This review contains spoilers
If you’re anything like me, you will end Red Dead Redemption 2 with an album’s worth of screenshots taken. More than any other game, I routinely collected snapshots of moments that begged not to be forgotten. I found that, by the end of my journey with Arthur and John, playing Red Dead 2 is like looking through someone else’s photo album; as you find candid and imperfect shots of people and places you can never fully understand, you get a sense of what they might have been like if you had truly been there—you wonder what infinity of experiences took place to lead them to this perfect moment, and what lies just ahead.
Chapter 1: Arthur Morgan
It seems so strange that, in a game so prideful in its emphasis on player decision and personal morality, that its main character is required to do unambiguously immoral actions. Unlike John Marston in the original Red Dead Redemption, there is no promise of familial safety, or the guise of only killing the bad people propelling Arthur through his journey. Although one obviously has the option to kill many innocents in that game, there is always either the light of freedom or the overhanging cloud of the Pinkertons pushing John through his every action. No matter how many roadside beggars you decide to help as Arthur, you are frequently reminded that he is willing to be unforgivably cruel for the sake of Dutch. Every town that the Van der Linde Gang enters quickly falls into myriad chaos ranging from being converted into a warzone (Rhodes) to, in one of the most jawdroppingly cruel things in the game, going on a purposeless killing spree through Strawberry. Until the final chapter, this all seems to undermine Arthur Morgan when compared to what he is outside of these moments. I can’t speak for everyone, but I was always pulled into doing the right thing as Arthur. Despite the fact that he is, for most of the game, silently complicit with the gang’s murder romps, it felt violating to do the wrong thing as Arthur. From what I see across the internet, this is the impression that I see most people implicitly understanding. It’s the tenderness with which he arches forward to stroke his horse’s muzzle, the transparent and raw regret that he has for his lost love with Mary, or the uncharacteristically (and missable!) tender journal entries that he writes in response to myriad events, that Arthur constantly proves himself to be much more than a gun for hire. When chapter 6 finally rolls around, and the game reveals its hand to the player, what had seemed to be Rockstar’s routine inability to reconcile their gameplay loop and their writing transforms into a denouement that takes full advantage of those assumptions. You aren’t the only one who thinks Arthur is uncharacteristically brutal in light of his typical demeanor, because the world does too. It would have been easy for Rockstar to allow players the simple satisfaction of being forgiven by the beaten debtors ruined along the warpath, but there is no solace to be had; the game shuts you out, leaving only the personal knowledge that an effort was given toward being less of a monster to these people. My Arthur died a rich man, pockets lined with the spoils of many successful heists and required robberies. At least for me, there was never enough to spend it all on. I would have given everything to the wife of the indebted coal miner, or the veteran on the run due to his indigenous wife, or the boy who was unceremoniously robbed of his father for no good reason; I couldn’t do any of that. Arthur wasn’t given that kind of absolution, and there’s no reason he should have. Still though, it’s difficult to ignore the young boy behind the cattleman and revolver, looking to please the only man who hasn’t abandoned him yet. On his unsacred deathbed dying alone and betrayed, I didn’t see a monster in those sunken eyes. I couldn’t; I saw Arthur Morgan arching forward to pat his beloved horse one last time, confessing his fear of death to the nun at the station, giving and giving and giving everything to become anything other than alone in a world and a country and a time rapidly hurdling toward a way of life that is unbearably isolating. It’s a masterstroke of writing for an open world protagonist: a character in perpetual turmoil over what he wants to be versus what he inescapably is; the only way to learn the former is to stray from the beaten path, being a voyeur to what he’s like when nobody else is looking, dismounting under an oil-lit moon and providing company and comfort to the only people lonelier than he. It felt imperative to make sure these moments were saved. In a way, it was my proof that, for most of my time with him, Arthur Morgan was no monster.
