Now that Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is out on PC as well as PS5, creator Hideo Kojima is turning his attention to his upcoming projects, which include the mysterious Xbox horror game OD.
OD, which is described by Kojima as “a game and at the same time a movie and at the same time a new form of media”, was first announced back in 2023. It stars Sophia Lillis, Hunter Schafer and the late Udo Kier as the game’s three main characters. There is also some involvement from director Jordan Peele, who is known for his films Get Out and Nope. Kojima has said for a while that OD will be quite unlike anything we have seen before and may not actually work. He has even gone so far as to admit he is sure plenty of people will hate OD, but that he’s OK with that in the short term.
Indeed, when Kojima first started pitching OD to publishing partners, many apparently turned him down and labelled the idea “crazy”.
“I wanted to do something new. I wanted to do something different,” Kojima explained during a wide-ranging Xbox interview with Entertainment Weekly. “I pitched to many people, to the big companies, and also to the up-and-coming companies. All of them said the same thing. They said that I’m crazy and that they really don’t understand the concept – that they will not be able to do it.”
In the end, it was former head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, who understood what Kojima wanted to achieve with OD, and that’s why it will be an Xbox game. The newly-appointed Xbox leader, Asha Sharma, also understands whatever it is Kojima is planning, according to EW.
So, what exactly is Kojima planning? Essentially, the concept for OD is to get players to experience an overwhelming amount of fear. “I wanted to go beyond the limit of the ‘scariness’ that other games had reached,” Kojima explained “It’s a single-player game and I wanted to make it as scary as possible.”
Should that prove too much for some players, Kojima has devised a system that – should things get too scary – still allows players to keep going somehow. “I can’t say much more, because it’ll give too much of a hint on the system,” he said. I wonder what it could be – an auto-play feature of some kind?
We also have a new image for OD, which shows the scariest thing of all: a TV in a room with nothing for would-be viewers to sit down and watch it on. The horror! There is also an ominous figure in one of the doorways, which is admittedly quite unsettling.
As well as OD, Kojima is working on the PlayStation published espionage game Physint. Kojima has already found a few actors for his Metal Gear-style project, including Don Lee (Train to Busan), Charlee Fraser (Furiosa), and Minami Hamabe (Godzilla Minus One).
