Death Stranding looks so realistic that people are using Sam’s face to bypass UK age restrictions


The UK have put in place an age restriction gate on several online platforms, barring access to adult-oriented sites unless users present a picture of themselves that proves they’re of age.

Reception to this change has certainly been mixed from UK residents, with people generally being frustrated by the barrier of having to do face ID every time they want to access an age-gated section of the internet.

In an act of protest, users have been finding ways to dupe the facial recognition and get to the sites they’d like to reach regardless of age restriction.

Among all the ways people have found to cheat the systme, the goofiest one is people using Death Stranding’s Sam Porter Bridges, played by Norman Reedus, to skirt past it. His face is rendered in such detail that it consistently tricks photo age ID and confuses him for a real person.

Norman Reedus’ face used to dupe facial recognition software

For those unfamiliar with how facial recognition works in relation to UK site access being restricted, it’s put in place for any age gated access point online. This isn’t just to access sites, people can’t even go into 18+ rated Discord server channels without authentication.

And, in order to get around people spoofing the software by using images of other people’s faces, users are sometimes required to take pictures of themselves in different poses.

This will thwart most attempts at users trying to bypass it, but, due to Hideo Kojima‘s oddly specific sense of detail, Death Stranding’s facial expressions are incredibly realistic and well rendered for pretty much any application you can think of.

The photo mode allows users to pose with several facial expressions with close-up detail, enough to more often than not trick facial recognition. Photo mode also allows users to toggle these expressions upon request, giving them ways to diversify images of his face.

While this tech was surely made with the intention of blowing people away with Death Stranding 2‘s storytelling and make people more immersed in the game, Kojima Studios’ efforts have found a very bizarre second life in this application.

Users have tested it and confirmed it works with Death Stranding 1 and 2 with pretty high accuracy, and photo mode from other modern games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and WWE 2K25 also work. It’s clear that the UK’s age restriction checks have some kinks to work out.



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