The Death Stranding Story Summarized
Death Stranding is a post-apocalyptic adventure, only instead of zombies or nuclear war bringing about our end, it came by way of an event known as… well, the Death Stranding.The Death Stranding was a cataclysmic event in which ghostly “Beached Things,” or BTs, suddenly appeared in the world of the living, triggering a massive amount of simultaneous explosion-like “voidouts” all over the world that eradicated everything caught up in them, leaving nothing but craters in their wake.As a result of the Death Stranding, previously undiscovered particles known as chiralium appeared in our world, rain turned into timefall that rapidly ages whatever it touches, and those BTs wander the world in rainy areas, pulled magnetically towards life if disturbed. Ruffle enough of their feathers and eventually their attack on the living causes more voidouts, too.
Naturally, this leaves the remnants of humanity turtled up inside isolated cities, thus creating the need for transporters: those brave enough to make the journey to deliver essentials from one city to another. Porters are some of the most valuable people in this death stranded world.
Prologue Plot Summary: Just A Routine Corpse Disposal
Enter Sam Porter Bridges, who begins the game assisting body disposal specialists. Since the Death Stranding, bodies need to be burned when they die, otherwise they will eventually necrotize and turn into a BT.
In the process, a mysterious masked man who seems to be able to control BTs sets them on Sam’s body disposal buddy. Before he’s able to kill himself, a giant BT swallows him whole, triggering a voidout and killing Sam in the process.
No worries though, because Sam’s a Repatriate, which means that when he dies, his soul winds up in a place called the Seam, where he’s able to guide his soul through a now-underwater environment back to his body. A cut scene follows where he enters through his own mouth, slides down the esophagus where there’s a baby… who gives him a thumbs up. The next thing he knows, he’s back to life spewing tar out of his mouth. Look, don’t ask me how it works, ask Kojima.
Episodes 1-2 Plot Summary: Reconnecting America
Following this adventure, Sam gets picked up by a man who goes by Deadman, on account of him being “well acquainted with the dead.” Deadman sends Sam to see his adoptive mother, Bridget Strand: the first and last female president of the United States, who also happens to be dying of cancer.
Bridget passes on her dying wish to Sam: Reconnect America. Though Sam is not sold on the idea, Bridget dies trying to convince him to head west and aid her daughter Amelie in making America whole.
Sam agrees to take Bridget’s body to the incinerator. Deadman equips Sam with BB-28, the bridge baby that belonged to the now-deceased corpse disposal employee. Deadman wants Sam to burn it as well, thinking it no more than a clearly defective tool that let its owner down, but come on, who could possibly kill that adorable face?
Sam keeps the BB, and good thing, too, because BTs quickly corner Sam inside the incinerator. Thankfully, BBs allow the wearer to see the shadowy figures of where the BTs are, giving Sam a chance to escape without triggering another voidout.
Upon returning, Sam finally reunites with Amelie, who echoes Bridget’s pleas with Sam to head west, establish the Chiral Network, and rescue her, as she’s been captured by a group of terrorists known as the Homo Demens, or Mad Men. But even after all that, Sam still wants nothing to do with Bridget or Amelie’s goal.
In a dream, Sam finds himself on The Beach with Amelie. After another plea for help (and some ominous foreshadowing), Sam caves. And thus truly begins his epic endeavor to reconnect the country and re-establish the United Cities of America.
Episode 3-4 Plot Summary: Fragile Express
Sam makes his way to Port Knot City where he reencounters the masked man with BT abilities from earlier in the game. We learn that his name is Higgs, named after the God Particle, the Higgs Boson.Higgs introduces himself with a classic villain monologue -- all of which makes much more sense later on -- and then sics his BTs on you.
After throwing a bunch of blood grenades at a whale, we set sail across the lake to the real meat of the game in the Central Region. Fragile -- a fellow transporter Sam meets briefly earlier on in the game that has then ability to teleport given her unique and free access to her beach -- reappears. She’s got a history with Higgs, as the two used to be partners before he betrayed her and used her to unwittingly blow up Middle Knot City and almost blow up South Knot, as well.
When Fragile was caught attempting to save South Knot City, Higgs offered her a choice: Save the city by running through rapidly age-ifying timefall and throwing the bomb in a crater, or save herself. Judging by Fragile’s rapidly aged body from neck to toe, it’s easy to see what choice she made.This is all-important because, back in the present, Higgs sneaks a bomb into Sam’s cargo -- similarly to how he tricked Fragile -- and makes another attempt at turning South Knot into a crater. Fortunately, Sam’s able to spot it in time and tosses the bomb into a tar pit on his first try.
As he continues on his journey, Sam eventually gets swept up in a crazy storm that transports him to a battlefield set sometime during World War I. It’s here that he first meets Clifford, a character we’ve previously only known through BB’s flashbacks indicating a relationship between the two. Turns out, Clifford really wants his BB back, and he’s willing to turn his small army of skele-soldiers against Sam to get it.
Sam fights his way out back into reality, where apparently only a few seconds have passed.
