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For theories related to the sequel, see this page.

    Pre-release 
The baby symbolises his loss of innocence.

Oil will play a big role in the story.
  • Just as Kojima's last game dealt with nukes and nuclear power, this game will have oil as a major theme/object in the story. The trailer looks to be in the aftermath of an oil spill, and the lettering of the title seems to be written in some kind of running black ink, or maybe oil.
    • Jossed in terms of the oil being literal. It's chiralium.

The baby is the same one from Silent Hills

The game will be a Surreal Horror game based around technology
  • The entire trailer gave off a sci-fi vibe, with the high-tech handcuffs, the umbilical cord to the baby looking like an electric cable, the quantum equations on Reedus's neck. And if we accept that this is at least partially based on Kojima's plans for Silent Hills, then that could be very well what this game is going to be.
    • Jossed, it's an action-adventure. It certainly features a lot of sci-fi elements though.

Reedus's scar ISN'T a Cesarean scar

The game will heavily feature an Assimilation Plot
  • The poem at the beginning of the trailer was by William Blake, who has had a work that prominently featured an Assimilation Plot

Part of the game will be about an Eldritch Abomination trying to make humanity Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence
  • Perhaps even doing so inadvertently, and our protagonist will be helpless to resist them.

The game will have moments where it appears to be a Mind Screw.
  • You guys remember how PT had that Camera Abuse and Interface Screw part that made the people who saw it for the first time think they broke the game? Maybe this game will have similar moments or even have Fission Mailed moments.

There is a reason why Norman Reedus' character is naked.
  • If that part of the trailer is to be taken literally and he is naked at some point in the game, it may be a Shout-Out to The Terminator because the method of traveling through black holes destroys clothes. In The Terminator, the method of time travel destroys clothes, so people are sent through time naked.
    • Jossed, Sam is naked in the Seam, which is this world's version of an afterlife. It has nothing to do with time travel.

Death Stranding will contain references to Metal Gear.
  • If this video is anything to go by.

Death Stranding will be a fishing game.
  • Or at least feature a Fishing Minigame. There are a lot of sea creatures featured in the teaser trailer.
    • Jossed. No fishing minigame present, sadly.

The oil is symbolic of both death and the connections of the human race.
  • Oil. Without oil we would be separate. It gives us power. It gives us civilisation. Without it, we would be stranded, apart from one another. But our plundering of our world for oil is killing it and killing us. Unless we curb our thirst for it and find a way to live more frugally, we will all be as dead as the whales that choke on our mistakes. That is one of the game's major themes. To preserve our world so our children aren't stranded without power or nature.
    • Jossed in the literal sence. The tar is made of chiralium, a substance that appeared after the Stranding.

Death Stranding takes place in an alternate dimension of Silent Hills.
  • As explained in this video.

The baby is evil!
  • Jossed.

The five figures in the sky in the trailer are aliens.
  • Well, the gigantic humanoid figure and invisible monsters in the 2017 trailer would certainly suggest either aliens or interdimensional entities.
    • Jossed. They are Extinction Entities who brought about the last four extinction events.

Alternate Universe Venom Snake.
  • Might not really happen, but if he appears, he would be the different Venom Snake from his original appearance. Expect him to be a minor medic character.

The game will allow you to interact with other people's games, but will not have full-on multiplayer.
  • Based on the recent descriptions of gameplay and confirmation that there will be online elements. It might be something like Journey where you get randomly dropped into other people's games and can help them in some way. This could also tie in with the hints at quantum physics/black holes playing a part in the game, as that might be how you "travel" to other player's games, with the games standing in for alternate dimensions.
    • Confirmed. You can build structures that will be visible to other players, share cargo and supplies, but you never interact with other players face-to-face.

