Death Stranding is a game full of a lot of content and story. This summary reflects that and, fair warning, it’s a long one. Strap in for a wild ride.
Spoiler Warning For The Entire Game
Years ago, an event occurred where the literal worlds of life and death collided, turning the dead into mysterious otherworldly creatures and forcing time into an odd relationship with humanity. This event was characterized by the first “voidout” where a freshly dead body becomes a catastrophic explosion that has the potential to wipe out entire cities.
This event, called the Death Stranding (cue title screen), turned the Earth upside down. However, we particularly focus on the United States in its aftermath with all of its cities cut off from each other.
Think of it as a second Dark Age. Communication is practically nonexistent between cities, American history has more or less been lost, and Americans are plagued by a disease known essentially as Death.
To transport materials like dead bodies or cargo across the rocky U.S. terrain, individuals and companies use porters. That’s where we come in.
Prologue: Porter
We begin Death Stranding with our golden boy Sam Porter Bridges en route to Central Knot City to deliver some cargo. For a split second, he sees a young woman in his path. In an attempt to avoid her, he swerves and crashes his bike just as it begins to rain. To keep dry, he finds shelter in a cave close by.
The rain, known as Timefall, quite literally accelerates the age of whatever it touches so people generally stay indoors whenever possible when there’s a downpour.
The young woman, who also dips into the cave for some shelter, introduces herself as Fragile. And, as it turns out, a while back she was drenched in Timefall from the neck down which is now covered entirely by her clothes.
While waiting, the duo is attacked by invisible entities known as Beached Things or BTs for short. Sam can only sense the BTs while Fragile can see them entirely, explaining that they’re on different levels of DOOMs, a kind of supernatural scale.
Tears are also an allergic reaction to “chiral matter” or, essentially, anything that has to do with the Death Stranding. Which is why everyone’s crying in literally every promotional photo for the game.
Fragile bids farewell once the rain has stopped and Sam continues on to the city where he’s tasked with a few others to dispose of a corpse.
On the way to an incinerator, the team is attacked by BTs that kill everyone in a massive voidout.
We discover that Sam is a repatriate, someone who can come back from the Seam or pretty much Death. When he wakes up, all that’s left is a giant crater. Before one of his companions died, he threw Sam his Bridge Baby which Sam still has after the explosion.
He passes out again and awakens in Capital Knot City handcuffed to his bed where Deadman, a member of the company Bridges, informs him that Central Knot was entirely destroyed in the voidout.
Episode 1: Bridget
America’s last president, Sam’s mother, wants to meet him to speak with him before she dies so Sam is more or less forced to deliver medication to her in the isolation ward of Capital Knot.
There, Bridget Strand asks Sam to finish what Amelie, her daughter, started which was reconnecting the entire country from coast to coast with what is known as the chiral network so that they can communicate and exchange information freely.
Sam initially refuses but he is persuaded to continue their work by Amelie, his longtime and closest friend, who also just so happens to be held captive on the west coast in Edge Knot City. To get there, Sam must reconnect facilities and other cities to the chiral network along the way.
Episode 2: Amelie
With Bridge Baby in hand, Sam sets out for Port Knot City to cross the water into the central U.S. Once in Port Knot, Sam delivers supplies and learns that the only boat leaving belongs to Fragile Express.
On his way to it, he is attacked by a man known as Higgs with very powerful DOOMs abilities. Higgs calls Amelie an “Extinction Entity” and that she’s unlike anything anyone could possibly understand. He wants her for himself and sends out a large whale-like BT to attack Sam.
After defeating it, Sam joins Fragile on her ship and sets out for the rest of the U.S.
Episode 3: Fragile
Sam has a rather uncanny ability to fall asleep at the drop of a hat and does so mid-conversation with Fragile (rude). In his sleep, he meets Amelie and views a memory from his childhood of meeting with Amelie on her Beach, a physical manifestation of death, as a young boy. In the memory, she gives him the dreamcatcher he still has.
