The network that the first game spent forty hours building has become something different in the years between the games. Connection at scale is not connection as Sam experienced it — the individual handshake, the package delivered, the relationship built one delivery at a time. It is infrastructure, which is to say it is the thing everyone depends on and no one thinks about until it fails.

The connection Sam imagined was personal. What he built was systemic. Both things are real and both things have consequences, and the gap between them is where Death Stranding 2 lives. The strand he thought he was making between people turns out to also be a strand between powers, between factions, between forces that have their own plans for what the network is for.