The title refers to a Non-Malicious Monster Eldritch Abomination stuck in Earth's reality
  • The plot will be about dealing with the death throes of a creature that has no business or desire to be here, and figuring out why it happened in the first place to stop it happening again.
    • After the 2017 trailer, I think we can pretty much rule out the "non-malicious" part (unless of course the game will invoke Blue-and-Orange Morality on the creature). The Eldritch Abomination part we can pretty much confirm, though.
    • Somewhat confirmed? The creatures that appeared after the Death Stranding are "souls" of people who have died and got pulled back into the land of the living instead of passing on. So they shouldn't be here, but they're not any otherworldly cosmic horror.

This title might never truly make sense in any comprehensible fashion until the later and inevitable DLC.
  • Jossed. Death Stranding is the name of the phenomenon that caused the ghosts of dead people to cross over to our plane, and allowed some of the living to use it to their own benefits. It's explained in the base game.

The game takes place within the Cthulhu Mythos.
  • The oil we see in the trailers isn´t really "oil", it's "ink", octopus ink, and who do we know have those traits, sleeping in the ocean?
    • For added points, the game takes place in a future where mankind actually discovered Cthulhu sleeping in its city and, humans being humans, the oil companies tried to exploit him after discovering that his ink turned out to be a superior alternative to oil, as they discovered that he could produce infinite amounts of it without depletion.
Of course, it spiraled out of control and the oil companies ended up waking it up and after a failed bombing on the eldritch abomination, destroying its city and releasing his ink into the oceans, starting the nightmare seen in-game.
  • The goal of the game might be to find a way to put him back to sleep again, with the hope that it will at least halt the destruction of the world, somewhat...

The game takes place at a point in the future where virtual reality and "real" reality are collapsing on each other.
  • Humanity is about to sever its mortal coil and merge into The Singularity. There is Schizo Tech everywhere because time is being mashed up and "downloaded" by the universal "server". The only thing keeping humans attached to the real world is the cycle of "Death" and "Birth". The game will be about trying to escort new lives (the babies) back into real world so that humanity is not completely assimilated.
    • Jossed. It's all in the real world.

The world is polluted and humans have mutated into horrible monsters.
  • The Del Toro character is a scientist who is trying to engineer humans that are resistant the worlds pollutants and the Baby shown in the trailers is his last experiment. And the Norman Reedus and Mads Mikkelsen characters are failed experiments.
    • Jossed, but funny in a way considering Deadman, the Del Toro character, is revealed to be an Artificial Human.

2 theories about the story.
  • So my first idea of the plot is that an eldritch abomination or some other creature that does not belong in our world is somehow trapped in our world. The main evidence that I have for this is that supposedly the title refers to when whales are washed up onto the shore and die if no one helps them. So the idea is that a creature not of this world is trapped in this world and the government decides to exploit the creature. The black "oil" is not actually oil but rather the blood of this other worldly creature. The blood of this creature allows the government to bioengineer stuff beyond what is currently capable. The blood of this creature leads to a future where there is wide spread biotechnology. The tank that we see covered in whale insides is not covered in whale insides rather the tank is a fusion of biology and technology. So basically an other world creature is stuck in our world, it's blood allows people to bioengineer beyond what is currently capable. As the creature begins to die, this leads to the government to stop exporting the creature's blood to stock pile it for themselves. This leads to a war where the government creates super soldiers like Mads Mikkelsen's character that are used to fight in the war. The skull faced soldiers Mads Mikkelsen's character sends out are either used to be human or not humans at all being directly controlled by him trough the wires comping out of him. Guillermo del Toro's character is just simply a refugee from the war that has destroyed his home. The baby he holds is either a hybrid of a human and the creature, or a clone of the creature (which is human like) that both sides of the war wants to capture so that they can have more of that miracle creature blood.
  • Same as the first except that the exploitation of the creature has led to a corruption like effect on humanity. Humans in the future are nolonger pure humans but rather like Mads Mikkelsen's character are inflected with the blood of the other worldly creature. No pure humans remains and the humans inflected with the creature's blood wage war on the each other with a combination of technology and organics (tank that looks like it has fleshy bits growing on it) to try and get more of the creature's blood. Guillermo del Toro's character is a scientist that is trying to escape the war zone and the baby that he has is one of the last pure humans on earth, or has a cure to the infection. Norman Reedus' character is actually the baby as a grown up (so the baby is Norman fetus haha) sent back in time to stop the war and corruption of humanity however the possess goes wrong, stranding him in a time during the war where it is too late to stop it. As is stated above me by another user, the scar on his belly is not a c-section scar but rather the scar on his belly and the equations on his dog tags are suppose to be his ticket back to his own time line when the job is finished. The game will be about Norman Reedus' character trying to stop the events that lead to the what I am now calling blood war.

