Death Stranding, the game Hideo Kojima’s studio released in 2019, is set in a broken future America, but the ground doesn’t look American. It’s black rock furred with green moss, cold rivers and bare uplands, and anyone who has seen photographs of Iceland recognises it before anything else in the game. The painting above you is from 1900. Þórarinn B. Þorláksson painted it at Þingvellir, the valley where Iceland’s old parliament met, and the National Gallery of Iceland describes it as the bright summer night, the blue-tinged light, the smooth surface of the water.
If you’ve searched why does Death Stranding look like Iceland, the short answer is that its art director built it from an image of Iceland and said so on the record. The longer answer runs through the clues Kojima left, and through the painters who got to that lava and moss a century before the game.
Why does Death Stranding look like Iceland?
Because it was drawn from Iceland on purpose. Yoji Shinkawa was the game’s art director, the same artist whose designs people know from Metal Gear Solid, and in July 2020, when the game came out on PC, Joe Juba at Game Informer asked him how the visual design of Death Stranding began.
“Well usually, there is the plot or the idea from Mr. [Hideo] Kojima, and I work to expand ideas off that through the background, story, and world image. For Death Stranding, the setting was based on an image of Iceland, with its great nature, so the background image for that was actually set.”
Yoji Shinkawa, Game Informer, July 17, 2020
The story is somewhere else. The official synopsis puts you in the boots of Sam Bridges, played by Norman Reedus, and gives you the job of connecting “the last survivors of a decimated America,” one step at a time. Kojima told the same magazine in 2019 that the map was drawn wrong on purpose: “It’s about America, but I made that map deliberately not correctly America. Maybe it looks like Japan from that angle. I want people to not think ‘America,’ but ‘where you are.’” The map says America and the ground under it comes from Iceland, and both were choices.
Kojima confirmed the scouting himself in 2025, explaining to triple j why the sequel went somewhere else: when he picks a location he goes there, “to scan, or to do interviews,” and “Last time, it was Iceland.” It was a little cold, he said. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, out in June 2025, moves Sam through Mexico to Australia, chosen because Kojima “wanted an area that was sprawled from East to West like America.”
Only moss lives here: the trail Kojima left
Fans had worked most of this out years before Shinkawa said it, from things Kojima let slip. The first is a song. In the summer of 2014 Kojima was in a record store in Reykjavík, on his way to pay, when something playing in the shop stopped him. “Something just clicked for me, so I went to ask about it,” he told Rachel Weber at Glixel in 2016. “It turned out to be a song from Low Roar’s 2014 album 0, and they told me it was an American band that was based in Iceland. Needless to say, I bought it.” Two years later a Low Roar song, “I’ll Keep Coming,” carried the first Death Stranding teaser, and in the same interview Kojima said the “strand” in the title “stands for strings and connections.”
The second is moss. On August 17, 2014, Kojima posted a photo with four words, “Only moss lives here???” It showed yellow-green moss growing in patches over cracked grey rock under a blue sky. On May 22, 2018, he posted a render from the game’s engine captioned “Decima×Kojima=DS.” and it was moss again, thick round cushions of it swelling over dark stones. Fans put it next to photos of moss on Icelandic lava fields, Eurogamer ran the theory that week, and when the game came out in November 2019 the Reykjavík Grapevine wrote that it “could not more obviously take place in Iceland if it was called ‘Death Stranding In Iceland’.”
Icelandic landscape painters: Þórarinn B. Þorláksson’s Þingvellir
Þórarinn B. Þorláksson (1867–1924) trained in Copenhagen, came home, and in 1900, in the National Gallery of Iceland’s words, “became the first Icelandic painter to hold a solo exhibition in Iceland, exhibiting work from the previous summer.” One of those works is the picture at the top of this page. The Gallery ties his landscapes to the independence movement of those years, and he picked the most loaded place in the country. The Alþing, Iceland’s general assembly, was founded at Þingvellir in 930 and met there every year for more than 850 years, until 1798.
He painted it with nobody in it. A horse stands on the bank and looks back at you, a second one grazes at the far edge of the pool, the church and farm sit small under long blue hills, and the water holds a second copy of all of it upside down. Move the light through it.
That’s what “great nature” looked like to an Icelandic painter in 1900, wide and quiet, with a few buildings and a couple of animals to give it scale.
W. G. Collingwood’s Iceland, 1897
Three summers before Þórarinn’s show, an English painter rode down into the same valley. W. G. Collingwood (1854–1932) had spent years as John Ruskin’s assistant, and in 1897 he spent three months in Iceland with the Icelandic scholar Jón Stefánsson, travelling to the places where the sagas happen. In 1899 the two published A Pilgrimage to the Saga-Steads of Iceland, sketched rather than photographed, because proper photography meant “carrying breakable apparatus on ponyback over a thousand miles of rough and roadless country.” They wanted “to make portraits of the places and not picturesque compositions.”