Chapter 2: Disney Land
“Ugh my cores are getting low”
“Jesus christ why can’t I run in camp”
“They’re really making me ride from Saint Denis to Strawberry”
These don’t even begin to scratch the surface of the litany of little frustrations Red Dead 2 elicited from me. The game exists somewhere between traditional open world romp and pure simulation, letting you sidestep many of the simulation elements, but reminding you every step of the way that you are, in fact, ignoring them. Most of the time this is a minor inconvenience, but other times you will receive a bounty for accidentally hitting triangle near someone else’s horse because it looked close enough to your horse so now you have to ride to the post office and speed walk to the clerk so you can spend ten of your hard earned American dollars to ensure that the cops don’t open fire on you for mounting and immediately dismounting a random horse. This is, to put it lightly, annoying. This kind of situation is the exception, though. Most of the time, these little annoyances do something unexpected: they pull you in further. In reality, nothing that bad will happen if you let your cores run low or wear clothes that are inadequate for a specific weather condition. You might experience slightly more difficulty in combat, but combat is so trivial that it’s a drop in the bucket. What happened to me is, despite the fact that the simulation aspects of the game didn’t hold much concrete mechanical consequence, I took part in the cowboy life anyway. I drank whisky to keep my deadeye core up, not because it made combat meaningfully easier, but because it gave me more confidence going into a fight. I didn’t brush my horse because it decreased its health degradation (I am literally not sure if this one actually does anything or if the game made me afraid for nothing), but because I wanted my horse to love me. I didn’t want to be the odd man out of the stage-play, breaking character just to satisfy my impatience. This test of immersion resolve comes most powerfully in Red Dead 2’s traversal. No other big budget open world game from the 2010s is this stingy with its fast travel options. There are options that reveal themselves during the game, but many of your hours playing the game will be taken up by typically silent rides from one point to another. It’s reductive, though, to pretend like the majority of my trips in Red Dead 2 happened so linearly. Taking off from wherever the last mission dropped me off in the first hints of dawn, I would chart out for Saint Denis for the next box to check off my list. Halfway there, I would hear a hunter caught in a bear trap, or a woman recently robbed, and I would help them in the way I knew Arthur would. Then I’d see a white question mark appear on my map, and I would discover a woman from the city looking to learn how to hunt, or an amputee veteran who lost his horse. I would satisfy their desires, and on the way find myself in awe of the way the sunset perforated the cloud cover and illuminated the obscuring mist hanging over the swamp. There are very few tangible rewards in Red Dead 2, but the screenshots that I took at moments like these were adequate payment for the time I had taken on the unbeaten path. It’s not just that the game’s beauty is overwhelming in its close hewing to an America that seems unimaginable in its wayward majesty, but the way that it coincides with the themes and historical placement it presents.
Chapter 3: In Medias Res
Red Dead 2 presents itself as portraying the dying breaths of the Wild West, a time that, second to maybe the founding fathers and revolution, is the primary source of myth making for American history. Unlike the beginnings of the country, the period of Wild West has no tangible beginning. One can point to an event like the Louisiana Purchase as a time when European colonists began to explore uncharted lands west of the Mississippi, but that fails to explain the “wild” part of Wild West. The gunslingers robbing trains and the vast, lawless frontier that they rode upon is indicative of something more than what can be defined by a set period of history. It’s present in Dutch’s continual gambits toward finding a world where the gang can live out some stagnant simulation of what they once had. You can see it in the game’s journey eastward, as the player transitions from the freedom of New Hanover and Ambarino to the cramped claustrophobia of Saint Denis; the irony of Dutch’s quest being that he is constantly moving away from what he loves so dearly. Indeed, the Wild West is a microcosm of America’s conflict between its prescription of being a land of