Is Death Stranding 2 set in Australia?

Yes. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach uses a wrecked, chiral Australia as its continent. Geography is stylised, not a 1:1 tourist map.

Does Death Stranding 2 include real Australian cities?

Names and biomes rhyme with real places. Distances, coastlines, and weather are Kojima fiction. Do not navigate the Hume with a chiral map.

Should Australians play Death Stranding 2 first?

The setting is a bonus, not a reason to skip the first game's roads. The sequel is richer if you already know Sam. Our scored review sits alongside this feature.

Opinion

Death Stranding 2's Australia Map: What Kojima Invented, What We Recognised

On the Beach is set in Australia. It is not a tourism board. Here is the local read of Kojima's chiral continent.

Byline

Jess Nguyen

Reviews editor

Published

Friday 4 September 2026

2 min read

PlayStation PC Death Stranding 2

Original editorial artwork of a chiral Australian coastline — no characters or Sony logos — Image credit: © Sony Interactive Entertainment / Kojima Productions. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach and related trademarks belong to their respective owners. Used for editorial coverage on GamePlayer.
Original abstract editorial illustration created for GamePlayer. No character likenesses and no official box art were copied. The title and trademarks remain with the rights holders named in the credit line.

The first Death Stranding asked the rest of the world to rebuild America. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach asks us to rebuild a ghost of home. That is a rare trick for a blockbuster, and it is why this feature exists next to the scored review.

I am not going to walk you through every knot. I am going to talk about the feeling of putting a porter on a landscape that almost has your weather.

Rhyme, not replica

Kojima's Australia is a mood board that went to art school: red interiors, impossible coasts, facilities dropped where a city name can still prick your ear. When a biome reminds you of a drive you have actually done — the long straight, the weather that changes its mind, the sense that the next cup of coffee is a logistics problem — the stranding loop stops being abstract.

When it invents a mountain range that would make Geoscience Australia file a complaint, that is also the point. This is a chiral afterlife, not Australia Simulator 2026. Anyone telling you they "found their suburb" is doing fan fiction. Anyone telling you the map has nothing to do with us did not play it here.

Distance is the national mechanic

Australian players already understand the series' joke. The empty is the content. A delivery that would be a loading screen in another game is, here, a reminder that this country has always been a network of isolated rooms pretending to be a nation.

That is why the sequel's Australia setting is not tourism. It is theme. Other regions will read "big desert, pretty storm." We read the bit where infrastructure is the plot.

What I will not spoil

Specific knot names, late-game coastlines, and the story's use of "home" are better encountered as a porter. If you want the mechanical and score argument, that is the review. If you want the shopping argument against other 2026 PS5 time-sinks, that is Best PS5 games 2026.

Play it on a sound system that can do cargo. Tell interstate friends which biome felt like their state. Argue. That argument is the feature.

The Death Stranding 2 hub keeps these pieces together. Image credits on that hub belong to Sony / Kojima Productions, not to GamePlayer — the editorial card is ours; the trademark is not.