The beginning of the game is appropriately somber, with the one humorous break being Sam landing his bike from a long jump…and smashing right into Fragile! She immediately teleports away (and doesn't seem to hold it against him when they talk later), but Sam immediately wipes out, losing most of his cargo and watching his bike slide off the cliff.
In Episode 2, after they escape the BTs, BB-28 flips off Deadman when Sam hands it to him.
Episode 3:
On the boat en route to Lake Knot, Fragile sits next to Sam, and is getting ready to talk about "that asshole, Higgs"...but Sam doesn't respond. Fragile looks to find that Sam fell asleep, at which point she sighs and walks off.
As you prepare to make your delivery from the Lake Knot City depot for the first time, the system "goes on the fritz", and a strange BRIDGES maintenance worker, who sounds and moves a lot like the villain you met, awkwardly gives you the package causing the issue before excusing himself. The preparation menu then reopens, and the package description for this item reads...this:
Sam watching Deadman and BB getting carried off by the supercell, with Deadman screaming the whole way, before all three get sucked in.
Deadman: Saaam! Heyyyy! Ahhhhh, whoa!
Heartman gives you likes throughout your face-to-face meetings with him. At one point, when Sam moves away from him to avoid being patted on the shoulder, Heartman instead changes his gesture to a thumbs-up to give him some likes.
This invokes Mood Whiplash the first time: when Sam guesses that Heartman wants to pass on with his family, Heartman gives him a thumb-up accompanied by a cheerful sound sting and a Heart appearing on the screen!
During Sam's first visit, Heartman mutes his AED's warning system to keep it from interrupting his briefing to Sam. Heartman dies again from cardiac arrest, interrupting himself. As Sam leaves Heartman's office, he sets the 3-minute hourglass for him, then takes the opportunity to record-scratch on Heartman's antique record player, almost DJ-style. Heartman docks 20 likes from Sam (causing him to walk off with a "Yeah boyee"), then gives those 20 likes back as he leaves. Heartman give the likes back with a thumbs-up over his chest. Despite being clinically dead at the moment. The way the camera reveals it with an uninterrupted shot brings this further into Leaning on the Fourth Wall.
In the third and final fight against Cliff, in the midst of a Vietnam battleground with constant explosions and ghostly apparitions of soldiers dying around him, Sam can only exasperatedly sigh and ask "where are we this time?" At this point, Sam is just tired of it all.
While stuck on his beach before Bridges rescues him, have Sam call out and you'll have him exasperatedly ask if the game is over and him being trapped was a bug. Other times, he'll curse out Amelie for essentially leaving him in limbo.
Heartman manages to make Die-Hardman's presidential inauguration a little more awkward by being dead for most of it. He comes back 'round just as Sam is leaving.
One of Cliff's last lines in the game, in his most emotional scene, says he was "just like any other cliff" before he had Sam. "A dead end, no way forward." That's right, he made a dad joke.
Gameplay:
The cargo/inventory system doesn't sound funny at first glance, but Kojima demonstrates at Tokyo Game Show 2019 how the system works—and more importantly, how it doesn't. Hammerspace gets subverted pretty damn hard in this game, and Kojima shows exactly how hard in the shown gameplay. The player first loads the cargo for the current mission in Sam's backpack. So far, so good. Then the player loads more cargo into the backpack...and more cargo...and more cargo...and more cargo in poor Sam's backpack (with Kojima listing each item) until the load is about as tall as he is and forcing him to hunch over. When the player finally gets out of the inventory screen, the female commentator who's there with Kojima can only give an exasperated "Ehhh..." at all the cargo Sam's carrying.
This carries into the actual game world as you can find yourself chuckling, even laughing out loud at Sam constantly weaving back and forth with this comically large load, or even just stumbling head over heels down a hillside. Damages the cargo? Definitely. Hilarious to witness? Definitely.