freedom from overbearing monarchy in Europe and the descriptive reality of robber barons and a new kind of king. Everything is readily available in Saint Denis, but it isn’t fun to exist in. You constantly find yourself bumping into civilians and other riders, receiving bounties for actions that would go overlooked in other towns. Thinking that I was going to help another distressed character, I got robbed for a significant amount of money in an alley, unable to get it back. It feels like a different game riding around the city, and you never truly feel welcomed there. There isn’t a place for people like Arthur Morgan in Saint Denis, but was there ever a place? Dutch’s gang, and the rival O’Driscolls, routinely feel like losers. They get away with petty crimes here and there, destabilizing settlements of a couple dozen people, but they are never formidable. Run out of Blackwater, the law seems to always think of them as an afterthought, sending two Pinkerton agents to deal with the entire gang. The truth of the Wild West is that it was never very wild at all, at least in the mythological frequency of duels and robberies and complete lawlessness. There was undoubtably a greater freedom due to one’s distance from civilization as they advanced westward, but industry and the order that it necessitates would not be very far behind. There is also the unceremonious exclusion of indigenous people from the freedom that is so widely touted by the Wild West myths. As you get to the tail end of the game, you can witness that it wasn’t the cowboys and swindlers that lost their way of life first, but the people who called that land home. The rebellion that Eagle Flies wages against the US government, and the end of the Van der Linde Gang, both happen in the shadow of Annesburg—A town that is representative of the inevitable expansion of eastern progress to the west. Half of the settlement is taken up by the coal mine, which is surrounded by a sudden onset of tree stumps and billowing smoke. With historical context, one knows that a tragic ending was always in store for Arthur and the gang, the indigenous tribes, and the freedom that they both sought, but the tragedy that Red Dead 2 really exemplifies is that true freedom from tyranny was never anything but a dream. One can only find fleeting gestures toward it in the snapshots taken of wild, uncolonized plains rolling into the horizon. When you can exist in this place for as long as you’d like, watching the distant mountain range meet with a star-perforated sky, you begin to feel like freedom is not only more than just a dream, but something truly attainable.
Epilogue
All signs so far point to Red Dead 2 being a crushingly bleak game. For every moment of beauty observed in the world, there is a reminder that none of it will go untainted in the future. It isn’t universally tragic, though, as John Marston’s epilogue injects some hope into the narrative. John, who is finally convinced into leaving his status as an outlaw due to Abigail’s threat of leaving forever, finds that living a domestic life on a ranch has given him some semblance of peace. Even with the knowledge that this peace won’t last for very long, the enjoyment of it is reflected in gameplay. John’s missions are some of the best in the game, matching the heights of Arthur’s wild rides on the run from whatever chaos he wrought with the complete opposite kind of experience. The game insists that you take your time building John’s house, healing his relationship with Abigail, and finally giving attention to Jack. Jack is different from everyone else who grew up near Dutch. He is a thoughtful boy who has yet to be jaded by a world that can only be disappointing to him. You find that he is some of the better company to have in the game and along with Abigail, Uncle, Charles, and Sadie, he represents the hope that a man like John can cling to in absence of the freedom he once yearned for. While there’s no hope for the America that Dutch idealized to exist, there’s a humble ranch house and a loving family to prove that peace can endure in a brutal world. It is unfortunate, then, that John is unable to allow Arthur’s killer to escape, which kicks off the events that lead to his own murder. However, until that day comes when Edgar Ross knocks on John Marston’s door, there is a sense of finality to the violence. You can take as much time as you’d like to exist in a place where you are loved unconditionally. Time cannot bring with it the progress that will eventually undo the peace you hold, and you can make believe that, for this is the composite of everything you hoped America would be.
