe not.

But.

It's the only plan we've got.

She gives Sam another cupid, but in order to get it to work, Sam needs to seek out a woman named Lachna, who it turns out is actually Mama's estranged twin sister.

It's good to hear your voice again.

To prove that Bridges is truly trustworthy to Lachna, Sam reunites the two sisters, but not before cutting the umbilical cord connecting Mama to her BT baby and running away from Higgs and his giant BT lion.

Mama, whose real name is Malignan, dies on arrival, a result of severing her ties with her BT baby, but her soul becomes one with Loch Ness.

Interestingly, Mama's body doesn't show any signs of necrotization, but we'll get to that in a bit.

When Sam returns back to his room and takes a nap, he wakes up to find that the BB, who he now adorably calls Lou, is missing.

Deadman informs him that while BBs are meant to be a bridge between the world of the living and the other side, Lou is starting to veer too closely to the world of the living by developing into an actual baby.

Deadman warns that Lou will cease functioning in a couple of days if he's not able to perform an operation to reset it, essentially tugging it back to the middle of the line between the two worlds.

I'll cut the cord that links the two of you and then perform an operation that reconnects it to the other side.

Sam hands Lou over to Deadman, leaving Sam with a few missions where he can't detect BTs.

That's a really evil thing to do.

Thanks, Kojima.

Maybe we should get the hell out of here.

Fast forward a bit to Sam's reunion with Deadman, where both of them get caught up in a storm that leads to yet another meeting with our good friend, Clifford Unger.

They find themselves inside a World War II themed nightmare world, where Deadman hands over the newly reset BB, which has now imprinted itself upon Deadman, finally making him see them as more than just tools.

Sam faces off against Clifford once again, and in another scuffle, he manages to snag Clifford's dog tag before waking up in his private room.

This is where we learn a whole boatload of secrets, including what happened with Sam's wife and child, they died in a void out, why Deadman is the way he is, he's an artificial human grown from pluripotent stem cells, with parts of him made up of body parts from corpses to replace the defective ones.

and the identity of Clifford Unger.

He's a U.S. Army Special Forces captain who served in Kosovo and Iraq.

After that lore dump, it's time for Sam to pay a visit to Heartman, who lives in a deeper explanation of what a beach is in Death Stranding.

A beach, as Heartman explains, is a space created by one's soul.

They're called beaches, but they don't have to look like actual beaches.

They're shaped by the individual's beliefs, religion, philosophy, et cetera, and when a person dies, their beach essentially acts as a corridor connecting them to the other side, a sort of limbo, so to speak.

Each person has their own unique beach.

But if a bunch of people die all at once, their beaches become tangled in what's called as a strand field.

So those World War battlefields that Sam finds Clifford in are beaches.

That thing that Fragile uses to teleport her is her beach.

That beach that Sam and Amelie converse on, that's a, well, it is a more beachy beach.

I'll be waiting for you.

on the beach.

So why does Hartman know so much about beaches, we hear you ask?

Well, he has a very close relationship with them, as he dies every 21 minutes for three minutes before being revived, allowing him to explore beaches 60 times per day to locate and reunite with his dead wife and child.

At the time Sam meets him, he's been to the beach 218,549 times.

Don't go!

Please, don't go!

Sam makes his way to Hartman with Mama's non-decomposing slash non-necrotizing corpse on his back, along with a mysterious umbilical cord that Deadman wants him to investigate.

A couple of deliveries and chiral network additions later, we learn that the umbilical cord actually belonged to Brigid Strand, and is the key to unlocking the mystery of the Death Stranding.

Hartman deduces that the cord, along with Mama's body, has cells infused with chiralium, giving them a connection to the beach and allowing them to escape the flow of time.

We shouldn't assume that everything about a Death Stranding is detrimental to life.

Now, here's where things get the last two episodes of Evangelion levels of crazy.

The umbilical cord leads Hartman to believe that Bridget Strand was actually an extinction entity, and that Amelie, being her daughter, may actually be an extension entity herself as well.

Though, Higgs already told us that, so thanks for the spoiler warning, Higgs.

After crossing a giant tar pit, Sam finally reaches his destination on the West Coast and completes his goal of reconnecting America.

It's at this point where Higgs reappears with Amelie, applauding Sam on a job well done.

Now that the chiral network is complete, Higgs plans on using Amelie to merge all of mankind's beaches into a single shore and trigger a final Death Stranding to bring on the sixth and most devastating extinction event.

Which brings us to the big ol' boss fight.

After defeating Higgs' giant BT, Higgs runs off with Amelie to the beach.

Fortunately, with Fragile's special power, Sam is able to follow them for one final fisticuff showdown.

After beating up Higgs and leaving his fate to Fragile, Sam rescues Amelie.

And everything seems to be fine, right?

Well, not quite.

Turns out Amelie lied to Sam about a bunch of stuff, and we'll get to that in a second.

But there's also still the matter of Clifford and his hunt for his BB.

Clifford appears on the beach Sam is on, along with Die Hard Man and Bridget Strand.

Cliff recognizes Die Hard Man and Bridget and demands his BB back.

