"Our nightmares are your dreams?" - Sam Strand
This line always stuck with me for some reason from the end of DS, and when Amelie cuts off her Beach from the rest of the world the Death Stranding is undone as she agrees to bear the weight of eternity to not end the world until she breaks (kind of like Atlas holding up the world)
Overdose will explore what has become of the Beach in her absence, and without a central "master" Beach we could end up having a multitude of decentralised multiverses, with their Beaches now severed from the centre. However, the Chiral Network still remains and is still functional at the end of the game despite Amelie's absence (proven by the sacrificed BBs watching over Lou's revival in the incinerator at the end of the game)
In an attempt to reconnect the Beach, the UCA must come to terms with the nightmares that Amelie experienced in order to determine what was the right path forward to save humanity. By connecting everyone, you have to face not only the joy that brings them together but their worst traumas and fears
This was EXACTLY the point of P.T.!
The demo can only be beaten by following the steps to make peace with yourself, and escape. Sam doesnt talk about what happened after his wife's suicide or what happened to him, he just disappeared...
...or he got stuck on the Beach, in his nightmares, like the dream sequences we experience throughout the game. The guilt ate him alive. The infinite cycle of P.T. was Sam punishing himself.
If we take P.T. as canon, Sam Strand (Norman Reedus) had to face the tragedy of having lost Lucy after she suicided while still pregnant. The whole "he shot his family" thing and being hated by the baby is all bluster: thats just Sam blaming himself for not being fast enough to save his wife. The name Lisa Bridges is actually his mother's name (the name of the monster in P.T.) - maybe saying its Oedipus complex might be too reaching. But its entirely possibly that Sam's mom being a "stillmother" led to her becoming a illusory apparition in a nightmare realm, hunting Sam through the Beach and being a source of his extreme guilt. Cliff calls Lisa his "Anomalisa" before he kills her...which is a very odd nickname, perhaps alluding to her nightmare qualities?
It is yet to be explained in Death Stranding what stillmothers actually experience. Maybe these nightmares are it? OD may be the experience of the women who are sacrificed to the chiral network, or perhaps theyre the monsters that populate it.
The 3 actors shown in the trailer, Hunter Schafer, Sophia Lillis, Udo Kier, all of them are taking part in "stillmother" nightmares of their own, connected by the Beach. This also explains the S.S.S system, that people may invade eachother's games with screams - thats how the chiral network works. This is the second Strand type game.
As for what this could look like as a game, Hideo Kojima has said he is looking for creators worldwide to create his game, and what I think he is doing is that he's getting them to create short stories: OD will be an anthology of different stories that the creators come up with (Jordan Peele will have a story, Guillermo has a story etc.) and each nightmare will be contextualised as trying to face the music so to speak
The UCA may be motivated to send these people in (whether willing or unwilling), duping them into the whole purple dinosaur hypnotism/drug overdose shtick in order to reconnect the network and force them into the Beach so they can patch the holes left by Amelie's sudden departure. The UCA have proven willing to sacrifice babies before, this wouldnt be unexpected of them to do. The flickering and radiation clicking may be the chiral network struggling to function, yet only in the final sequence with Sophia Lillis where she screams does the flickering stop, replaced by the droning chant - droning that could be BTs now interacting with Sophia's character now the "calibration" is complete.
Anyway that's my theory. Basically, OD is a way of Kojima trying to make P.T canon to Death Stranding following the events of the first game. OD will basically be a game-sized demo for DS2.
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