One thing you can be certain about a Hideo Kojima game is nothing is certain. No matter what you may have personally thought of 2019’s Death Stranding and all the bizarre and strange concepts it had, a sequel was quite enviable. Once Kojima gets an idea he loves in his head, he will see it through for years to come. The Death Stranding saga has only just begun most likely. With just one very long, very cryptic trailer at The 2022 Game Awards, we’ve got nothing but questions. Kojima himself said on stage he wants people to figure out all the clues he left in the trailer. So then let’s try to crack one of possibly the easier ones. How much time has passed in Death Stranding 2?
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Clues of Passing Time
One of the first and most obvious clues we have must be looking at Sam Bridges. Once again portrayed by Norman Reedus, Sam looks like he’s aged a good bit. His air is grayer, and he even has more wrinkles. It’s not going to give us an exact timeline or anything. Although, it can confirm perhaps a significant amount of time has gone by.
Fragile and her Baby
The real key to figuring out at least an approximation is Fragile and her baby. Fragile didn’t have a baby in the first game, so that’s one thing. Now is this a Bridge Baby or Fragile’s own from her body? At the beginning of the trailer when we see Fragile and her child in the bunker she’s seemingly hiding away in, there’s a height marker on the wall. It has the numbers 1 and 2 and baby hand prints. We all know some parents like to measure their children’s height. So we can assume at the least this child is somewhere around 2 years old.
Given time for pregnancy and let’s just assume nothing is what it seems with Kojima, this could be anywhere between 3 and 5 years give or take from when the last game ended. However, that’s just when Fragile is attacked and her baby is allegedly lost or taken. Then we get the shot with her with Sam looking like they are about to go destroy something in a plot of revenge and even rebellion.
If we want to assume it takes a while to recover, track down, and plot against whatever force took/killed Fragile’s child, maybe 10 years is a safe assumption at the *most* time that has passed.
Puzzling the Pieces
Of course, there are probably some much more die-hard fans out there who have considered many more factors and got a better approximate time skip. This is a Kojima game however and if the first Death Stranding proved anything, it’s predicting Death Stranding is a monumental task. We can infer close to a decade or so of time passing at the least, but it could still be much longer, or even shorter depending on when Fragile had her child taken. Perhaps that was a flashback instead, happening before she even met Sam the first time.
We also of course have only gotten this one teaser trailer. There will be much more in the months to come to find out even more secrets and question more answers Kojima throws at us until the release of DS2.
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