Reports suggest that Death Stranding 2 will offer the option to bypass boss fights and experience them "as if reading a novel."

I cannot remember any of Death Stranding’s bosses, so it’s perhaps for the best that Death Stranding 2: On The Beach will let us skip right past them – skip right past them like children who think video games are just Instagram montages, and that the power of choice is a Christian rock band. Kojima Productions’ forthcoming open world off-Reeder will apparently give you the option to bypass bossfights after your defeat, with information about the character then fed to you in the form of image and text descriptions. In other words, Death Stranding 2 is secretly a hybrid visual novel.

I jest, I jest! No visual novel would ever receive this kind of financing. They probably blew through the entire budget of Amarantus on Troy Baker’s eyeshadow. Rest assured that Death Stranding 2 will have traditional real game accoutrements like shooting and cyberpunk pedalos, but should you miss claiming a boss’s scalp by millimetres you will now have the option of delegating its defeat to the Game Over screen.

“For boss battles in DS2 (presumably in easy mode) there will be an extra option on the Game Over screen below the ‘continue’ option,” explains Genki_JPN on Xitter, translating and summarising comments from game director Hideo Kojima during a recent Koji Pro radio broadcast, as passed on by Eurogamer. The bossfight and any story revelations therein will then be spelled out “like a novel”.

What will the Kojima faithful make of all this? As Matt Jones points out on Bluesky, other developers have proposed to let people skip things and gotten it in the neck from people who regard ‘cheating’ at games as some kind of Nietzschean self-negation.

Back in 2012, for example, BioWare writer Jennifer Hepler received a torrent of abuse from disgruntled Dragon Age 2 players over a recirculated interview from 2006, in which she argued that some games might benefit from the option to skip the combat. Something tells me that Kojima will be granted more latitude. Myself, I see no harm in letting people skip bossfights as long as Death Stranding 2 doubles down on the hiking mechanics and lets me choose from a selection of bootlace knots to modify my stamina and agility. Also I want a pogo stick.