Bridget points him in Sam's direction, but before he's able to get to Sam, Amelie shoves Sam off a cliff, and he reawakens in a private room.

Now, it's time for Sam to head all the way back east.

Right before he reaches his destination, a familiar storm kicks up, and he's off to have one last showdown with Clifford.

After defeating him for the last time, Sam finally learns the truth.

Clifford's actually not such a bad guy after all.

He was a war hero, a loving father, and a heartbroken husband who was lied to when he entrusted his baby to Bridget Strand after his wife wound up in a coma.

Oh, and Sam is actually Clifford's son, as well as being the BB Cliff has been searching for all this time.

Die Hard Man, a soldier who served under Clifford, attempted to give Cliff the space to break him and his baby out, but Clifford got caught, leading to Bridget giving Die Hard Man the order to kill him.

Tragically, an errant bullet hits the BB, sending it to the beach, where Amelie is able to revive it and send it back to the world of the living, thus explaining not only Sam's gnarly stomach scar, but also his connection to the beach, his ability to repatriate back to life, and his relationship with Amelie.

Though the baby can no longer serve its function as a BB, Bridget decided to adopt it and raise it as her own.

Back in the present though, Sam travels to the beach once again to try and prevent Amelie from initiating the final stranding.

But instead, Sam finds Bridget.

And it's here we learn the big secret.

Amelie and Bridget are one and the same.

Well, sort of.

Bridget is the body to Amelie's soul that's stuck on the beach, together making up one entity.

But before any more revelations, Sam's given a choice.

The sixth stranding has already begun.

Does he sit back and watch it happen, or does he cut his bond from Amelie and stop her from achieving her goal?

Turns out it's a bit of a fake choice.

You can't actually kill Amelie, though you can watch the last stranding go down, which will only point you in a continue screen.

Only by holstering your gun and choosing to instead hug Amelie can you stop the sixth stranding from happening, or at the very least, delay it.

From the start, Amelie doesn't really want to bring on extinction.

Trapped as she is in her role as an extinction entity, she actually approaches a young Sam and insists that he stop her when the time is right, and he's the only one who can.

But she knows that extinction is an inevitability, and eventually the thought of waiting on the beach for however many hundreds of thousands of years gets to her.

But by hugging her, Sam reminded Amelie that it was the bonds between people that Sam valued most, and because of that, she accepts a lonely fate.

Relegated to the beach for however long it takes to usher in extinction now,

naturally.

After the world-saving hug, Sam wanders the beach listening to Amelie and Bridget's whole story.

And eventually, he is rescued and brought back to the world of the living thanks to the combined efforts of Hartman, Loch Nimalignan, Deadman, and Fragile, who manage to track Sam down thanks to a revolver that Die Hardman brought into the beach, which contains his blood in the hematic rounds.

From there, Die Hard Man becomes the new president of the UCA, delivering an inauguration speech that makes Sam uncomfortable with the overwhelming praise.

Fragile, meanwhile, continues her delivery business, and Fragile Express becomes the first private delivery firm to be approved by the UCA.

Fragile also reveals she never shot Higgs,

She instead gave him the choice of death or being stranded on the beach.

She offers Sam a job to work for her one last time, but Sam insists on staying a lone wolf.

After Die Hardman's presidential inauguration, Deadman returns Sam's BB back to him.

Unfortunately, Lou is near death, and Deadman gives him the news that to prevent a void out, Lou will need to be incinerated like any other corpse.

Deadman heavily implies to Sam that Lou could be taken out of the pod to see what happens, but he also warns him that it'd be a direct UCA violation.

He then disconnects Sam's cufflinks from the UCA, explaining that he can now remove them if needed.

Officially free from the UCA, Sam travels to the incinerator to dispose of Lou's body.

But Dead Man's words reverberate in Sam's head.

He starts the process of incinerating Lou before grabbing him at the last second.

Sam instead incinerates his cuff links and removes Lou from the BB pod.

After a struggle, Sam is able to revive Lou, and the two leave the incinerator.

Now that Sam is fully disconnected from the UCA, they seemingly will go on to live as father and daughter.

Right, the post-credits scene shows Sam naming BB Louise.

Twist.

But that isn't the end of the story, is it?

Taking place 11 months later, Death Stranding 2 looks to take Sam, Lou, and Fragile to new continents.

Sam has been trying to live a quieter life in Mexico, before he's asked to reconnect Australia, much like he did America in the first game.

but they're not the only familiar faces returning.

In the trailers we've seen so far, it's clear that Troy Baker's Higgs is making a return, which can only be bad news.

What does he want with us this time?

We'll just have to wait and see.

But if the tentacle coming out of this mouth here is any indicator, it won't be anything good.

They'll be joined by mysterious new characters, including Rainy, Tomorrow, Tarman, Dollman, and the enigmatically named Neil.

We've got a particular eye locked on this solid snake-like gentleman, but beyond knowing what these people are called, much remains under wraps about where the sequel story will take us.

We'll find out soon, though, when Death Stranding 2 On The Beach arrives on June 26th.

Thanks for watching, and for more Death Stranding, keep it locked here on IGN.