Once in Lake Knot, Fragile reveals that Higgs somehow managed to ruin her business and reputation but she doesn’t exactly explain how. She gives Sam a bracelet that would identify him as an associate of Fragile Express and shows him that she can teleport to and from places using her Beach.
Sam gets ready to set out but as he connects his suit to his BB, he experiences a vision that shows a man speaking to him as if he were the BB himself.
Sam’s new goal is to connect the chiral network from Lake Knot to South Knot City and to do that, he must connect preppers, individuals who live out on their own, and other destinations to the network.
On the way to South Knot, Sam hears rather mixed reviews about Fragile. She is either a terrorist that helped destroy Middle Knot City with a bomb or she is a hero who deserves all of the praise. When Sam confronts her about this in his private room, Fragile tells him that Higgs hijacked her company’s system and made her unwittingly sneak a bomb into the city, blowing it up.
She accidentally snuck another nuke into South Knot City but managed to stop it before it exploded. Higgs, in punishment, drenched her in Timefall.
On his way out of his private room, Sam experiences another vision through BB of that mysterious man. Deadman tries to make sense of them but he’s locked out of Sam’s BB’s service record.
In the meantime, Sam continues connecting locations and returns to Lake Knot City to grab supplies for South Knot. One specific piece of cargo couldn’t be processed in the system and a technician brings it out for Sam personally, stating it’s for Fragile.
When Sam gives it to her at a distribution center halfway to South Knot, they discover that it’s a nuke that must remain on Sam’s person to keep from detonating. Fragile comes up with the idea to throw the bomb into a massive tar lake near the city.
The plan succeeds and afterwards Fragile tells Sam what really happened to her body. To get the first nuke out of South Knot City, Higgs gave her a choice: run through Timefall naked to get rid of the bomb or let the city explode. Fragile chose the former, saved the city, and was soaked in Timefall as a result.
After her tale, Fragile bids Sam farewell after making him promise to keep Higgs alive so she can finish him off.
Episode 4: Unger
Sam continues on to South Knot City but a massive surge of chiral matter carries him Wizard of Oz style into a World War 1 era battlefield where the same man in BB’s visions is bent on taking back “his BB.”
After fighting through the battlefield and defeating the mysterious man, Sam returns to the present only to discover that, to others, he hadn’t even left.
Episode 5: Mama
Under Die-Hardman’s instructions, Sam meets up with Mama, the lead R & D engineer for Bridges who also helped create the chiral network.
In her lab, he finds out that Mama is attached to her own personal BT, her unborn child that died after she was crushed by a bridge in an explosion. The baby BT is entirely harmless but it continues to want to cross over to the other side. This connection also keeps her stuck in her lab.
Mama explains that the device Sam is using to connect others to the chiral network, a Q-pid, may be the cause of the temporal phenomena and continued use of it may result in another Death Stranding. She replaces his Q-pid but states that the network’s software needs to be rewritten to accommodate the change.
The only person who can fix the software is a woman known as Lockne in Mountain Knot City. Lucky for Sam, he has to head that way anyway.
After Sam makes it to Mountain Knot, he discovers that Lockne has an uncanny resemblance to Mama. Lockne outright refuses to connect to the chiral network and tells Sam to leave.
Courtesy of Die-Hardman, we find out that Lockne is Mama’s twin sister and they used to have a connection through DOOMs that practically made them telepathic. It was the foundation for the design of the chiral network.
However, Lockne and Mama had a falling out that, once Sam returns to South Knot, Mama explains was due to her accident. Lockne and Mama, or Målingen, both are unable to have children separately. So, to work around this, they take Lockne’s eggs, fertilize them using Lockne’s late husband’s sperm, and Mama carries the fetus to term.
But her accident not only kills the baby but severs her connection with Lockne. Mama’s inability to leave or contact Lockne leaves a big rift between the two.
