After Hideo Kojima showed the first promotional video for his new game Death Stranding, fans have picked apart every frame of the video, as well as the game's promotional image, to figure out something about the game's plot.
Reddit users have zoomed in on the main promotional image, which features a very realistic CGI version of actor Norman Reedus wearing a set of dog tags. Turns out those dog tags have mathematical equations on them.
After careful examination, redditors determined that these equations could hint at a plot line involving black holes, wormholes or something like alternate universes. Basically, this potentially means that Death Stranding is some kind of science fiction game.
The first equation that fans recognized on the tags is the Dirac equation, which not only describes particles such as electrons and quarks and relates to the theory of special relativity, but also implies the existence of antimatter.
The other equation is the Schwarzschild radius, which is most often associated with black holes, suggesting that the plot involves that and/or singularities in some way, or even has an Interstellar vibe with wormholes (although let's hope that if this is the case, the science in Death Stranding makes a little more sense).
The dog tag revelation, though, has Reddit buzzing, with many theories about the Death Stranding plot getting thrown out there. Some seem pretty interesting, although most is still a lot of wild speculation:
"Looking to me like he is some sort of vessel for human knowledge," Reddit user superpastaaisle writes. "Like he is the last human (immortal? Is he even human? He could be machine) and he was imbued with our knowledge so that it would persist. You know kind of like the Voyager Golden Record."
Some theories are even more creative and take the game's short trailer into account:
"Clearly this indicates a multiple worlds style setting with a probable 'afterlife' layer tossed in," user Animachina writes. "The baby vanishing along with the handprints are probably indications of multiple outcomes or a meditation on choice. Hand prints on him are probably an indication of manipulative forces on his life most likely manifested as the floating figures in the sky at the end."
One Reddit user just attributed it to a cool trailer, indicating that Kojima probably wasn't even sure what the game was about yet. Another user believes that the dog tags could just symbolize that Reedus' character is a theoretical physicist. Other users think that the dog tags are actually something else, such as flash drives.
One Reddit user, though, summed it up best:
"Are we trying to understand a game Kojima has yet to release?" necromonger writes. "It's hard to understand the stuff he has already made."
