Death stranding RPG

Death Stranding is an action-adventure game set in an open world, and includes asynchronous online functions. Kojima refers to Death Stranding as the first "strand game", an original genre characterized by the game's incorporation of social elements. Kojima compared this genre to how his earlier game Metal Gear—now considered a stealth game—was called an action game during its release because the stealth genre had not been established.[5][6][7]

The player controls Sam Bridges, a porter for a company known as BRIDGES. The player is tasked with delivering supply cargo to various isolated cities known as KNOTs, as well as isolated researchers and survivalists, while also connecting them to a communications system known as the Chiral Network.[8][9] The player is evaluated by the company and recipients based on their performance (including via "likes" similar to social networks), including whether the cargo was delivered, and if it is intact, among other factors. These merits are, in turn, used to level up the player's statistics, such as stability and weight capacity, and increase their standing with individual locations and characters (which can improve rewards).[10] How cargo is packed by the player, and the overall weight being carried, affect Sam's ability to navigate through the environments.[11]

The RPG is set in an apocalyptic United States, where a cataclysmic event known as the "Death Stranding" caused "Beached Things" ("BTs")—invisible creatures originating from the "Beach", lands thought to be unique to each person that are typically visited during near-death experiences and are said to be the link to the afterlife—to begin roaming the Earth. BTs are created from the dead via necrosis, and when they consume a living human being, they create an explosion on the scale of a nuclear bomb, known as a "voidout". They produce rain known as "Timefall" that rapidly ages and deteriorates whatever it hits. These events damaged the country's infrastructure, leading its remaining population to confine themselves to remote colonies known as "Knot Cities", which form the remaining "United Cities of America".[15][8][9][21]

These colonies have relied on the services of a company known as BRIDGES, whose porters brave the BTs, bandits, and terrorists to deliver supplies to the cities. Bridges performs various governmental functions on behalf of the UCA.[15][8][9][21] If they achieve a mental connection to a "Bridge Baby" (a "BB")—a premature child reflecting a state between life and death—it is possible for a person to sense the presence of a BT. Porters carry a BB with them, stored in a pod simulating the womb of a "stillmother". Depending on its severity, a condition known as "DOOMS" allows a person to naturally sense, see, or even control a BT, as well as granting a variety of powers, such as teleportation or travel to other people's Beaches.[21][9] There are individuals known as "repatriates" who can travel back from "the Seam"—a place between the world of the living and the Beach—upon death. As such, these individuals can effectively return from death, though their deaths will still cause voidouts if killed during contact with a BT.

Freelance courier Sam Porter Bridges (Norman Reedus) is transporting cargo to Central Knot City but is interrupted by Timefall and takes shelter. He receives assistance from Fragile (Léa Seydoux) in evading a BT. Sam arrives at his destination, where a citizen has committed suicide, with the corpse on the verge of necrosis. Due to being both a repatriate and having DOOMS, Sam is given an emergency assignment to accompany the disposal team to an incinerator to dispose of the corpse. However, an encounter with BTs causes a voidout that destroys Central Knot City.

Sam revives in Capital Knot City and meets Deadman (Guillermo del Toro/Jesse Corti),[d] a doctor from BRIDGES who has Sam deliver morphine to the dying President of the UCA: Sam's adoptive mother, Bridget Strand (Lindsay Wagner/Emily O'Brien).[e] Bridget pleads with Sam to rejoin BRIDGES and help realize her dream of "reforming America" before succumbing to her illness. Sam takes her body for incineration but refuses to incinerate a Bridge Baby involved in the Central Knot City voidout. With the BB's assistance, Sam evades a horde of BTs and decides to adopt it as his own Bridge Baby; against UCA instructions to treat Bridge Babies as pieces of equipment, Sam gradually forms an emotional bond with it and nicknames it "Lou".

Upon his return to Capital Knot City, Sam receives a message from his estranged sister Amelie Strand (also Wagner/O'Brien).[e] She tells him that over the past three years, she led an expedition across what is left of the continental United States, making contact with isolated cities and settlements and setting up terminals that would connect them to the Chiral Network: a system that facilitates instant communication and data transfer across vast distances through the Beach. Upon reaching the last city on the West Coast (Edge Knot City), Amelie was captured by Homo Demens, a terrorist group to guarantee Edge Knot City's independence. She pleads for Sam to follow her expedition.