After his break-up with Konami, industry legend Hideo Kojima is back in the limelight, this time with his brand-new PS4 game, Death Stranding. Unveiled at Sony's E3 press conference last night, Kojima came on stage to introduce the game's very first in-game trailer.
The whole thing was short and sweet, raising more questions than it did answers about what Kojima has in store for us. There's no release date for the game yet, either, so it may still be some years away before we see it arrive on PS4. One thing's for sure, though - Norman Reedus, the Walking Dead actor who had planned to lend his face to the protagonist of Kojima and Del Toro's now-cancelled Silent Hills game, will take the lead role in Death Stranding, suggesting that we may yet see Kojima's canned Silent Hills game resurface under a different guise.
The three-minute trailer gives nothing away when it comes to genre, or even what type of gameplay we can expect - all we know is that something very fishy is going on in this strange new world Kojima's cooked up for us. You can watch the full trailer below, which all runs in real-time on the PS4, but it begins with a quote from William Blake's Auguries of Innocence, which is a poem about evil and corruption, so some horror themes may well be present in the final game.
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The camera then pans over a grey beach and the carcasses of dead crabs and various sea life before focusing on a set of mysterious, vanishing hand prints. We then arrive at the body of a fully grown naked man (Mr Reedus), a pair of blinking handcuffs hanging from his wrist. There's also an umbilical cord extending out of his stomach, and a new-born baby lying just across the way. Handprints circle around him in the sand, but Reedus holds the child tightly to his chest, barely able to contain his happiness.
However, the child then suddenly disappears and is replaced by thick, gloopy oil stains on his hands, and tiny, baby-sized handprints suddenly materialise down his leg. Was it all just a memory? As Reedus stands to get a better look at his surroundings, we see a large cross-shaped scar on his abdomen, perhaps a leftover from giving birth. Hovering in the sky before him are five strange figures - are they responsible for this desolate seascape? Did they take Reedus' child away? The trailer ends before we can find out, but either way, Kojima's certainly caught our attention.
