Introduction

The introduction establishes the scope of the book as focusing on the themes of longing, ruin, and connection in Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding. While the game is post-apocalyptic, and centers on the threat of a final, humanity-ending apocalyptic event, it is also forward-looking, finding hope in the tentative connections characters with the game form with one another. Death Stranding, with its specific setting in post-apocalyptic America, also serves as a commentary on the destabilizing events of the last several years in the United States and cautions that getting caught up in a nostalgic quest to recreate a version of America based on the past is both small-minded and doomed to failure.