20 YEARS OF GAMING PART 10: HALFWAY POINT

Is Red Dead Redemption 2 a perfect game? Absolutely not. It's a 10/10 in the same way the Breath of the Wild duology are. If rating games was just about "things it does good vs things it does bad" then this game, nor those, would be anywhere CLOSE to a 10/10. And just to satiate that curiosity, I'll quickly run by the issues I do have with it so it doesn't look like I have Rockstar's 100 Work Week Bad Security Dick in my mouth.

Several systems are either super easy to take advantage of or not taken far enough in a way that ruins the immersion that the game otherwise dedicates a whole bunch of time to like the Wanted mechanic, NPC behaviors, weather and temperature, and more. There's a shit ton of trailing missions and some of the shooting galleries can get pretty repetitive. And Chapter V just generally kinda blows.

Now, all of that on its own would drag this game down to a 9 or even an 8/10. But what this game also has is some of the best visuals in any game, an incredibly engrossing open world with a ton of different ways to interact and have fun in it, some incredible music, excellent linear mission design, and one of the best stories in any video game. Arthur Morgan in particular is maybe the best protagonist in any video game ever and the story of him and his gang trying to make it in a dying world that's quickly outliving them is incredibly compelling. It's next level on a video, game, and narrative level so even if there are a good amount of issues I have with it when I really dissect it, the experience I had playing the game was so incredible and so engrossing, that I would feel dirty (at least right now) rating it at that 8 score I was considering. Anyway, onto the second half of this marathon!

20 YEARS OF GAMING PART 9

I've seen a lot of people say this game gave them A24 vibes. And now that I've played it, I can finally agree! This IS just like Men (2022)!

This game was mildly interesting at first. It has an excellent concept and the movies themselves are well shot and Manon Gage gives an excellent performance. But it was ultimately dragged down by some realizations I made about its fairly repetitive gameplay and one of the worst plot twists I've ever seen in a game.

On the latter front, it completely derails all of the interesting ideas I thought it was going to capitalize on in its first half and turns it into a FUCKING CREEPYPASTA. I laughed out loud at least 4 times and was not scared by anything except one shot that felt uncomfortable in the same way the OD trailer was. But regardless, this plot derail was so disappointing and poorly executed even for what it was TRYING to do.

The gameplay was also pretty interesting until I realized that the things that were categorized as matches really weren't... that related? So while combing through film footage and memorizing specific details was really cool and novel at first, as soon as the amount of times I said "huh? how does that work" increased to a point, I just gave up on combing through these intentionally. Coincidentally, that was around the time the story was beginning to "pick up." Great.

But yeah, what seemed like a super interesting game slowly became less interesting for me as it went along until my "do I give a shit"-o meter eventually plummeted as the true nature of its narrative came about. It feels like a terrible A24 horror movie and it's super clear after playing this that this goes in the David Cage camp of "people need to watch actual fucking movies."