Take a massive load of cargo almost as tall as Sam is and definitely about to make him fall over. Get on one of the reverse trikes, which is basically a motorcycle, and begin riding forward. Move the camera to the side and notice how Artistic License comes into play as physics go out the window, with a full tower of cargo leaning over and beyond Sam's head without falling over despite no real way of buckling it down being visible outside the (relatively tiny) backpack.note It should be noted that the cargo containers are specifically designed to be stackable with interlocking pieces
The "Urinate" mechanic. Yes, you can have Sam pee in the open...provided it's away from other people/buildings, otherwise he won't do it. And he won't do it in front of BRIDGES holograms or around/on people, either.
This was introduced in the beginning of the "Ludens Fan" video, which is Geoff Keighley's character in the game. Talk about an awkward juxtaposition.
If you're feeling particularly ballsy, you can humiliate a BT by having Sam pee directly on it instead of throwing an EX grenade. That's right,you can kill a ghost by pissing on it.
Some of the hijinks you can have Sam get up to in the Private Room.
Keep having Sam drink cans of beer, and he'll randomly take a can, shake it a lot, and open it in your face!
You can have Sam do goofy stuff in front of the mirror and take pictures of him mid action. You can have him motorboat in the camera or do a "You're pretty good!"-esque pose.
If Sam needs to use the restroom, he'll point at the stall in the room and put his hands together, silently begging you to let him.
After connecting to the Timefall Farm, your cans on Monster Energy will be replaced by beer. Drink three of these and trying to make Sam drink another results in him drunkenly sweeping everything off the table and attempt to squish the escaping Cryptobiotes.
One particular mission in the game has you delivering something important to a customer. Nothing unusual there, except it's a Timed Mission as well and marked as URGENT. So what is the cargo involved? Pizza.
Subsequent missions for this client have him thanking Sam obsequiously in an email and apologizing for not being at the door at the time of delivery...and then coming up with a ludicrous requirement for another pizza from an even further-off location, with stories like how needs to smooth things over with his wife or deliver his dad's last meal (of pizza). Since you need the guy to actually show up to connect to the chiral network, you get the feeling he's just stringing you along. Post-game, you can go inside his bunker and discover it was really Higgs' home the whole time. He really WAS playing you like a goddamn fiddle!
The release key art has everyone posing for the camera... while Higgs is sensually lying down holding his head on his hand.
The Odradek (the five-pronged sensor on Sam's shoulder) is usually cause for alarm whenever it pops out, but when it lets you know it's all clear, it can be hilarious. Sometimes it pantomimes a child clapping its hands or morphs into a hand shape to give you a thumbs-up.
In Higgs' Stalker ShrineRoom Full of Crazy, if you look closely, he's captioned a couple of photos of Sam falling down with his motorbike with an "LOL".
In his journal entries, Higgs' reaction to the first supercell basically amounts to "What the fuck was that?" and noting that whatever it is, he can tell that it's "all kinds of fucked up". And that's coming fromHiggs.
It's also hilarious since it was speculated both in-universe and out-of-universe that Higgs and Cliff were associates, only to turn out that they're separate plot threads and the two have no idea who each other are.
At the start of his Duel to the Death with Sam, Higgs encourages him to fight him with his Strand. Turns out this is not only the most effective way to beat him, but the funniest. Sam will casually dodge his attacks, truss him up in unbreakable rope, knock him over with a knee to the gut, and then merrily stomp on him over and over until he teleports away to begin the whole painful, humiliating process again. It really drives home what a disastrous Humiliation Conga the whole situation is for the wannabe pharaoh of America.
A DS player made a ski resort... It's best to see the video, but it just goes to show how creative players can get with a set of gravity-defying zip-lines and some Floating Carriers.
Hideo Kojima went to the store and found that it was a self-serve shop; no employees and everything is run on automatons, almost like in Death Stranding. So, to top off the experience, Kojima put his bag over his chest like a BB. Apparently, he does this quite often.
exactly how hard in the shown gameplay. The player first loads the cargo for the current mission in Sam's backpack. So far, so good. Then the player loads more cargo into the backpack...and more cargo...and more cargo...and more cargo in poor Sam's backpack (with Kojima listing each item) until the load is about as tall as he is and forcing him to hunch over. When the player finally gets out of the inventory screen, the female commentator who's there with Kojima can only give an exasperated "Ehhh..." at all the cargo Sam's carrying.