Episode 5 Plot Summary: Mama I’m Coming Home
Sam’s next stop has him meeting Mama, a woman who is tethered to her dead baby, which floats around her as a BT. Mama’s story is a tragic one, but the short version of it is: Terrorists attacked a hospital while she was giving birth, she got stuck under rubble during the C-section operation, and her baby died while Mama lived, connecting them via the BT’s umbilical cord.In the present, Mama informs Sam that the storm was the result of chiral density at a way higher than she ever expected. It’s apparently a result of Sam connecting stations to the Chiral Network. Even stranger, the limiter that she placed on the Q-pid -- the device that Sam uses to connect stations to the Chiral Network -- is faulty. She warns Sam that if he continues extending the chiral network as is, he may actually cause another Death Stranding.
She gives Sam a new Q-Pid, but in order to get it to work Sam needs to seek out a woman named Lockne. Lockne, as it turns out, is actually Mama’s estranged twin sister. To prove that Lockne can trust him, Sam reunites the two sisters, but not before needing to cut the umbilical cord connecting Mama to her BT baby, and also running away from Higgs and his giant BT Lion (the second BT mini-boss we see in the game).
Mama -- whose real name is Malingen -- “dies” on arrival -- a result of severing her ties with her BT baby. Her soul instead bonds as one with Lockne’s. Interestingly, Mama’s physical body doesn’t show any signs of necrotization, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
Episodes 6-7 Plot Summary: I Want My BB Back
Sam returns to his room and takes a nap. When he wakes up he finds that the BB, who he now adorably calls Lou, is missing. Deadman shows up with BB in hand and informs him that while BBs are meant to be a bridge between the world of the living and the other side, Lou is starting to veer too closely to the world of the living by developing into an actual baby. Deadman warns that Lou will cease functioning in a couple of days unless he performs an operation to reset it, essentially tugging it back to the middle of the line between the two worlds.
Sam hands Lou back over to Deadman, leaving Sam to take on missions where he is blind to BTs. Fast forward a bit and Sam makes his way back to Deadman to retrieve a rebooted BB, a reunion interrupted by another chiral storm that precedes yet another meeting with the menacing Clifford Unger.
Deadman and Sam now find each other inside a World War II-themed nightmare world. When he eventually finds Deadman through the warzone, Sam takes BB back, which has now imprinted itself upon Deadman, finally making him see BBs as more than just a tool.
Sam faces off against Clifford once again, and in another scuffle, he manages to snag Clifford’s dog tag before waking up in his private room. Here we learn a whole boatload of secrets, including what happened with Sam’s wife and child (they died in a voidout), where Deadman got his name (he’s an artificial human, grown from pluripotent stem cells, with parts of him made up of body parts from corpses to replace the defective ones), and the identity of Clifford Unger (he’s a US Army Special Forces captain who served in Kosovo and Iraq).
Episode 8 Plot Summary: A Heart to Heart With Heartman
Sam pays a man known as Heartman a visit, who dives into a deeper explanation of what a “Beach” is in Death Stranding. A Beach, as Heartman explains it, is a space created by one’s soul. They’re called Beaches, but they don’t have to be actual beaches. They are shaped by the individual’s beliefs, religion, philosophy, etc. When a person dies, their beach essentially acts as a corridor connecting them to the other side. A sort of limbo, so to speak.Each person has their own unique beach, but if a bunch of people die all at once, their beaches become tangled in what’s known as a Strand Field. So, those battlefields that Sam finds Clifford in -- those are Cliff’s Beaches. Fragile uses her beach to teleport between hub cities. That beach that Sam and Amelie converse on, that’s a beachy Beach.
Sam makes his way to Heartman with Mama’s non-decomposing/non-necrotizing corpse on his back, along with a mysterious umbilical cord that Deadman wanted him to investigate. We learn that Heartman has a very close relationship with Beaches, as he dies every 21 minutes for three minutes before being revived, allowing him to explore beaches 60 times per day in an effort to locate and reunite with his dead wife and child. At the time Sam meets him, he’s been to the beach 218,549 times.A couple of deliveries and chiral network additions later, we learn that the umbilical cord Deadman smuggled into Sam’s cargo actually belonged to Bridget Strand, and is apparently the key to unlocking the mystery of the Death Stranding. Heartman deduces that the cord, along with Mama’s body, have cells infused with chiralium, giving them a connection to the beach and allowing them to escape the flow of time.
Episode 9 Plot Summary: Extinction Entities
Now, here’s where things get last-two-episodes-of-Evangelion levels of crazy. The umbilical cord leads Heartman to believe that Bridget Strand was actually an extinction entity, and that Amelie -- being her daughter -- may actually be an extinction entity herself. Though, Higgs already told us that, so thanks for the spoiler warning, Higgs.After crossing a giant tar pit, Sam finally reaches his destination on the west coast and completes his goal of reconnecting America. It’s at this point where Higgs reappears with Amelie, applauding Sam on an unintentional job well done. Now that the Chiral Network is complete, Higgs plans on using Amelie to merge all of mankind’s beaches onto a single shore and trigger a final Death Stranding to bring on the sixth and most devastating extinction event. Which brings us to a big ol’ boss fight!
