Hideo Kojima has set Death Stranding 2 in Aus, rewriting the game mid-pandemic
Gaming god Hideo Kojima swung by the Sydney Film Festival to chat all things film, games and freaky creatures — and yep, Death Stranding 2: On The Beach is officially heading Down Under.
In conversation with Mad Max maestro George Miller (aka his self-described “master”), Kojima unpacked how movies have always shaped his brain.
He said Mad Max basically rewired his idea of what storytelling and world-building could be — and that it helped carve the strange, cinematic energy that powers games like Death Stranding.
Turns out, his admiration for Miller is one of the reasons Death Stranding 2 is set in Australia. “Because I love George,” he laughed, but added that the Aussie landscape — its wild scale, weird geography, and utterly bonkers wildlife — made it the “perfect fit” for the sequel’s post-apocalyptic delivery quests.
Kojima only managed to visit Australia recently (pandemic delays and all), so a mate did some location scouting on his behalf at first. When he did finally land, he hit the zoo — and realised at least one of the creatures in his game doesn’t actually live where he put it. Oops.
In a press chat that we sat in on, Kojima spoke about the challenge of sequels, saying Death Stranding 2 takes a cue from Alien and Aliens: if the first game was all eerie mystery, the follow-up brings the action. “Now you know why Death Stranding is happening… it’s not scary anymore,” he explained. So, DS2 ups the pace, cranks the chaos, and expands the original’s systems — more weapons, more stealth, more complex deliveries.
It’s still about human connection, but this time it’s also about digital overload — something Kojima says was shaped by the pandemic. In fact, lockdown hit him so hard creatively that he binned the original story and started from scratch: “During the pandemic, I rewrote everything that I had for DS2.”
At the core, though, Kojima says the mission is the same — make something boundary-pushing, but not so out-there that it loses players.
If the first game was about isolation, DS2 is about navigating the mess of reconnection — with a whole lot more chaos in between.