The game takes place during humanities final judgement.

  • Because of greed and selfishness, mankind has let the planet they were given go to waste. We keep seeing images of dead wild life and oil all over the place. The oil could represent the current wars that are happening all over the world and how resources like oil seem to be the most important prize. Meanwhile, industry is slowly destroying the plant due to Global Warming. The cables attached to everything could represent how every thing on the planet was connected, but its now dead and it's humanities fault. So now, the remaining humans are being punished for failing the creator of the universe. However, those remaining humans are tying to fight back and not accept their punishment willingly. Those humans must face off against Deities whom are Reality Warper's. During the struggle, the remaining humans (similar to Skynet and the Terminator storyline,) figure out a way to resist by creating a baby that can duplicate the reality warping abilities of the Deities, but with a limited amount of time and with the baby being attached to the human body to form a mental link. The humans whom fail are either killed or capture, and when they're captured, their belly buttons are surgically removed.

At some point there will be a giant robot that you will have to fight as a boss.
  • Considering who's behind the game, this does not seem like that big a stretch.
    • Does a giant humanoid counts?
      • Maybe, depends on how the boss fight goes.
    • Jossed, you don't fight any MECHA enemies. You go fight a giant BT that is CONTROLLED like a mecha, does that count?

Heroine casting WMG

Director Neill Blomkamp is involved with the game.

The Uterine Replicator represent the player character's extra lives
  • My guess is that the game won't allow saving or restarting from checkpoints. Instead, continuing on will be represented by the player growing a clone of themselves as a fetus inside their Uterine Replicator. Upon dying, the clone will begin to grow to maturity. This is why Reedus' character has a cross-shaped scar instead of a belly button — all of the clones have that, and the trailer depicts him waking up on the beach after respawning. A highly twisted in-game explanation of one of the most common video game mechanics.
    • Jossed. BBs have nothing to do with the respawn mechanic.
The theme of the game is a darker take on the concept of rebirth.
  • The amount of umbilical imagery in the game is mixed in with the concept of people avoiding Rapid Aging and A Fate Worse Than Death. Perhaps people are being "reborn" as the type of undead soldiers Mikkelsen's character has strapped to him through his own umbilical cord.

There will be Marathon Bosses that will take weeks to defeat.
  • Kojima tried to do this with one of his Metal Gear games, but Konami shot it down. Now this is Kojima unchained.
    • Jossed.

Death Stranding is a Metal Gear game that involves The Boss, the Cobra Unit, and other characters as explained here.

The Baby is Revolver Ocelot.

Death Stranding is a Crossover between Metal Gear and Silent Hill.

The skeleton soldiers are related somehow to the rain that causes Rapid Aging
  • My guess is that the rain aged the soldiers to the point where nothing was left of them but skeletons, and it also either caused them to continue living past the point where they should have expired, or they were resurrected by Mads Mikkelson's character to serve as his mooks. Though it's pretty far-fetched, I also think that the rain may have somehow had this effect on their equipment, such as their rifles, uniforms, tanks, and planes. Rather than causing these inanimate objects to decay, the rain had some effect that caused them to revert to older versions of themselves, which is why they're all using World War II-era weaponry. This theme of aging and entropy would form a nice thematic contrast with the infants the protagonists are evidently trying to protect.
    • Jossed, mostly. Those guys died LONG before there was anything supernaturally strange going on, and are encountered exclusively in what is essentially the collective limbo of soldiers killed in vicious conflicts who've been unable to find peace and move on.

