Video games are a fledgling industry. The existence of computer generated home consoles dates back to the 1970s and really only emerged as a legitimate industry in the mid 80s. It would be another decade before games were making any real artistic statements. So with the relatively short time they’ve had to evolve, it’s pretty remarkable the way they’ve progressed from early Nintendo and Atari to the monstrous artistic statement that is Red Dead Redemption 2. Red Dead 2 is intricate, tragic, beautiful; and the next step- the new standard for the unique and powerful experience that only video games can produce. You may not like everything Read Dead Redemption 2 does, as a video game it may not be flawless, but as an artistic statement it’s grand, ambitious and consistently breathtaking.
I love Read Dead Redemption 2, and thanks to its wild west setting, Rockstar is able to draw on an old world beauty that makes the game unique artistically and also a consistent delight to look at. Despite the almost unbelievable scope of the game, Rockstar squeezes out a staggering amount of variety and detail in it’s locations. Two that immediately jump to mind are the foggy and snowy mountains of the early game, as well as a walkway to a mansion, encased in trees with flowers covering your pathway. Rockstar crafts a natural, bygone sense of wonder that’s positively encapsulating. The games presentation is massive in scope, you feel at one with the environments while also feeling so small in comparison to the sprawling mountain and streams that shimmer in the afternoon sun. On top of this the game moves you from place to place, ensuring you can never get bored of a location as you’re never stuck in it for too long. Incredible weather effects also freshen up the locations as fog, mist, and rain can impair your vision or leave the ground wet and muddy. Your characters will also react accordingly, pulling their jackets closed to cover up form the wind and rain. The animations are mostly great though can occasionally behave in strange ways. I do feel the game lacks the graphical fidelity of an Uncharted or God of War; but those are far more linear experiences and Rockstar certainly makes up for it in variety and artistic direction. Facial animations are great and capture the minute details of the actors performances. The devs go to great lengths to take weight and external factors into every single action your character performs, creating an experience that pulls you in and doesn’t force you out for even a second. Red Dead can certainly stand toe to toe and occasionally surpass even the most gorgeous first party Sony games.
Along with being one of the the industries most densely animated games, it’s also one of it’s most carefully written. Rockstar has a lot to juggle but in spite of this they’re able to not only build an engaging and heartbreaking central story, but can also create meaningful side missions that all feel unique and necessary. The main story here is fantastic. You play as Arthur Morgan as you are lead through the down fall of the Van der Linde gang. Events unfold in a steady and lifelike way as you watch the characters slowly lose their grips on the bonds they had spent years building. Read Dead Redemption 2 is a tense and exhilarating story and the stakes are palpable as you race towards an inevitable conclusion. This being a prequel you know the broad strokes of the story here, and that ends up enabling the narrative as oppose to inhibiting it. The sense of tragedy grows as you know full well how things end, there’s a sense of hopelessness and frustration that permeates through the entire second half of the game. Dan Houser, Michael Unsworth, and Rupert Humphries (the games writers) take their time getting things going. The pacing isn’t perfect early on and while the characters are all interesting and have their own immediately memorable personalities, the story doesn’t roar out of the gates. I think while at first it bothered me, in retrospect it does serve as a valuable contrast to the breakneck pace of the games last two chapters. While the main story hands you a devastating portrait of loyalty and betrayal, it’s not all the game has to offer and we do end on much a needed sense of hope and optimism.
The dialogue is mostly pretty natural and even occasionally poetic and bleeds emotion. The characters are also more subtle and complex then they’ve been in the past. Rockstar has gotten a lot of criticism for their broadly written and occasionally obnoxious characters. Red Dead Redemption 2 strips away the irreverent tone in favor of dynamic characterization. These people evolve and express deeper emotions than you usually see in games, not just from this developer but from the industry as a whole. Arthur goes through an endearing and deeply upsetting arch, he was easily one of my favorite characters and is brought to life by what I feel was an impassioned performance by Roger Clark. I also loved the arcs of Dutch (Benjamin Byron Davis), Sadie Adlers (Alex McKenna), and John Marston (Rob Wiethoff). All of these for drastically different reasons.
While I could endlessly praise the game’s story and presentation, it’s first and foremost a video game. While I have a few minor problems, this game is mostly a blast to play. I think the shooting mechanics are the best they’ve ever been, seeing improvements to dead eye, as well as giving you more range of motion to line up headshots while still snapping from target to target seamlessly. There can still be some wonkiness to the way Arthur moves and I found myself occasionally selecting the wrong prompts as multiple and contradicting actions are mapped to the same buttons. I can’t tell you how many times I tried to talk to someone and accidentally pointed my weapon at them. For me the only spots where realism can hamper gameplay was my constantly draining dead eye core, and me finding my horse out of range. Forcing me to sprint back to town. Other than this I came to appreciate the pace the game moves at, really taking it’s time and allowing you to breathe everything in. I do take issue with the games bounty system. I seem to get reported for crimes that I am nowhere near, which can pull me out of the experience. I also dislike how it locks you out of missions for a period of time. I very rarely had an issue with frame rate other than some slowdown in the cities. Also some characters glitching out in the backgrounds of cutscenes can be distracting. All of these complaints though are dwarfed by the size and detail of the open world. The game is lively and every event and missions is so seamlessly integrated into everything you see and do. This is by far the most realistic open world ever. Just filled to the brim with beauty and spontaneity that unfold with or without your involvement.
Even with all I’ve written I still don’t feel like I’ve done this game justice. This is the new high watermark for open world games. It’s a towering achievement of both design and storytelling, putting most TV shows to shame while creating an experience fresh and unique to it’s medium. I’ve said so much and yet I feel like I could still go on for pages about just how magnificent an experience the team at Rockstar has created. I think whether the game clicks with you or not on a gameplay front- this is the future of the medium. Rockstar has brought us what is without a doubt one of the most fully realized and complexly interconnected pieces of interactive media ever created. I can say without hyperbole that Red Dead Redemption 2 is on a new level, the bar has been raised and I cannot wait to see where we can go from here.