Death Stranding 2 and the Allure of the Australian Outback in Gaming
Forty years after a formative classroom experience with Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout, one gamer finds echoes of that haunting vision in Hideo Kojima’s sprawling new title, Death Stranding 2. The game’s ruined Australian landscape, stark and beautiful, evokes a powerful sense of isolation and wonder.
As a teenager in the late 1980s, a fascination with Australian new wave cinema blossomed, fueled by the Mad Max trilogy and a pivotal moment in an English class. An English teacher introduced the class to Roeg’s masterpiece, Walkabout, leaving a lasting impression. Now, decades later, while immersed in Death Stranding 2, the feeling of being transported back to that classroom returns.
The majority of Death Stranding 2 unfolds in a devastated Australia, stripped of its cities and imbued with a foreboding beauty reminiscent of Roeg’s film. After 45 hours of gameplay, progress on the main storyline feels secondary to the act of exploration itself. The player spends their time traversing the wilderness, delivering packages to isolated communities in a world scarred by a catastrophic event and supernatural explosions.
The game’s Australia is a dynamic, ever-changing environment. Vast ochre deserts give way to coastlines where sunsets illuminate glowing mountains and tides roll onto empty bays. Unlike many open-world games with static landscapes, Death Stranding 2 features a world constantly reshaped by earthquakes, dust storms, and avalanches. Players can contribute to this evolving world by constructing roads, electricity generators, and jump-ramps, infrastructure that is then shared with other players, creating a constantly shifting network of traversal options.
Kojima’s admiration for George Miller, the director of the Mad Max films, is evident throughout Death Stranding 2. The game’s themes of technology versus isolation, feudal tribes, and scarce resources all echo the energy of Miller’s work. The influence of Walkabout is also palpable, though perhaps lacking the film’s strong undercurrent of colonial guilt. A remote rocky outcrop within the game map even bears a resemblance to the unsettling location of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, with its labyrinthine crevices, reddish glow, and unnerving silence.
The player’s motivations within the game – spending hours delivering parcels, even something as mundane as fluffy pyjamas to an animal shelter – become strangely compelling. Kojima, like Weir, has crafted a world that is both beguiling and threatening, a seductive combination that draws players in. As Weir himself explained, his aim with Picnic at Hanging Rock was to create “an oppressive atmosphere of something which has no solution,” a “hallucinatory mesmeric rhythm” that disorients and captivates.
That description, the gamer notes, perfectly encapsulates the experience of Death Stranding 2. It’s a game of hypnotic rhythms, where familiar landscapes subtly transform with each return visit – a new road appears, or a sign left by another player marks a previously uncharted path. Kojima has achieved what Grand Theft Auto attempts with American cities: to distill the feeling of a place, viewed through an outsider’s lens. The feeling of discovering new areas in Death Stranding 2 is akin to that first viewing of Walkabout, a sense of encountering an impossible, alien landscape brimming with beauty, possibility, and danger. The player anticipates months of continued exploration.
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