Everything We Know About Hideo Kojima & Jordan Peele’s OD So Far
ODis a new project by auteur video game director Hideo Kojima and sees the gaming icon once again teaming up with Hollywood to provide players with a surreal and unique experience. Here iseverything we know about OD so far.
Kojima and Peele
Oscar-nominated horror directed Jordan Peele joined Kojima onstage atThe Game Awards 2023to announce his involvement in the project. What part the director of Get Out andNopeplays in OD is unknown. The title is being described as a film just as much as it is a game with Kojima once again looking to blur the line between the two mediums. Perhaps this is where Peele will contribute.
Similarly, Kojima’s last foray into horror, the ill-fated Silent Hills (better known for its demoP.T.), also saw him team up with an esteemed Hollywood director, Guillermo del Toro. Onstage at The Game Awards Peele expressed his love for Kojima andMetal Gear Solid 2, before calling OD “completely immersive” and “utterly terrifying”. Judging from the announcement trailer, Peele might be right. Jordan Peele isn’t the only name on board for OD, however, with Kojima promising a group of “legends” contributing to the title. He hasn’t said who yet, but likened the group to “the Avengers”.
An Xbox Exclusive?
Kojima Productions’ first titleDeath Strandinglaunched exclusively on the PlayStation 4 back in 2019, but it looks like Microsoft has tempted the auteur over to the green side of the console war. Kojima Productions has partnered with Xbox Game Studios to make OD, a huge win for Xbox and Phil Spencer. According to theofficial press release, OD will be using “Xbox Game Studios and their cloud gaming technology to take on the challenge of creating a very unique, immersive, and totally new style of game”.
While it is not confirmed, OD will probably be an Xbox exclusive. Alongside Xbox, logos for Unreal Engine, Serbian graphics company 3Lateral (owned by Epic Games), and photorealistic modeling studio MetaHuman are also seen in the trailer.
OD stars Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and IT actress Sophia Lillis, Euphoria star Hunter Schafer, and German character actor Udo Kier. This is Lillis and Shafer’s first time appearing in a video game, but among Kier’s more than 270 credits, he has voiced characters in games such asMartha is DeadandCall of Duty: WWII.
The Reveal Trailer
OD will explore “the concept of testing your fear threshold, and what it means to OD on fear”. How does one overdose on fear though? In the reveal trailer, the three leads appear as disturbingly realistic CGI heads, floating in a dark void. An off-screen presence terrifies them, even causing Sophia Lillis’ character to let out a frankly horrifying scream.
The phrase “the hungry purple dinosaur ate the kind zingy fox, the jabbering crab, and the mad whale and started vending and quacking” is repeated by the trio. This phrase is an example of a phonetic pangram, a sentence that uses all the phonemes and letters of the English alphabet. How this phrase relates to Kojima’s next project is anyone’s guess. In the trailer, we can also hear footsteps, the creaking of a door, and a mysterious clicking, crackling noise. Honestly, though, it is Sophia Lillis’ scream that will stay in my mind until OD is released.
Release Date
There is currently no release date for OD. However, with Kojima Productions also working on Death Stranding 2, we probably can’t expect a release any time soon.
As is the case with any Hideo Kojima project we will be speculating on OD until the cows come home. One thing is for sure though, this game will be unlike anything we’ve seen before. It is Kojima after all. His games are insane and iconic. After all who expected Death Stranding to be about a post-apocalyptic delivery man when its first trailer dropped? For more onODand other games announced at The Game Awards, stay with Twinfinite.
