Just Try to Make Sense of This Death Stranding Trailer

What happens when you give Hideo Kojima money and the creative freedom to do whatever he damn pleases? You get whatever the hell this eight-minute long Death Stranding trailer is. Since its reveal in E3 2016, we have received no gameplay footage of this (apparently?) open-world action game, but instead have been graced with one bizarre trailer after the next. This new trailer that debuted last night is no different.

Where do we even begin?

We focus on our protagonist, played by Norman Reedus of The Walking Dead fame. Unlike in the first trailer, Reedus is wearing clothes, and appears to be in the middle of some sort of expedition gone awry (his character narrates about a life-giving and life-ending “explosions” in the background).

The character’s team is stalked by some sort of invisible beast that they are able to detect with their instruments, one that appeared to dissolve a corpse into gold dust. Meanwhile Reedus’s teammates appear to suffer from some bad luck, with one pinned to the ground and taken away by shadow creatures, and the other taken by an invisible force; the latter person appears to prefer death than to being taken by these unknown forces.

The grisly and surreal trailer continues on, including a zoom-in inside of Reedus’s throat to reveal a baby inside of him (giving a thumbs up, no less). After the chaos, Reedus gets up to observe the environment and the same mysterious floating figures from the first trailer. As the title is shown, Reedus growls “Aww yeah.”

Uh, yeah.

We’ll leave it to you and the rest of the internet detectives on Twitter, Reddit and the like to figure out what any of this means—there were certainly a lot of details to take in there. No release date has been set for Death Stranding, but we sure hope that it is an actual videogame and not a bunch of confusing trailers that Kojima is making for shits and giggles.