There's some kind of very symbolic reason why an unborn baby is the only thing that can detect the floating umbilical cord dead/zombie/monster things.
  • Because they're both attached to umbilical cords, or a unborn baby is technically not "alive" yet...I don't know.
    • Confirmed! BBs can see BTs because they aren't considered "alive" yet, and are in between the worlds of the living and the dead.

  • Sam has dark handprints all over him, meaning that he had probably been captured by the monsters. He's fine, but the area around him is destroyed, which matches up with how his power is described.
    • Somewhat confirmed. The crater only appears if Sam was killed by a BT and won't show up if he was killed by anything else.
      • Specifically, Sam's power is simply to come back from the dead. Being consumed by a BT is what causes the devastation.

Also looking back at the first trailer, the baby being "born" or taken out of it's capsule thing caused it to become one of the monsters.
  • When the baby vanishes, tiny black handprints are shown walking down Sam's body and out to the floating figures. This is consistent with how the invisible monsters move.

Alternatively, the baby being stolen and transported to another dimension/timeline thingy left behind a monster.
  • If the theory about the synced-up trailers is right and that is the same baby, then del Toro's character taking that baby somehow caused a monster to be left behind in it's place. Maybe the monsters are echos of people who have been taken from their own dimension/timeline, the umbilical cord representing their connection to their own world that got broken. The monsters power to age the world around them comes from them/the universe trying to reconnect them to the right time/place and put them back where they're supposed to be.

Sam transports dead bodies to stop them from being claimed by the monsters or to save to spirits of the people that have been taken by them.
  • From this reddit thread.
    • Confirmed. Sam transports bodies to incinerators to avoid them necrotising and causing a voidout.

Sam is transporting or will transport cargo that is pivotal in stopping the monsters or the Timefall.
  • Stopping what's going on would fit as the plot of the game.
    • Partially confirmed, partially Jossed. Sam can, and must, transport supplies to settlements which includes weapons developed to resist and even destroy the predatory ghost BTs, but he does not specifically end up transport anything that is relevant to ending the apocalypse itself.

Death Stranding is related to Simon Stålenhag's Things from the Flood, and Tales from the Loop
  • Let's see, a tank filled with organic organs and stuff? A lot like the art in Things from the Flood, showing organic growths coming out of a gameboy. A theme of water? Death Stranding places a lot of emphasis on the ocean and water, while Things from the Flood, deals with a flood that brings anomalies to a ordinary world. Sam's dog tags having quantum equations on it? Tales from the Loop deals with a particle accelerator, which is used to discover subatomic particles (that quantum physics govern) bring anomalies to a simple town. It would not surprise me at all if the world of Death Stranding was the future of the world presented in Things from the Flood and Tales from the Loop.

