The first Death Stranding came out in 2019, and I reviewed it then. It’s a long game, and I spent a couple of weeks sunk into its world. It was a strange experience for several reasons: primarily that it’s a very strange game, both frustrating and hypnotic, lucid and obtuse. It was also eerily prophetic about the isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic that was then just a few months in the future.

I had given myself the review as a little break from the day-to-day stresses of my job at the time. But reviewing a game this big and unwieldy comes with its own stresses — and then Hideo Kojima went and added an extra level of stress to it, in a way that felt like it had been tailored for me personally.

My daughter was just six months old at the time, so evening gaming sessions were accompanied by a baby monitor on the coffee table. As parents, my wife and I were still in a state of constant, anxious alertness, attuned to every rustle and whimper from the monitor’s tinny little speaker.

If you’ve played Death Stranding, you know where this is going. The game’s hero Sam Bridges carries a “BB” — an unborn baby in an odd little sarcophagus — on his chest that helps him perceive the world of the dead. If you fall foul of the game’s sinister “BT” ghosts — or even if you just fall........

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