After defeating Higgs’s giant BT boss, Higgs runs off with Amelie to the Beach. Fortunately, using Fragile’s special power, Sam is able to follow them for one final fisticuff showdown. After beating up Higgs and leaving his fate up to Fragile, Sam rescues Amelie and... everything seems to be fine.
Episodes 10-13 Plot Summary: Just When You Think It’s Over...
Well, not quite; turns out Amelie has lied to Sam about a bunch of stuff (which we’ll get to in a second) but there’s still the matter of Clifford and his hunt for his BB. Clifford appears on the Beach along with Die-Hardman and Bridget Strand. Cliff recognizes Die-Hardman and Bridgett and demands his BB back. Bridget points him in Sam’s direction. Before he’s able to get to Sam, though, Amelie shoves Sam off a cliff and he reawakens in a private room.
Now it’s time for Sam to head all the way back east. Right before Sam reaches his destination, a familiar storm kicks up, and he’s off to have one last showdown with Clifford. After defeating him for the last time, Sam finally learns the truth: Clifford’s actually not such a bad guy after all. He was a war hero, a loving father, and a heartbroken husband who was lied to when he entrusted his baby to Bridget Strand after his wife wound up in a coma. Oh, and Sam is actually Clifford’s son -- and he’s also the BB that Cliff had been searching for all this time.
Die-Hardman, a soldier who served under Clifford, attempted to give Cliff a head start to escape with his baby, but Clifford got caught, leading to Bridget giving Die-Hardman the order to kill him. Tragically, an errant bullet hits the BB, sending it to the Beach, where Amelie is able to revive it and send it back to the world of the living, thus explaining not only Sam’s gnarly stomach scar, but also his connection to the Beach, his ability to repatriate back to life, and his relationship with Amelie. Though the baby can no longer serve its function as a BB, Bridget decides to adopt it and raise it as her own.
Back in the present, Sam travels to the beach once again to try and prevent Amelie from initiating the final stranding. But instead, Sam finds Bridget. It’s here we learn the big secret: Amelie and Bridget are one and the same. Sort of. Bridget is the body to Amelie’s soul that’s stuck on the beach, together making up one entity.
But before any more revelations, Sam’s given a choice. The Sixth Stranding has already begun. Does he sit back and watch it happen, or does he cut his bond from Amelie and stop her from achieving her goal?
Turns out, it’s a bit of a fake choice -- you can’t actually kill Amelie, though you can watch the Last Stranding go down, which will only point you to a continue screen. Only by holstering your revolver and choosing to instead hug Amelie can you stop the Sixth Stranding from happening, or at the very least delay it.
From the start, Amelie doesn’t really want to bring on extinction. Trapped as she is in her role as an Extinction Entity, she actually approaches a young Sam and insists he stop her when the time is right, as he’s the only one who can. But she knows extinction is an inevitability and eventually the thought of waiting on the Beach for however many hundreds of thousands of years gets to her.
“I didn’t think anyone would blame me,” she pleaded with present-day Sam. But by hugging her, Sam reminded Amelie that it was the bonds between people that Sam valued most, and because of that, she accepts a lonely fate relegated to the Beach for however long it takes to usher in extinction naturally.
After the world-saving hug, Sam wanders the beach listening to Amelie/Bridget’s whole story, and eventually he is rescued and brought back to the world of the living thanks to the combined efforts of Heartman, Lockne/Malingen, Deadman, and Fragile, who manage to track Sam down thanks to the revolver that Diehard-Man brought into the Beach, which contains Sam’s own blood in the hematic rounds.
Episode 14 Plot Summary … It’s Still Not Over
From there, Die-Hardman becomes the new president of the UCA, sharing an inauguration speech that makes Sam uncomfortable with its overwhelming praise. Fragile, meanwhile, continues her delivery business and Fragile Express becomes the first private delivery firm to be approved by the UCA. Fragile also reveals she never shot Higgs, but instead let him spend eternity on the beach. She offers Sam a job to work for her one last time, but Sam insists on remaining a lone wolf.
After Die-Hardman’s presidential inauguration, Deadman returns Sam’s BB ‘Lou’ back to him. Unfortunately, Lou is dead, and Deadman gives him the news that to prevent a voidout, Lou will need to be incinerated like any other corpse. Deadman heavily implies to Sam that Lou could be taken out of the pod to “see what happens” but he also warns Sam that it’d be in direct violation of the UCA’s orders. He then disconnects Sam’s cufflinks from the UCA, explaining that Sam can now remove them if needed, thereby disappearing off the UCA’s radar.
Officially free of the UCA, Sam travels to the incinerator to dispose of Lou’s body. Deadman’s words reverberate in Sam’s head. He starts the process of incinerating Lou, but grabs him at the last second. Sam instead incinerates his cufflinks, and removes Lou from the BB pod. After a struggle, Sam is able to revive Lou. The two leave the incinerator, and now that Sam is fully disconnected from the UCA, they seemingly will go on to live as father and daughter. Oh right -- the postcredits scene shows Sam naming BB Louise. Twist!
Mitchell Saltzman is an editorial producer at IGN. Find him on Twitter @JurassicRabbit
