I’ve seen a lot of art in my lifetime and yet so little of it I actually remember. Memories of exhibitions, films, plays and books exist like ghosts that bump around inside my head. Old videos that never fully reload. But in amongst them, there are a handful that come back to me without question marks trailing behind; artworks that are less like ghosts and more like the bones I am made of. Every few years, I experience something with so much heft and affect, something that comes just when I need it most, that its memory is forever fixed in time and space.

It’s autumn 2020 and I’m renting a flat on my own. The rain is so heavy that it is loud through single-glazing. Every evening, I run the kidney-shaped perimeter of an old Victorian park because I think the routine will keep me sane. Case numbers are high so Liverpool has been placed back under lockdown before the rest of the country. I am definitely the most depressed I’ve ever been. I check the news more than I check on myself. Greyed out on the map, I send parcels to friends, they send them back. I water the house plants so much I over-water them — a thing I didn’t even know you could do.

I check the news again and agree that nothing is worth the risk. Wash hands after touching doors. A friend tells me about the 2019 Japanese video game Death Stranding, written, designed and produced by Hideo Kojima of Metal Gear Solid fame. Apparently it’s about a world in lockdown? There are a load of celebrities in it. Norman Reedus, Léa Seydoux, Mads Mikkelsen, Margaret Qualley. It’s not like I’m going anywhere. I wring wet hair into the sink after another park run because I can’t keep watering the plants. Close the curtains to better see the screen. I message the friend to say I’m starting now. I realise I don’t remember the last time I spoke out loud.

The game, it turned out, was about lockdown. But it was also about a future America where there has been a shattering between the realms of the living and the dead. Hunched-over ghosts simmer, invisible, in the air. If humans ever come into contact with these ghosts, the two explode, leaving huge nuclear-sized craters in the Earth. New dystopian rain is corrosive to skin, buildings, everything. People have no choice but to hide in bunkers underground. You play as a porter named Sam who walks carefully on foot to deliver packages between these bunkers. Everyone’s become disconnected so it is also Sam’s job to set up a new kind of Internet, daisy-chaining a network between them. You get ladders and climbing ropes to cross rivers and mountains; you get special equipment to reveal the static-electricity silhouettes of the dead to make sure you never touch them and they never touch you.

I didn’t know games like this existed. I had never played anything so lonely, hard-going, and challenging in some of its imagery; that special ghost hunting equipment is actually a pre-term baby that blinks at you through a transparent pod. Not having been born yet, the baby exists somewhere between the living and the dead, meaning it can sense the ghosts the naked eye can’t see. Sam wears this pod over his stomach like a surrogate and mutters to it as he walks. And yeah, I wasn’t used to games that weren’t about having fun, and yet it was without a doubt the best thing I’d ever played. I couldn’t believe Death Stranding had been released a month before the first case of COVID was ever recorded when it just so happened to be about an invisible force that exploded us into ghosts when we touched. I clocked 160 hours playing from my own bunker, completing everything there was to complete. God, I wanted to climb inside the TV.

And it’s so tender thinking back on my time with it, like watching therapy I didn’t know was being filmed. I remember not knowing if I was more scared of being alone in that flat for years to come (or even weeks, honestly), seeing other people and risking infection, or worse, risking becoming a domino in someone else’s death. The game wasn’t there to answer this moral knot. Sam develops a fear of being touched and everyone steers clear of each other, only interfacing through screens. No, the game was just the perfect counterweight, pushing my body back harder the closer I got to the edge. Two firm hands on shoulders guiding me out of a haunted house. Someone saying, ‘look at me,’ because otherwise I’d see how close the ghosts had gotten.

In the years that followed, the gratitude I felt led me to writing three texts about it. I lectured on the game at a conference in Vienna. I lived in a branded hoodie, got gachapon, read the novelisations, plural. I bought tickets to see Low Roar, the band whose music features throughout; and when I started making art again for a stint, I did so under a pseudonym riffing on one of the game’s main characters. I didn’t realise until I started writing these words but I think fandom became a way to enjoy the core thing at a safe distance. The art was so bound to the specific shared trauma of 2020 to the point I didn’t even make it halfway through the Director’s Cut. I needed the remove. To play the actual thing again would be like disturbing a grave.

It meant that when the sequel was drawing near and Playstation sent me a review code, there were nerves mixed in with excitement. I definitely wanted to know what happened next in the story but life is so different now. That grave might be my past self and if I don’t need hands on shoulders, I wasn’t sure I needed the game. But 80 hours later, watching the credits roll at 3AM after eschewing all birthday plans to just play this instead, I was left with a good, clear feeling in my chest like… a kind of freedom, like when you finally come to a decision. Relaxing a hard, tense jaw. It was like bumping into someone you feel weird about and actually, it’s so normal and the two of you are having a nice time. I’ve never laughed so much at a game. I’ve never loved fictional characters more. I’ve never felt more satisfied, surprised or capable. I had such a good time now I wasn’t white-knuckling the controller and needing things to be so fucking high stakes.

