In the starting hours of video game auteur Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding, things get weird quickly. “I think it’s very strange if a game creator doesn’t express what they think in the game,” Kojima says. “Even if they don’t understand, they say, ‘I don’t understand you, but we’ll follow you because we know you’re onto something.’ New people are afraid. My way of thinking gets incorporated.”In the original Death Stranding, Kojima wanted people to say thank you to people who deliver things and to appreciate porters as everyday heroes. “People don’t need to know my thinking; they can just enjoy it naturally,” Kojima says of Death Stranding 2.