To fix this, Mama fashions new handcuffs for Sam that can cut the umbilical cord of BTs. She requests that he cut the cord between her and her baby. Sam does so but leaves Mama weakened in the process. Her final job for him is to take her to Mountain Knot.
Once they arrive, Lockne and Mama make up just before Mama dies. However, their connection manages to fuse their two consciousnesses together, allowing Mama to not entirely be gone.
As per Mama’s wishes, Lockne fixes Sam’s Q-pid and starts to aid Bridges in their tasks.
Episode 6: Deadman
After successfully connecting Mountain Knot to the chiral network, Sam rests up in his private room but awakes to find his BB, who he’s named Lou, gone. Deadman shows up with Lou in hand stating that there’s a problem.
Sam’s BB has started to become more connected to the world of the living, essentially starting the process of becoming a baby. However, Bridge Babies are meant to remain a literal bridge between life and death. They only have a 70% chance of surviving outside of their pods.
To fix this, Deadman takes BB in the meantime to physically separate its connection to Sam.
Under the guise of needing a shower, Deadman speaks to Sam where no others will hear, detailing that there is a conspiracy surrounding Bridget Strand and Bridge Babies.
The first BB experiments were initially suspended after a voidout killed the previous president of the United States. However, Bridget continued the experiments in secret to help solve the mystery surrounding the Death Stranding. Bridget also wanted to incorporate BBs into the chiral network to physically travel to the Beaches but it never worked out.
Terrorists eventually manage to get their hands on BB tech. None of this looks good for Bridget or Die-Hardman, her right-hand man.
Regardless, to help make BB feel better and to help uncover Bridget’s secrets, Sam is tasked with connecting local preppers to the chiral network.
Episode 7: Clifford
Once finished, another massive chiral superstorm surrounds Mountain Knot City as Sam returns. On his way to meet Deadman to retrieve his BB, they’re all swept up and sent to another World War 2 era battleground.
In the commotion, Sam and Deadman were spit out in separate locations. In the hopes of getting to Deadman before the mysterious man does, Sam hurries across the battlefield to be reunited with BB.
Once they are, he surmises that defeating the man will send them all home.
Beating the man leads to a rather informative conversation. He may have been the reason BB was placed in his pod in the first place.
Sam experiences another vision that reveals to us that the man may have tried to escape with BB from an unknown facility but ultimately fails.
Defeating the man does indeed allow Sam and Deadman to leave and they converse in Sam’s private room about what happened.
After some digging by Deadman, he discovers that “Lou” would have been the name of Sam’s unborn child had his wife not been killed in a voidout years ago. Due to his abilities as a repatriate, Sam was the only one to survive.
This rather forceful heart to heart also reveals that 70% of Deadman is made up of dead body parts and that he doesn’t have his own Beach due to it. Hence the name “Deadman.”
Deadman’s research also concludes that, after looking at a dog tag Sam brought back to the present, the mysterious man is Clifford Unger, a U.S. army special forces soldier.
Deadman bids Sam farewell and as Sam takes a shower, Heartman, a chiral researcher, explains that the beach Sam went to might be a specific battlefield for soldiers connected to one another. However, their World War 2 connection to Clifford Unger is still unknown.
Heartman requests that Sam connect him to the chiral network to continue research and, as Sam readies himself to leave, he experiences another vision while connecting to BB.
In the vision, Unger is surprised by one of his former soldiers within the facility but his identity isn’t revealed.
Episode 8: Heartman
Heartman requests Mama’s corpse among a number of other pieces of cargo due to the fact that her body has shown no signs of decomposition.
Along with Mama’s corpse, Deadman snuck in an umbilical cord for Heartman to research that looks more like a BTs tether than a human umbilical cord.
Once Sam arrives at his lab, he finds Heartman clinically dead only to revive seconds later. Here, we discover why Heartman has his particular name.