At Þingvellir Collingwood stood on the rock everyone called the Lögberg, the Law Rock, and wrote down what he saw: “the brown, moss-grown lava-field; the long wall of Almannagjá completely shutting in everything on the right hand,” and beyond it “the broad gleam of the lake.” His big watercolour of Þingvellir, now in the British Museum, shows the old assembly in session, crowds on broken rock under a long wall, a lake beyond. Here it is beside Þórarinn’s painting of the same valley, and under both, the ground itself.
That wall is the edge of a crack in the planet. Þingvellir National Park explains it plainly: the Eurasian and North American plates break apart here and the land between them sinks, a valley seven kilometres wide between two faults, Almannagjá and Heiðargjá, floored with lava about 10,000 years old. It has sunk almost four metres since the first assembly met in 930.
He also had something to say about the colour. Some travellers had brought home a gloomy report of the country, and he disagreed in print: “It is not the dismal world of brown and grey we have been told about. It is a land of brilliant colour when the sun shines; and that is not seldom.”
Hekla in colour: the palette of Iceland
Collingwood listed those colours at Þingvellir, “lichen and moss, fern and flower, against the deep rich browns and glittering greys of the rock,” and further off, “the fluor-spar purple-pinks of the bare distant mountains.” Þórarinn painted a pink mountain of his own twenty-five years later. Hekla úr Laugardal, from 1922, two years before he died, has the volcano’s snow lit pink on the horizon, a band of blue distance under it, a pale lake, and in front, dark trees and slopes of green.
Sampled by area, almost all of it is dark, trees in shadow and olive slopes, and the pink of Hekla’s snow, the mountain the painting is named for, is the smallest colour on the bar. Hold it and the only thing left lit is the top of the volcano.
Why the moss gives Iceland away
The moss on Iceland’s lava fields has a name. In Icelandic it’s hraungambri, in English woolly fringe-moss, Racomitrium lanuginosum, and according to the University of Iceland’s science web it covers the lava in the south of the country and often grows into thick carpets. It’s the one that turns the black lava fields green. Plenty of places have lava. Lava under a thick, living carpet of moss is what people recognise as Iceland.
It’s also very easy to break. The Icelandic Institute of Natural History reports that a moss heath on Miðdalsheiði that burned in 2007 still showed a sharp line between burned and unburned ground fourteen years later. On a walking route to the Fagradalsfjall eruption in 2021, the Institute noted that the moss had been worn away on the path. People walking is enough to do it.
Þórarinn painted moss where the water keeps it wet, on the boulders beside a waterfall in 1909, green fur over rock so dark it’s nearly purple. It’s a close view for him, and it points straight at the painter who came next.
Kjarval, the painter who looked down at the moss
Jóhannes S. Kjarval (1885–1972) is, in the Reykjavík Art Museum’s words, one of the most beloved artists in Iceland’s art history, and his main subject was nature and landscape. The museum, which holds about 180 of his paintings, says he began painting in the open air in 1929, often making many works in one place, and that “from the 1940s onwards, the foreground became increasingly important in Kjarval’s landscapes, the perspective became narrower, and finally the textures and colour nuances of lava and moss became the main theme of his paintings.”
For about a quarter of a century he kept going back to one spot in the Garðahraun lava field north of Hafnarfjörður, a rock called Hangman’s Rock, and made a large number of paintings there. In 1950 he wrote an article called “The Icelandic Palette,” asking Icelandic artists to catalogue the colours of their own nature. Hörður Ágústsson, writing about his colour in the newspaper Þjóðviljinn in 1954, named three of them: “the delicately grey moss, blue-black lava, eroded brown earth.” It’s the ground seen the way you see it when you cross it on foot, head down, watching where the next step goes.
The walking simulator: the weight on Sam’s back
All of that is ground you cross on foot, and crossing it is the game. Kojima knew what people would call it. He told Game Informer before launch that “once you start playing the game, just walking in that world is really fun,” and then, “now everyone will say, ‘Oh, it’s a walking simulator!’” He also said Sam moans a lot on the journey, and that players can end up in the same position: “Why am I doing this? It’s so rough, so lonely, and so solitary!”
The game makes the weight physical. Everything Sam carries is stacked on his back or clipped to his shoulders and hips, and Sony’s own launch tips warned that “even if you can bear the weight, consider the height of all those packages,” that “making sharp turns can also be tricky if you’re overloaded,” and that “recklessness can lead to tumbles and damaged cargo.” You hold the two triggers to steady him, one for each hand, wading upstream or on a steep climb. Even the rain is against you: timefall “causes whatever it touches to age.”
Friedrich built a whole painting on a man seen from behind, looking out over a land too big for him, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. A game played over the shoulder keeps you behind its walker the same way for hours, his back to you and the land in front of both of you. Friedrich’s man has arrived and stands still. Sam never gets to stand still for long.
