'Death Stranding' ending spoilers: Why it could be unexpectedly upbeat

On Wednesday, Death Stranding creator Hideo Kojima shared an interesting new tidbit of information about his studio’s collaboration with Chvrches, revealing that the band’s new track “Death Stranding” will play over the game’s end credits. Kojima offered glowing praise for the song, while dropping some pretty strong hints that his upcoming game might have a more upbeat conclusion than you might expect.

“Very positive & wonderful song,” Kojima wrote in the post. “I’ve been thru rough days by listening to it. When you hear it at the end of the game you will be touched.” There’s a lot of adjectives to describe the footage and gameplay we’ve seen of Death Stranding so far ahead of the game’s November 8 release date. The game is shaping up to be weird, fascinating, trippy, obtuse, surreal, ambitious, psychological and chock-full of Norman Reedus. With all that in mind, it’s a bit jarring to see Kojima describe it here as “positive,” “wonderful” and touching. Frankly, we were expecting a bit more of an emotional gut-punch.

Of course, end credits songs rarely reveal specific details about a story’s resolution, but they do tend to reflect the overall vibe and atmosphere. And the first thing you’ll notice about the new Chvrches song (which we’ve embedded below), is that it evokes a happy, toe-tapping mood, a feeling of starting something new together. Based on what Kojima has already revealed about Death Stranding, we know the game centers around Reedus’s character Sam attempting to connect the inhabitants of a fractured world. Though much of what we’ve seen from the game so far involves Sam tramping around various landscapes all by his lonesome, this song hints he’ll successfully forge bonds with people over the course of his journey. This particularly comes through in lines like “What will become of us all if we dare to dream” and “Maybe together we can make a mark in the stars we embark.”

There’s also a very clear sense of an ending here, with lyrics like “Let’s make a toast to the damned,” “When we’re played out by the band,” and “Now that it’s all said and done” lending a reflective tenor to the proceedings. In other words, while it seems the last moments of Death Stranding will be a bit more chipper than we’d have guessed, it’s still not outside the realm of possibility that Sam won’t survive the game, and that his heroic sacrifice at the climax of the story will allow for the possibility of a brighter future.

Want to dig a little deeper into the meaning of the lyrics for yourself? You can check them out in full here.

Death Stranding comes to PlayStation 4 on November 8.