Mads’ character and Sam will plug into each other at some point in the game.
  • Mads has umbilical cords that he uses to control/manipulate skeleton soldiers. It may be possible for him to use the cords on living people. Sam has a cord that allows him to use the baby jar to see eldritch beings. According to Kojima, connections will be an important element to the game. So the idea that you’ll be able to plug into other characters, not just baby jars and skeletons, doesn’t seem far fetched to me. Sam and Mads probably plug into each other out of necessity. Since Mads is the antagonist, Sam most likely won’t want to do this, but will for survival reasons (However, since Mads has stated that his character isn’t evil, it’s possible that Sam’s reservations about doing this won’t be too high). Here are a few related speculations of what might occur if this happens:
    • Connecting with another human being will be painful and/or more intense. In the fourth trailer, Sam shows a bit discomfort when he plugs into the baby jar. Plugging into another human being will be a much more uncomfortable and/or extreme experience.
    • Mads might attempt to control Sam when they’re connected. Sam will have to fight to keep control over himself. Whether or not Mads succeeds, this event will solidify animosity between the two characters. Alternatively, Mads will not attempt to take Sam over- though Sam will be concerned that he will- because the situation they’re in is too dangerous to do something like that.
    • Plugging into Mads will allow Sam to see some of Mads’ past, which will allow Sam to understand Mads’ motivations. This will either make Sam more sympathetic or hostile towards Mads.
    • Mads has plugged into other humans in the past, while Sam hasn’t. This will put Mads at an advantage if he chooses to use their connection to manipulate Sam.
    • This event will change Sam in some way. Maybe it will be in the form of a new ability (for example, he might learn to control skeletons), or he’ll be changed mentally and emotionally, but the event will be a keystone in Sam’s character development.
      • Jossed. At no point do Mads' character's cords attach to a living human, nor does Sam connect using his own device to any other living human besides the BB device.

A character will crush one of the baby jars.
  • Not necessarily Sam’s baby jar, but a baby jar will be crushed, destroying the thing inside. Most likely this scene will not be too graphic. If, for example, the jar is crushed by someone stomping on it, the scene will show the person raising their foot and then a Gory Discretion Shot will keep the audience from actually seeing the jar destroyed.
    • Somewhat confirmed. A pod doesn't exactly get crushed, but it DOES get shot, The BBs fine, don't worry

Why Sam has dog tags in the first trailer.
  • It’s a red herring. It was only put there to misdirect fan theories and the tags won’t be there when the scene happens in game.
    • Though Sam is an average man now, he used to be a soldier and doesn’t remember that for some time. The moment shown in trailer one happens after Sam regains his memories as a soldier.
    • Those tags belong to other solders and were given to him or taken by him. One of the tags could’ve belong to Mads’ character at some point.
    • They don’t belong to soldiers and aren’t real dog tags, but were made to look like dog tags in order to hide and carry important information in a discreet way. That would explain why the "dog tags" are engraved with quantum equations.
  • Guesses 1 and 4 were correct. The Q-PID looks like dogtags, but it's more like a key that allows to connect a terminal to a chiral network. They are likely shaped like that to not take too much space and for ease of transport.

Mads Mikkelsen's Character
  • Based on the most recent trailer, Mads' character finally has a name: Cliff. Not only that, it also drops some hints of potential backstory. One theory that is running through my head of who Cliff is goes-
    • A Bridges scientist and "father" of the Bridge Baby, Cliff becomes disconnected from the normal plane of existence (possibly due an encounter with the Eldritch Abomination race), Go Mad from the Revelation, and is obsessed with reconnecting with the normal plane, using the abilities he had developed. This is all so he can get back to his "child", BB.
    • Based on the moment in the trailer where Cliff rises from the ink/black goo, it looks like he has a C-section scar similar to Sam. At some point in the game, Cliff might call Sam out on that, maybe demanding how Sam got his own abilities.
      • Partially Jossed. Cliff was a veteran soldier involved with Bridges and was the father of _a_ Bridge Baby, though he was not a scientist, and he was merely killed in a mundane way, resulting in his scar manifesting when he vengefully begins to return from the dead.

Candidates for the Japanese voice of Cliff.

Amelie is Bridget's daughter and she is the pregnant woman in Sam's picture..
  • Now we can see that the woman behind Sam and another woman with her face obstructed appears to be a slightly younger Bridget. The mysterious woman could be Amelie, and Amelie could be Bridget's daughter, explaining why Sam and Bridget seem close.
    • Jossed. The woman is Lucy, Sam's wife. Amelie and Bridget's relationship is a whole other can of worms.