Figures twist up out of a storm of red, gold and deep blue paint in Weight On My Faith, and its words are a prayer from someone carrying a weight that won’t lift: “Morning keeps coming. I stand up. I do what I said I would do.” Swap the prayer for a delivery order and it is Sam’s whole walk.
Frequently asked questions
Is Death Stranding set in Iceland?
No. The story takes place in a broken future America, and Kojima has said he made the map “deliberately not correctly America.” The land is what comes from Iceland: the art director, Yoji Shinkawa, told Game Informer in 2020 that the setting “was based on an image of Iceland, with its great nature.”
Why does Death Stranding look like Iceland?
Because its look was built from an image of Iceland at the start of design, in Shinkawa’s words, and Kojima scouted there: “Last time, it was Iceland,” he said in 2025. Fans had guessed years earlier from his photos of moss, which matched Iceland’s mossy lava fields.
Where is Death Stranding 2 set?
Mexico and then Australia. Kojima wanted a land that stretched east to west like the first game’s America, and found Australia the right size.
Who are Iceland’s great landscape painters?
Þórarinn B. Þorláksson (1867–1924) held the first solo exhibition by an Icelandic painter in Iceland, in 1900, with Þingvellir among the pictures. Jóhannes S. Kjarval (1885–1972) spent his later decades on close views of lava and moss, and many of his paintings are at Kjarvalsstaðir in Reykjavík. The English painter W. G. Collingwood sketched the saga sites all over Iceland in 1897.
What is the moss in Iceland called?
The one that carpets the lava fields is woolly fringe-moss, Racomitrium lanuginosum, hraungambri in Icelandic. It grows back very slowly once it’s damaged, and the Icelandic Institute of Natural History has reported burn scars in it still clear fourteen years on.
Read next
- Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Friedrich’s man seen from behind above an endless land, and the word his century had for that pull.
- The Paintings Inside Elden Ring, Bosch’s hell, Doré’s giants and Friedrich’s lonely oak next to the Lands Between.
- Ico and de Chirico, the painting behind Fumito Ueda’s cover, and a held hand across three games.
- The colours of Paris, Texas, Travis’s long walk.
References
- Joe Juba, “The Artistic Process Behind Death Stranding,” Game Informer, July 17, 2020: gameinformer.com
- Joe Juba, “Hideo Kojima Answers Our Questions About Death Stranding,” Game Informer, September 16, 2019: gameinformer.com
- Death Stranding, official game page, PlayStation: playstation.com
- Rachel Weber, “Hideo Kojima Talks Soundtrack and the Meaning of ‘Death Stranding’,” Glixel (Rolling Stone), December 16, 2016, archived: web.archive.org
- Hideo Kojima (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN), posts of August 17, 2014 and May 22, 2018: 2014, 2018
- “Why Hideo Kojima fans reckon Death Stranding is set in Iceland,” Eurogamer, May 26, 2018: eurogamer.net
- Andie Sophia Fontaine, “Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding Is Totally Set In Iceland,” The Reykjavík Grapevine, November 19, 2019: grapevine.is
- Þórarinn B. Þorláksson, Þingvellir, 1900, National Gallery of Iceland, LÍ-1051: listasafn.is; image commons.wikimedia.org
- Þórarinn B. Þorláksson, Hekla úr Laugardal, 1922, and Foss, 1909: Hekla, Foss
- W. G. Collingwood and Jón Stefánsson, A Pilgrimage to the Saga-Steads of Iceland, Ulverston: W. Holmes, 1899: archive.org
- W. G. Collingwood, The Icelandic Thing, about 1897, watercolour, British Museum, OA.10759: britishmuseum.org; image commons.wikimedia.org
- Þingvellir National Park, “Tectonic Movements”: thingvellir.is; and the World Heritage nomination of Þingvellir National Park: thingvellir.is
- Ingibjörg Svala Jónsdóttir, “Hvað er mosi?”, Vísindavefurinn, University of Iceland, January 13, 2015: visindavefur.is
- Icelandic Institute of Natural History, “Gróðureldar við gosstöðvar við Fagradalsfjall”: natt.is
- Reykjavík Art Museum, Jóhannes S. Kjarval collection; “Hangman’s Rock: The Delirium of Vision”; “Jóhannes S. Kjarval: In Icelandic Colours”: Hangman’s Rock, In Icelandic Colours
- Angus Truskett, “Why Death Stranding 2 is set in Australia and other things we learned speaking with Hideo Kojima,” triple j, June 27, 2025: abc.net.au
- James Berich, “Death Stranding 2’s Version Of Australia Is Bloody Great So Far,” Press Start, May 8, 2025: press-start.com.au
- “Death Stranding 2: On the Beach,” Wikipedia: wikipedia.org
- Brett Elston, “Hit the Ground Running With These Day-One Death Stranding Tips,” PlayStation Blog, November 7, 2019: blog.playstation.com
- “All The Terms You Need To Know To Start Death Stranding,” Game Informer, November 7, 2019: gameinformer.com