He has a heart condition that had put him in the hospital years ago. The hospital he was in was caught in a voidout, killing his family and himself. However, the hospital’s automated systems revived him and separated him from his wife and child.
To search for them, he continually put himself into cardiac arrest to look for them on the Beach. This led to his heart stopping every 21 minutes with 3 minutes dead every single day.
He explains that everyone has a specific Beach and that generally they don’t interact. However, strong feelings and connections can lead to shared Beaches like the battlefields Sam had been to. Think of it as a sort of purgatory.
Before Heartman goes into cardiac arrest for a third time, he explains to Sam that he would like him to connect researchers to the chiral network to share their research on fossils. Hidden in these fossils is evidence of past extinctions that may give insight into the Death Stranding.
Near the end of this conversation, Heartman dies and falls to the floor leaving Sam with a weird farewell.
Once finished with requests from the other researchers, Heartman details that he is nearly finished with his research on Mama’s corpse and the umbilical cord.
Sam returns to the lab where Heartman explains that there is an unusual amount of chiral matter within Mama’s cells. The BT she was connected to was also her soul as both her soul and body had failed to separate properly.
After manipulating the logs for his cardiac arrest, Heartman is able to speak to Sam without Die-Hardman or Bridges listening in.
With the umbilical cord came a message from Deadman, detailing that the umbilical cord is Bridget’s and that it would unlock the key to the Death Stranding. The umbilical cord is seemingly frozen in time just like Mama’s corpse.
Heartman has a theory that relates the Death Stranding to the past five extinction events in Earth’s history. The Death Stranding may be the sixth.
Throughout history, there have been corpses just like Mama’s frozen in time with umbilical cords. These beings could be related to the Extinction Entity (EE) Theory. Their connection to the Beach via their umbilical cords somehow brings about a Death Stranding.
With this in mind, Bridget Strand may have been an Extinction Entity. Amelie, as her daughter, may be the same which is why Higgs wants her for himself to end humanity.
Death Stranding takes a wild turn with this information so we can’t blame you if you’re still very confused.
Before Heartman goes into cardiac arrest, he instructs Sam to continue west to Edge Knot.
Episode 9: Higgs
To get there, Sam must cross a massive tar belt separating it from the rest of the U.S.
Sam deliberately gets caught by a BT so that structures from the past rise up within the tar due to the BT’s influence. He crosses these buildings and manages to get to the end of the tar belt.
He sees Amelie and, distracted, he is swallowed up by the tar. He awakens on his Beach to see Amelie before he is brought back to life on the other side of the tar belt.
Higgs is there to meet him, stating that he wouldn’t have known where Amelie was without the chiral network. Before making a show of leaving, he takes the time to talk about “masks” and how so many people wear them.
Sam connects a distribution center on the outskirts of Edge Knot city to the chiral network. While resting in its private room, Amelie appears in his room to tell him that she is “on the Beach she had been born on.” She also states that she is meant to bring about extinction but doesn’t particularly elaborate.
To get to Edge Knot City, Sam must cross ruins filled with jellyfish-like BTs. Once he does and he finishes connecting the entire United States together, Sam is tasked with finding Amelie.
He rests in his private room before setting out and awakens on the Beach again. This time, he has a wild fever dream that fuses Higgs and Amelie together in addition to seeing a giant version of Amelie in the water. Yeah, we know it’s weird.
Sam wakes up to alarms warning that an attack is imminent. On his way up the elevator, he experiences a vision of Unger, bloodied, holding his BB as he sings to it while people are heard trying to get into his room.
Outside, Sam discovers that a massive BT is approaching the city with Amelie attached to it. As a good villain, Higgs shows up to gloat that, with Amelie, he’ll cause the next extinction event. Nothing can stop him.
He also explains that everyone that has DOOMs abilities can trace them all back to Amelie as the source.
