【Laruan】

An epic eight-minute teaser for the upcoming game Death Strandingdebuted during The LaruanGame Awards Thursday night, and it's one of the wildest, most daring trailers that has ever graced the world of video games.

The trailer commands attention from the first second it kicks in, with Norman Reedus's voice over about the beginning of life in the universe and the beginning of its end. Once Reedus's character pulls himself off the black morass of earth (if that is, indeed, Earth), everything goes off the rails and never finds the ground again.

Death Strandingis the latest project by director Hideo Kojima, known for creating the highly acclaimed Metal Gear series. The first two trailers from 2016 painted one of the most ambitious, confusing, cinematic, and impressive games ever made.

Thursday night's third trailer kicks it into overdrive.

Per Reedus's monologue, an explosion akin to the big bang is ending life as we know it, and it's tearing apart humanity in inexplicable ways. People are being snatched up by invisible beasts, consumed by black goo, and thrown around by rising and falling tides.

Kojima is teasing something huge, something so immense that it may not even be entirely comprehensible when the game releases on its to-be-announced date. It's certainly not comprehensible in this eight-minute snippet.

Amid the Lovecraftian landscape, people are fighting for their lives and the life of a baby, held in an artificial womb, who appeared in the previous two trailers. It appears to be the last light of hope for humanity in its seemingly insurmountable fight against the supernatural threat of the end of the world.

Each scene turns the last one on its head, pushing further and further into obscurity, from the oceans rising hundreds of feet in a single moment to a baby, somehow, giving a thumbs up from inside Reedus's character's esophagus.

The trailer, and likely the game, is heady. Kojima is throwing reality and its rules out the window and delivering something mind-bendingly weird. But given his track record, that ambition could pay off tenfold.