Death Stranding gets surprise Xbox release from Kojima Productions

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Five years after it launched as a PlayStation 4 exclusive, Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding is now available on Xbox. The game studio helmed by Hideo Kojima shadow-dropped Death Stranding: Director’s Cut for Xbox Series X on Thursday, alongside a new cloud-streaming version for Amazon’s Luna platform.

The Xbox Series X version of Death Stranding arrives with a launch discount; it’s available for $19.99 for the next 15 days.

Death Stranding tells the story of a decimated futuristic America and porter Sam Bridges (Norman Reedus), who delivers supplies to cities across the dangerous wastelands. Bridges is enlisted by the President of the United Cities of America — who is also Sam’s mom — to bring isolated cities into the fold by connecting them to a data network. 

In our review of the original game, we praised Death Stranding for its inventive, cooperative game ideas, but called the overall experience “a slog” of fetch quests. The expanded Director’s Cut version of Death Stranding, released in 2021 on PlayStation 5, improved the experience. “Death Stranding is still preachy, plodding, and indulgent. It is also propulsive, soothing, and immense. I have played roughly 60 hours, and I’ve been entranced the whole time,” we said in our Death Stranding: Director’s Cut review.

Sony Interactive Entertainment originally published Death Stranding with Kojima Productions. According to a report from Japanese outlet Automaton, Kojima Productions now owns the intellectual property to the franchise, which will continue with Death Stranding 2: On the Beach in 2025. Kojima Productions is also working with film studio A24 on a movie adaptation of the game.

Kojima Productions is also working on horror game OD with Xbox Game Studios and action-espionage game Physint with Sony.