As a teenager in the late 1980s, I became obsessed with Australian new wave cinema, thanks partly to the Mad Max trilogy, and partly to an English teacher at my high school, who rolled out the TV trolley one afternoon and showed us Nicolas Roeg’s masterpiece Walkabout. We were mesmerised. Forty years later, I am playing Death Stranding 2, Hideo Kojima’s sprawling apocalyptic adventure, and there are times I feel as if I’m back in that classroom. Most of the game takes place in a ruined Australia, the cities gone, the landscape as stark, beautiful and foreboding as it was in Roeg’s film.
I’ve been playing for 45 hours and have barely made an impact on the story. Instead, I have wandered the wilderness, delivering packages to the game’s isolated communities. The game is set after a catastrophic event has decimated humanity and scarred the landscape with supernatural explosions. Now you pass through vast ochre deserts and on toward the coast, watching the sun set behind glowing mountains, the tide rolling in on empty bays. Usually in open-world games, the landscape is permanent and unchanging, apart from day/night cycles and seasonal rotations. But the Australia of Death Stranding 2 is mysterious and amorphous. Earthquakes bring rocks tumbling down hillsides, vast dust storms blow up and avalanches bury you in snow. As you go, you are able to build roads, electricity generators and even jump-ramps for cars. These can be found and used by other players, so each time you visit a place you may find new ways to traverse. Nothing is ever really still.
