Hideo Kojima is working on Metal Gear's spiritual successor "Physint" all by himself for now

Renowned director Hideo Kojima is out to prove once again why he’s a singular force in the video games industry. The legendary game designer behind Death Stranding 2 and the Metal Gear Franchise revealed in a recent interview that he’s working entirely alone on his PlayStation-exclusive action-espionage game, which is still in a conceptual stage.

Little is known about Physint, but Kojima has so far described it as the “culmination” of his career. So while he starts work on OD and tweaks Death Stranding 2, there are still ways to go before we get our hands on the spiritual successor to Metal Gear Solid. In an interview with IndieWire, Kojima said:

“I also am starting to work with the team on OD because that’s a new project, and also doing Physint all by myself because that’s at the conceptual stage. So I’m doing that. And also I have all these interviews every day, and also promotional photo-shootings, things like that – so I don’t feel like I’ve finished Death Stranding 2, to be frank.”

Announced during Sony’s January 2024 PlayStation State of Play, Physint is supposed to be the successor to the Metal Gear Solid franchise. Kojima pioneered the stealth-action genre from the ground up and released the first Metal Gear for the MSX2 home computer in 1987. He parted ways with Konami toward the tail end of 2015, after completing work on Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

While the game is currently in conceptual stages, Kojima has already proven himself yet again with Death Stranding 2’s visual fidelity using the Decima engine. According to him, Physint will use cutting-edge technology, blurring the lines between video games and filmmaking. Kojima shared a bit about the level of visual immersion we could expect with Physint:

“If your mom walks in and sees you playing, she’ll think you’re watching a movie.”

Still, Kojima is working solo on Physint while he juggles other projects. Currently, Kojima is analyzing player data for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, which launched on June 26, 2025, for the PS5. Kojima is looking at weapon usage and player routes to see what bugs and technical issues to address.

He’s also working with his team over at Kojima Productions for an Xbox-exclusive horror game, OD, which features actors like Hunter Schafer, Sophia Lillis, and is being developed in partnership with Microsoft and renowned filmmaker Jordan Peele. Despite OD already being in development, Kojima did state that the project was delayed by the 2024 SAG-AFTRA video game actors' strike, which extended into 2025.

Fans have been urging Kojima to return to the stealth-action genre that he master-crafted over the years. After finding Kojima Productions and releasing Death Stranding, Kojima expressed, “A lot of people wanted me to do something similar to Metal Gear.”

However, the wait could be considerably longer than expected for enthusiasts, as Kojima has estimated a release window of “five or six years,” potentially aligning with the debut of the Sony PlayStation 6. Gamers looking to grab a copy of Death Stranding 2 on the PlayStation 5 to check out Kojima's latest endeavor can do so however below:

Buy Death Stranding 2 on Amazon