Death Stranding 2: On the Beach – Game of the Year 2025
I. Introduction – The Year the Beach Called Me Back
2025 will always be the year the beach called me back.
In a year packed with sequels, remakes, live-service noise, and endless announcements, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach didn’t just arrive as another big release on the calendar. It felt like a message in a bottle thrown directly at me – a quiet, haunting reminder that games can still be deeply weird, heartbreakingly intimate, and stubbornly human in a medium that often chases trends over soul.
Picking up my controller and stepping back into Hideo Kojima’s world, years after the original Death Stranding, felt less like “starting a new game” and more like visiting an old, haunted town I once lived in. The names were familiar. The symbols were familiar. Even the silence was familiar. But everything had shifted – the geography, the stakes, the emotional temperature of the story, and, most importantly, the place I was in as a person.
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach was released on PlayStation 5 in June 2025, carrying with it all the odd expectations and questions that swirled around the first game.
Would it be stranger? Simpler? More “conventional”? Would the world still be ready for a game where walking, planning, and connecting are the heart of the experience? The answer, for me, was a loud, resounding yes – but in a quiet, whispering way only Kojima seems to pull off.
This wasn’t just another open world to tick off markers in. It was a landscape of grief, second chances, and fragile hope stretched across Mexico and Australia, two vast, scarred spaces connected by impossible portals and impossible dreams.
In that space, surrounded by sandstorms, ghostly machines, and memories of the first game, I found something I didn’t realize I’d been missing: a game that asked me not just to win, but to feel.
When I say Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is my Game of the Year for 2025, I don’t mean it lightly. I mean, this game tapped into the same part of me that loves quiet journaling sessions, and stories that risk being misunderstood, to be honest. It gave me a world to carry, characters to worry about, and a post-credits scene that left me staring at the screen, half devastated, half electrified about whatever comes next.
This blog isn’t a traditional review. It’s more like a long letter to the game that soundtracked my year – to the deliveries I made, the storms I survived, the performances that crushed me, and the final shot that made me think, “Yeah, this is why I still care about games.”
II. Coming Back to the Strand (opening)
The first Death Stranding arrived at a strange time in my life and in the world. It was a game about isolation and connection that became even more relevant as the real world around us changed. By the time On the Beach landed in June 2025, that original journey had settled into legend in my mind. I remembered the feeling of it more than the specifics – the weight of the cargo, the way Low Roar’s songs hit at just the right moment, the lonely comfort of walking into the unknown.
Sequels to something that personal always do. There’s a fear that the magic will be gone, that the sequel will try too hard to explain the unexplainable, or sand off the rough edges that made the first one feel special. But Death Stranding 2: On the Beach doesn’t just repeat itself. It looks at the same world from a different angle, eleven months later, in a time where the chiral network is fully connected, BRIDGES is gone, and automated systems have replaced human porters.
That premise alone hit me harder than I expected. A world that no longer needs people like Sam – a world where the very act of carrying, of showing up in person, has been handed off to machines – felt painfully familiar in a creative industry obsessed with automation and efficiency. Sam isn’t just retired; he’s almost obsolete. And there’s something deeply human about watching a character who once carried the fate of a nation now just trying to carry the fate of his own small, fragile family.
When Fragile shows up with a new mission, a new company, and a new reason to step back into danger, it doesn’t feel like “the next quest.” It feels like that moment in life when you thought you were done, when you’d made peace with fading into the background – and then life knocks on your door and asks, gently but firmly, “Are you really finished?”