He attacks Sam with the giant BT and once it is defeated, Higgs takes Amelie to the Beach. Before doing that, he shoots Sam and kills him after our darling BB tries to defend him.
Sam comes up with the idea to use Fragile to jump to the Beach Higgs and Amelie are in. His connection to Amelie allows him to travel to where she is and Fragile’s connection to Sam will allow her to follow.
Armed with practically nothing, Sam confronts Higgs. Seconds after he arrives, Higgs appears to be kneeling in front of Amelie. However, his attitude changes the moment he notices Sam, trapping Amelie and readying himself to fight Sam.
He states that, on the Beach, death is death so there will be no coming back for either of them. This would be a final “boss fight” for the both of them.
Sam manages to outmaneuver Higgs and his weapons, culminating in a final fistfight in tar Metal Gear Solid 4 style. Once Higgs is defeated, Sam leaves him alive for Fragile and goes to rescue Amelie.
She reveals that she manipulated Sam to connect the chiral network across the country, stating that she had slipped out of enemy hands once to visit him only to return here.
Afterwards, Fragile leaves to deal with Higgs while Sam and Amelie travel back east physically through the Beach. This leads to a surreal beach running scene that lasts way too long.
Once they arrive at their destination, Amelie leaves to go look at something. Sam follows only to see Bridget and Die-Hardman further along the Beach.
Die-Hardman is holding a gun up to Bridget, detailing that he is going to “make things right.” However, the gun doesn’t work. From the water, Clifford Unger and his soldiers emerge.
Die-Hardman reacts to Unger with incredible emotion, dropping to his knees and crying as he asks for forgiveness. Unger aims his gun at him but stops, instead drawing it on Bridget and asking for his BB.
She points at Sam looking on from the distance only for Amelie to forcefully push him out of the Beach altogether.
Episode 10: Die-Hardman
Sam awakens in his private room to Deadman explaining that Unger may now be holding Amelie and Die-Hardman captive on the Beach.
Fragile teleported Lockne, Deadman, and Heartman to Capital Knot City but this process weakened her greatly, making her unable to bring Sam to the city nor the Beach.
He has to now physically travel back from Edge Knot City to Capital Knot City.
On top of that, chiral spikes have been rising since Sam’s return from the Beach, destabilizing the chiral network and causing disturbances in the weather.
Sam begins his journey back across the United States. As he gets closer and closer to his destination, Deadman discovers more details about the relationship between Bridget, Unger, and Die-Hardman.
Unger is an entity filled with so much hatred and emotion that he lingers with the specific intention of getting his BB back.
The BB experiments were also continued in secret by Bridget even though they were publicly discontinued. A Bridge Baby’s true purpose is to be a catalyst for the chiral network, literally having been sacrificed at cities and centers by Amelie in her original journey west to provide connection to the chiral network.
Unger willingly put his baby in the care of scientists in charge of the BB experiments but once he discovered what they were truly doing, he tried to escape with his baby, dying in the process. His hate for Bridget shifted to Bridges once she died, taking his revenge on her by using Amelie to cause an extinction event.
Deadman surmises that Die-Hardman’s appearance on Amelie’s Beach isn’t a result of his connection to Amelie but to Clifford Unger instead.
Heartman also explains that Amelie’s Beach may be on a different plane of existence compared to others as Unger’s Beach and Heartman’s had never interacted at all. Thus, Unger intends to take control of Amelie’s more powerful Beach to trigger the last Stranding.
Episode 11: Clifford Unger
On his approach to Lake Knot City, another chiral superstorm engulfs Sam and transports him to Clifford Unger’s Beach once again.
Another vision shows Unger dying on the floor with Bridget yelling at a man named John to shoot him.
After fighting through Unger’s battlefield, he finds Unger sitting up against a log with no intention of hurting him. He looks at Sam’s BB and sings to it.