The entire game is Big Boss's coma dream
  • At the beginning of the release trailer, Cliff is talking to someone called BB in a place that looks like a hospital. It's a known phenomenon that coma patients can see their surrounding. Although it's later shown that Cliff is talking to a picture, there is nothing indicating that this is the same scene. Sam seems to be rather anti-government, which would make sense if he's a figment of Big Boss's dream; the man hates the U.S and nation-states in general with a passion. As for why a separatist group is an antagonist, it's possible that Big Boss has some deep uncertainty about his plan and already accepts that he is in the wrong.

The baby is the player's avatar
  • There is a segment during the release trailer where it's shown from the perspective of the baby and Cliff talking directly to them. It is possible that the baby is the real player character, and you only play as Sam because the baby is influencing him in some way.
    • Jossed. Cliff's speaking to the baby's POV is because that baby was Sam years ago.

Plastic is the only material that cannot be affected by the rain
  • Which leads to the remnants of mankind desperately extracting a massive amount of oil to create enough plastic to protect their cities. Since the game takes place in the future, the worldwide oil reserve is lower than it is in real life. Massive wars happen as many oil-poor countries try to seize control of oil-rich territories, further pushing the world into chaos. Due to the rushed extraction process, oils are spilled all over the ocean and somehow create or summon the monsters to the world. This is why all eldritch beings shown so far have an oily appearance.
    • Jossed, though not explicitly. Timefall degradation is unrelated to plastic, and the "oil" is closer to tar and is unrelated to cracking or drilling efforts, manifesting due to supernatural conditions instead; the monsters weren't caused by it - they're the ones bringing it with them, though perhaps not intentionally. And if plastic was resistant to Timefall, Bridges would've picked up on that at some point and built everything out of it or covered in layers of it.

The BB is Ludens.
  • The cover art confirms that Ludens is in the game and Cliff tells a/the BB that it'll be able to go anywhere, "even the moon". Perhaps due to the space-time nature of the BTs, Bridges decides to go to space to find a solution to the crisis or to escape and start over somewhere else. The first stop is the moon.
    • Sequel, perhaps?

The BTs were in Area 51 and we let them out
  • There has been a meme floating around about "Storming Area 51" and on the off-chance that people succeeded, the Death Stranding is what happened all because of Memetic Mutation being too dangerous for mankind.
    • The problem with this hypothesis is that DS was conceptualized and announced way before this meme came up.
      • In any case, it's Jossed enough; BTs manifest from the dead independently of government containment or tampering, though it's not implausible that some of the naughty experiments being performed related to the events which caused the Death Stranding were done at Area 51.

The mechanical arm may be called a "mobile"—like the mobile you hang over a crib
  • Judging by the recent Gamescom footage, the mechanical arm isn't just for detecting BTs. It changes into a "mobile" form when the BB is distressed and needs Sam to calm it down, slowly rotating its lights overhead—the same way a mobile hangs over a baby to distract it. That might mean that the arm is called a "mobile" (or some variation thereof) by Bridges members.
    • Jossed with the 50-minute gameplay overview from Tokyo Game Show 2019. Kojima calls it the Odradek sensor, which was previously referred to internally as the "Pata Pata".

If you wait in-game for a year, your baby will die.
  • Deadman says that these kinds of babies only last for about a year, and Kojima is a fan of doing things that only occur after a long enough time.

Mama will be forced to sever her connection to her baby.
  • We saw her screaming while covered in rubble in a previous trailer and Sam appears to be carrying her around in the Golden Mask trailer despite her saying in her trailer that she can't leave her facility due to her baby.
    • Confirmed, but not in the way you were probably thinking.

It will be difficult to move around in the Midwest.
  • Gamescom 2019 footage shows that there are a bunch of voidout craters in the Midwest and this is presumably why the United States broke up. As part of the rising stakes in the middle part of the game, Sam will have to cross into the Midwest, but there will be a lot more Beached Things than usual and possibly more Homo Demens who are purposely setting off voidouts.
    • Jossed except for the last part. It occurs more in the deeper West around former Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, but the Homo Demens do have thicker presence to the West. The cluster of craters in the Midwest, however, is simply treated as a gigantic "lake" which is crossed using a boat during a cutscene.