Hideo Kojima didn’t know we’d be playing the first game during the fifth worse pandemic of all time, but he knew we’d be playing the sequel in its aftermath. At every turn he uses Death Stranding 2 to make his values clear: when it comes to global threats, we only really have each other. We can’t trust governments to keep us safe. Death Stranding 2 is critical of superpowers, borders, white supremacy, human trafficking. It also seems to say that the Internet is great or whatever, but we need to be in the same room. We shouldn’t go through anything alone.

And so, we continue our postman job but this time around, Sam has taken that baby out the pod and is now raising her as his kid. He travels on a flying submarine with a whole load of shipmates. Léa Seydoux chain-smokes. Shioli Kutsuna joins the cast as Rainy, a character so loveable she could spin forever inside a musical jewellery box and I’d never get bored. Elle Fanning plays a stray cat of a girl called Tomorrow. There’s in-game social media and Sam has a chatty sentient puppet strapped to his belt providing a running commentary throughout. It means Sam is never actually alone.

Gameplay is pretty much the same, making Death Stranding 2 a non-identical twin. But in having a twin, it’s a much less lonely game. The temperature rise feels good. It’s single player but it has an online mode that means the ladders and bridges you place appear in other players’ games to help them cross rivers and mountains too. If you drop a gun in a boss fight, it will pop up in someone else’s. If enough people walk the same route, it creates a desire line in the ground so we can all find our way. The player is never alone either.

And it’s funny. All of this design was true for game one as well but it’s like I’m only able to feel it in the sequel, now that story and gameplay feel like they’re really working towards the same goal of community. I feel it in Death Stranding 2 where characters finally touch; where the baby paws at Sam’s face, Rainy brushes Tomorrow’s hair, and the girls press their foreheads together and hug. Maybe I feel it because I know it now, too? I pause the game because Priya and Carlos are coming over for dinner. I stop writing this sentence for a moment, right now, and here I’m back again, because I don’t live alone anymore and Michael just leant over the back of my computer chair to kiss me on the head.

It’s all warmth, shoulders touching. I felt it even in the way Hideo Kojima decorates Death Stranding 2 with all of the art he loves. He has Woodkid and Caroline Polachek on the original soundtrack. Main characters wear custom jackets designed by German fashion house ACRONYM. The little puppet stans Gen Hoshino. Sam unlocks a suit covered in Junji Ito drawings. Kojima is famously a huge fan of cinema, so Mad Max director George Miller provides the likeness for the captain of the ship, and another character in the game is played by RRR director S. S. Rajamouli, to name but a few.

It takes me back to the friend who once recommended I play Death Stranding. This game is a result of years of production and decisions, and Kojima seems to use every opening in the game to recommend even more art. That’s a kind of friendship towards the player, and it’s friendship to other creatives too. I struggle to think of another container featuring such a wide cross-section of international artists and art across mediums. It’s like a very elaborate listicle. 20 bones Hideo Kojima is made of. Writing this as a critic in England, where scarcity has forced creatives into a lonely competition they can’t even win, the curation in this game is like a party.

It’s summer 2025 and I’m in a good mood these days. The puppet swinging on my hip has become a bit of a Jiminy Cricket. Before we set off on another trip he tells me, ‘Prolonged living inside an enclosed space can be bad for one’s mental health due to the unchanging environment.’ I end up in a snowstorm in the middle of the night on the way to my next delivery, and that’s still better than staying inside. And I can’t really complain about a snowstorm. When I went to Norway, a girl told me there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. I think Hideo Kojima would agree.

When there’s no more mountain left to climb, the skies clear and I am standing before a full moon so big I must have taken a wrong turn in the whiteout and ended up in space. It is so quiet. The puppet says, ‘To me, it matters less where I am than who I am with. So long as I am in the company of those I care about, I’m happy to go wherever.’ When I look down, I see a heart-shaped lake. When I look up, there’s a constellation in the shape of a thumbs up. It twinkles at me. In a game that is so much about preparation, all of these surprises, all of this sentimentality, I swear it’s rewiring my brain. I keep giving people thumbs up in real life. God, I must be happy.

And I’m happy even though the game’s not perfect. The hardest difficulty mode is not hard enough, the story’s a bit obvious, sometimes the structure is just too identical to game one, the menu could be more efficient, and Elle Fanning’s hair is weirdly distracting in a game of CGI so impressive I sometimes wondered if a few videos had been slotted in. But I don’t think I will remember that stuff when I think back on summer 2025? I think I’ll remember that funny game about friendship, and wanting to hold my people close. Wanting to find all the art that’s ever going to change me. Wanting to find more art that I can simply never forget.

if you’re here at the end of the text, leave a thumbs up emoji 👍 on our instagram so I know you were here 👍👍👍 thumbs up for not being depressed anymore👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