Sam surmises that Unger is BB’s father but Unger doesn’t respond saying, instead, that they had told him that Sam’s name was “Sam Porter” but that it actually is “Sam Bridges.”
He tells Sam that Sam brings people together and that he is their bridge to the future. He gives Sam the rest of his dog tags, hugs him, and shifts into the same appearance he had within the vision Sam had seen earlier before a gunshot is heard. Unger disappears afterwards.
Another vision shows John telling Unger to take BB and escape the facility. John is forced to follow whatever orders “she” tells him but he still wants to give Unger a chance to escape.
Sam awakens in Port Knot City and details to Deadman everything that had happened. Deadman also reveals a message from Die-Hardman titled “If I Don’t Come Back.”
In it, Die-Hardman says that Amelie would take him to the Beach anytime he wanted but he would need a baby doll to do so. He shares his suspicions of Amelie, stating that no one had ever met Amelie in person. That she is practically a ghost. Literally no one can definitively say she exists.
Amelie’s soul was born on the Beach but her body came to the physical world. She already had great DOOMs potential growing up and by the time she was 20, she had the ability to travel to the Beach. After that, no one ever saw her in person.
Bridget said that Amelie was her daughter but Die-Hardman reveals that Bridget physically can’t have children. Thus, Amelie is entirely a mystery.
Fragile explains that, according to Higgs, Amelie is the mastermind behind the terrorists. The BB tech that allegedly found its way to terrorist hands was just fake dolls that connected them to Amelie and her Beach.
Episode 12: Bridges
With cryobiotes in hand to help heal Fragile, Sam finishes the last leg of his journey back to Capital Knot. He meets with the others to take care of Fragile.
Die-Hardman was released from the Beach by Amelie at some point as well and is resting in another room in the facility.
Heartman explains that since Amelie’s Beach is above all others, she has complete control over it and if she doesn’t want Sam to leave, he can’t. Also, if he can’t convince Amelie to stop the extinction event, then killing her would strand him on the Beach as well.
Either way, he decides to go, releasing his BB to Deadman for it to rest.
Episode 13: Sam Strand
Sam travels to Amelie’s Beach and once she shows herself, she explains that she and Bridget are the same person. Bridget was her body and Amelie is her soul.
The Last Stranding has already begun but Amelie decides not to kill Sam both out of her love for him and the fact that it would be “a big mistake.” Instead, she gives him a choice. He can either watch the world end with Amelie or he can prolong the inevitable for humanity to die another day.
According to Amelie, the sixth extinction will happen no matter what. Amelie simply wants to accelerate it to give humanity a final mercy. She hands Sam the gun Die-Hardman used to try to kill Bridget and walks off into the water.
Instead of killing her, Sam hugs Amelie and tells her that he’ll always be there for her. In the past, when Amelie first gave Sam his dreamcatcher, she told him that he would inevitably have to stop her which he suddenly remember now.
Because time doesn’t affect Amelie, she couldn’t understand the full weight of the decision she had to make. So, she gave it to Sam.
With his decision made, Amelie chooses to stay on the Beach to ensure that the extinction will happen someday whether it takes days, months, or thousands of years.
With that, Amelie sends Sam away to awaken on his own Beach.
Cue a sort of pseudo-credits. As the credits roll, Sam wanders around the Beach learning more about Amelie.
She gave people with DOOMs her dreams of the world’s end in hopes that someone would stop them.
From the very beginning, she knew that she would eventually cause extinction and that nothing could be done.
At 20, Amelie had an operation that resulted in her soul waking up on the Beach. She awakened in her hospital bed as well, separating into both Amelie and Bridget. Bridget aged while Amelie remained entirely the same.
As Bridget, she used her physical body to learn more about the Beach. She also realized that the Beach could be used to gather information from the past, inevitably culminating into the chiral network. She began researching Bridge Babies and founded Bridges to help stop the sixth extinction.
However, Bridget died before she could finish everything so Sam was used instead.