The Q-pid (the quantum-engraved dog tags) is used for fast travel.
  • Sam is shown to use it to log into the Chiral Network (online play/Internet connection) at the Ludens Fan's bunker. Maybe bunkers are checkpoints and you have to go in them to login in order to save your checkpoint for future use to record that you've been here before as well so that you can fast travel there later if you want. Excusing the lack of travel equipment that is the reason in the first place as to why Sam and other couriers have to travel on foot to distant places, the handwavey excuse is that Sam uses a black/worm hole artificially created by technology to travel around faster.
    • Jossed. While the Q-pid is responsible for connecting up locations to the chiral network, it's Fragile's abilities that let you fast travel between different locations. The explanation is that Fragile takes Sam through her beach using her powers. The chiral network is apparently still necessary as it's only possible to leave/arrive at chirally active areas.

Cliff's role in-story, sticks and ropes
  • Kojima mentioned that the game involves ropes and sticks, alluding to Kobo Abe. The sticks are weapons, and the ropes are both connections and securing things - it seems, our protagonist is tasked with connecting the world back together, with a few sticks in his bag. Cliff? He believes in using sticks first and grabbing the ropes afterwards. It seems Cliff is not quite flabbergasted with Timefall or BTs - he may be busy hunting BTs and enemies with his skeleton lads. A second way to combat the dangers of the world, mayhaps, is that he is pretty much a lone warrior fighting against the same threats BRIDGES does, but while BRIDGES build, he destroys. In another way: BRIDGES builds connections, Homo Demens burns them, Cliff gets to the BTs, destroys, and then goes "now you can come in and do whatever". Cliff may be an anti-villain for the story. And why skeletons and recreations of history? It seems Cliff is fascinated with history of war and, like Coriolanus, is only able to wage war. He has an enemy in BTs, so of course he jumps in, in hopes to eradicate them and then become the hero of mankind, as he cares for the new generation, as seen in the interaction with the Bridge Baby.
    • Also, Kojima and Del Toro both love war stories for different reasons, and they both played around with the idea of Hero of Another Story and people whom use sticks or ropes only, not both.

    Post-release 
Ludens is a part of an in-universe merchandise brand
  • Other than being a refrence to Kojima Productions, the character of Ludens is featured in the game on different merchandise, like watches, figurines, holograms or keychains. In-universe, Ludens was a mascot of a merchandise brand, that is a brand that makes a character and then puts it on different items and sells them. It's different from, let's say, a figurine of a video game character, because in this case the character was made specifically for the game and a figurine was made later. In short, Ludens is this universe's version of Hello Kitty.

Sam's bloodtype is 0Rh-
  • Since the game is about connections and Sam's blood is a big part of the story, it's only fitting that the man who connected the entire continent would have the blood type of an universal blood donor.

'Ride with Norman Reedus' exists in-universe
  • An advertisment for 'Ride with Norman Reedus' in Sam's private room and Sam outright speaking about the show when riding a certain trike in the game initially comes across as typical Kojima-style fourth wall leaning or actor allusion. However, perhaps 'Ride with Norman Reedus' aired in-universe before the Death Stranding, and eventually someone who remembered the show remarked to Sam his uncanny resemblance to the presenter of a television show they once watched. Sam subsequently tracked down a way to watch the show and although he initially only intended to see how close the similarity was, he ended up becoming a fan due to his and Norman Reedus' shared interest of bikes/trikes.

Every Extinction Entities have their own Higgs Monaghan.
  • Just like every mass extinction events have their Extinction Entities, they would also have Higgs Monaghan-equivalent entities of the same species of their respective Extinction Entities, which would assist the Extinction Entities and herald their destiny of bringing about apocalypse.

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