The Game Awards saw the newest trailer drop for Death Stranding, a trailer which supposedly precedes all the others we’ve seen. Like most Kojima trailers, it showed more of the world, more of the aesthetics and feelings, and it answered roughly zero questions. But in a recent interview with IGN, Kojima answered a few questions, and he harkened back to something he has always been interested in, which is taking traits from gaming and game culture and making them a part of the actual game. In his interview, he stated:

Death is a big theme in Death Stranding. Even the opening of the newest video, “Once there was an explosion,” is referencing both life in the big bang and death, as the protagonist leaves an explosive crater behind when he dies. When he disappears to the world of water – which most theorize is an in-between world or purgatory – he returns to a crater, presumably where he died. This is also something Kojima hinted at, that when the protagonist dies, the world changes, but that it remembers.

Turning death into a game mechanic isn’t new. Dying in Dark Souls was a part of your character, not just a part of the video game. The more you died, the more humanity you lost, the more souls you lost, and the further you fell towards becoming inhuman. The second Dark Souls took this even further, continually weakening you as you die to show your weakening connection to the world. Like Death Stranding, it was also a huge part of the lore and world. While Dark Souls may have beaten Kojima to the punch in playing with death as a mechanic, he has been putting meta-textual mechanics in his games for as long as he has been in the industry.

Metal Gear Solid is now old enough that many gamers may not recall the original battle with Psycho Mantis, but it was the first look at how Kojima plays with bringing elements of gaming into the game. In it, Psycho Mantis shows his powers of telepathy by literally reading the player’s memory card. He then recites some of the games they have played. Although a little silly, it was something no one had done before, and it connected the player to Snake, making them feel like one in the same. Even defeating Psycho Mantis required the player to unplug their controller and plug it into a second port, representing Snake’s struggle to change how he thought in order to beat Psycho Mantis.

Metal Gear Solid 2 featured similar elements. It was a game about trust, confusion, and betrayal, and near the closing portions of the game, Colonel Campbell, who was discovered to be an AI, begins to deteriorate from a virus, telling Raiden he is in a game and to turn the console off. Like his other methods, Kojima played on both the player experience – with the AI telling the player not to sit too close to the TV – as well as the reality of the game, which was an AI losing its mind.

Death Stranding looks even more ambitious than the Metal Gear series though, and it’s likely he is going to have more fun with game elements as game plot than ever before. It’s Kojima’s first project on his own, and his first major project that isn’t Metal Gear. We already know that it will contain Dark Souls-esque meta elements of death in the game, but Kojima probably won’t stop there, and he has hinted that he also has quite a lot to say about video games in general, maybe even defining a new genre.