Amelie also reveals that the day Unger died, she pulled the trigger twice. She looked everywhere for Sam and found him dying on the Beach as a baby. She brought him back to life, turning him into a repatriate in the process and upsetting the balance of life and death.
Not long after, DOOMs was spread across the country and the Death Stranding began.
Confused? Stay tuned. We ain’t done yet.
Deadman and the others manage to find Sam on the Beach and bring him back to the living world. Die-Hardman becomes the new president of the United States with the other members of Bridges at his side.
Deadman details to Sam that Die-Hardman used to be a man named John that disappeared after Unger’s death. He became Bridget’s right hand man and the rest is history.
Die-Hardman passes Sam in the hallway and explains to him his regrets. He loved both Unger and Bridget equally and what happened to Unger has stayed with him ever since he was killed.
Sam leaves after giving Die-Hardman a weirdly motivational speech to meet Deadman at the doors to the facility.
Deadman tells him that Sam’s BB isn’t working anymore and the order for its disposal has been put in. Sam could see what would happen if BB was taken out of its pod but it only has a 30% chance of living.
Deadman unlinks Sam’s cufflinks, turning him invisible in the eyes of Bridges and allowing him to disappear if he so chooses.
And, after a final goodbye to Deadman, Sam takes BB to the incinerator.
Episode 14: Lou
Once Sam arrives at the incinerator, he hesitates and connects to BB one final time. This triggers the full memories BB has of its time within the Bridges facility.
Within the memories, we discover that this BB is the first successful candidate from the Bridge Baby program and Bridget, wearing Die-Hardman’s mask, states that it could be a foundation or a “bridge.”
Clifford Unger, ignorant to the program, had checked his wife into the facility for treatment hoping to awaken her from her coma. His son rests within a pod beside her that he regularly checks up on.
John walks in and reunites with his former captain, explaining that he hadn’t known that the mother checked into the facility was Unger’s wife.
Still keeping secrets, Bridget refuses to release Unger’s child to him which reasonably upsets him.
John, out of loyalty he still has for Unger, tells him that his son will be transported to another facility the next day. However, he would help Unger escape before it happens.
Fake logs would help mask Unger’s wife’s death once he mercy kills her and they would also allow him get a five minute start out of the facility before anyone noticed.
The escape attempt ultimately fails with Unger seriously wounded. He manages to barricade himself in his wife’s room.
At this point, Sam is physically projected into this moment in the memory but he is unable to stop anything that is to come.
Once Bridget, John, and security finally barge in, they shoot Unger again, wounding him even more. The team takes the pod from him but they discover that Unger had taken his son out of the pod, cradling him.
John, despite being ordered by Bridget, cannot kill Unger.
In this moment, Unger directly speaks to Sam, mirroring his earlier words on his Beach about Sam’s name. He calls Sam his son and explains that being his father gave meaning to his life.
He stands and asks Sam to stand as well, giving him his dog tags. He hugs Sam one final time before he is shot and killed.
It was Bridget who pulled the trigger in John’s stead, shooting twice and killing Unger but accidentally killing the baby as well.
Continually, Amelie finds Sam as a baby dead on the Beach. She brings him back to life, turning him into a repatriate and beginning the process that would inevitably lead to the Death Stranding.
Unable to continue as a Bridge Baby, Bridget decides to raise Sam like her own child.
In the present, Sam places his BB in the incinerator along with his Bridges cufflinks but at the last second, he changes his mind and grabs the pod.
He opens it, hoping that anything would happen but for quite some time nothing does. However, Lou finally awakens and Sam takes Lou away with him to start a new life.
Now the real credits roll. Death Stranding is finally done.
A very short post-credits scene reveals to us that our darling Lou may, instead, have been a Louise this entire time.
Fade to black.
For those of you who made it all the way to the end of this, we salute you.
Be sure to check out our review of the game plus our Death Stranding wiki for more guides.
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