First reported by GamesRadar, Hideo Kojima revealed in a year-end Twitter post that his upcoming projects OD and Physint have encountered difficulties due to the SAG-AFTRA strike that began last July and remains ongoing.
"For OD, we developed the game and had actor and environment scanning," Kojima wrote as part of his 2024 year-in-review. "In the second half of the year, scanning and filming were suspended due to the SAG strike. Casting was also suspended for Physint due to the strike."
Death Stranding 2 remains full steam ahead, as games that were in production for at least one year by the start of the strike were not struck work—actors would not be considered to be crossing the picket line to continue working on them. It certainly seems like early days for Physint—that's only a working title for the game, and its January 2024 announcement was not accompanied by a trailer or any marketing materials, just a promise: "It's a new stealth-action game from Hideo Kojima."
I'm a little more curious about where this leaves OD. We can infer that it entered full production before the start of the strike last July from Kojima's tweet, but it entered production no earlier than July 25, 2023. That means it could have been in active development for up to four months before being revealed at the 2023 Game Awards or, equally likely, it could have still been in pre production at the time it was announced—see the recent trend toward super early game announcements like The Witcher 4's initial reveal or Star Wars Eclipse's first teaser.
In theory, OD should be at least a little closer to release than Physint, but I feel like I know so much less about it—Physint at least has a gameplay genre attached to it. OD, meanwhile, is definitely a game according to Kojima, "but it's at the same time a movie, but at the same time a new form of media." Horror filmmaker Jordan Peele is involved in some fashion, and OD's first trailer consisted of strangely lit digital scans of actors speaking cryptically into the camera before Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves actor Sophia Lillis capped it off with a classico horror movie scream.
Basically, this one tested even my tolerance for opaque avant garde indulgence, but who am I kidding: Metal Gear Solid 3 won several lifetimes' worth of benefit of the doubt in my book and the world's first strand-type game wound up being pretty cool after all those years of similarly baffling teasers. Speaking of Death Stranding, OD and Physint may have unquantified delays due to the strike, but Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is still on track to release this year—on PS5, at least.