Chapter 1: Arthur Morgan
It seems so strange that, in a game so prideful in its emphasis on player decision and personal morality, that its main character is required to do unambiguously immoral actions. Unlike John Marston in the original Red Dead Redemption, there is no promise of familial safety, or the guise of only killing the bad people propelling Arthur through his journey. Although one obviously has the option to kill many innocents in that game, there is always either the light of freedom or the overhanging cloud of the Pinkertons pushing John through his every action. No matter how many roadside beggars you decide to help as Arthur, you are frequently reminded that he is willing to be unforgivably cruel for the sake of Dutch. Every town that the Van der Linde Gang enters quickly falls into myriad chaos ranging from being converted into a warzone (Rhodes) to, in one of the most jawdroppingly cruel things in the game, going on a purposeless killing spree through Strawberry. Until the final chapter, this all seems to undermine Arthur Morgan when compared to what he is outside of these moments. I can’t speak for everyone, but I was always pulled into doing the right thing as Arthur. Despite the fact that he is, for most of the game, silently complicit with the gang’s murder romps, it felt violating to do the wrong thing as Arthur. From what I see across the internet, this is the impression that I see most people implicitly understanding. It’s the tenderness with which he arches forward to stroke his horse’s muzzle, the transparent and raw regret that he has for his lost love with Mary, or the uncharacteristically (and missable!) tender journal entries that he writes in response to myriad events, that Arthur constantly proves himself to be much more than a gun for hire. When chapter 6 finally rolls around, and the game reveals its hand to the player, what had seemed to be Rockstar’s routine inability to reconcile their gameplay loop and their writing transforms into a denouement that takes full advantage of those assumptions. You aren’t the only one who thinks Arthur is uncharacteristically brutal in light of his typical demeanor, because the world does too. It would have been easy for Rockstar to allow players the simple satisfaction of being forgiven by the beaten debtors ruined along the warpath, but there is no solace to be had; the game shuts you out, leaving only the personal knowledge that an effort was given toward being less of a monster to these people. My Arthur died a rich man, pockets lined with the spoils of many successful heists and required robberies. At least for me, there was never enough to spend it all on. I would have given everything to the wife of the indebted coal miner, or the veteran on the run due to his indigenous wife, or the boy who was unceremoniously robbed of his father for no good reason; I couldn’t do any of that. Arthur wasn’t given that kind of absolution, and there’s no reason he should have. Still though, it’s difficult to ignore the young boy behind the cattleman and revolver, looking to please the only man who hasn’t abandoned him yet. On his unsacred deathbed dying alone and betrayed, I didn’t see a monster in those sunken eyes. I couldn’t; I saw Arthur Morgan arching forward to pat his beloved horse one last time, confessing his fear of death to the nun at the station, giving and giving and giving everything to become anything other than alone in a world and a country and a time rapidly hurdling toward a way of life that is unbearably isolating. It’s a masterstroke of writing for an open world protagonist: a character in perpetual turmoil over what he wants to be versus what he inescapably is; the only way to learn the former is to stray from the beaten path, being a voyeur to what he’s like when nobody else is looking, dismounting under an oil-lit moon and providing company and comfort to the only people lonelier than he. It felt imperative to make sure these moments were saved. In a way, it was my proof that, for most of my time with him, Arthur Morgan was no monster.
Chapter 2: Disney Land
“Ugh my cores are getting low”
“Jesus christ why can’t I run in camp”
“They’re really making me ride from Saint Denis to Strawberry”
These don’t even begin to scratch the surface of the litany of little frustrations Red Dead 2 elicited from me. The game exists somewhere between traditional open world romp and pure simulation, letting you sidestep many of the simulation elements, but reminding you every step of the way that you are, in fact, ignoring them. Most of the time this is a minor inconvenience, but other times you will receive a bounty for accidentally hitting triangle near someone else’s horse because it looked close enough to your horse so now you have to ride to the post office and speed walk to the clerk so you can spend ten of your hard earned American dollars to ensure that the cops don’t open fire on you for mounting and immediately dismounting a random horse. This is, to put it lightly, annoying. This kind of situation is the exception, though. Most of the time, these little annoyances do something unexpected: they pull you in further. In reality, nothing that bad will happen if you let your cores run low or wear clothes that are inadequate for a specific weather condition. You might experience slightly more difficulty in combat, but combat is so trivial that it’s a drop in the bucket. What happened to me is, despite the fact that the simulation aspects of the game didn’t hold much concrete mechanical consequence, I took part in the cowboy life anyway. I drank whisky to keep my deadeye core up, not because it made combat meaningfully easier, but because it gave me more confidence going into a fight. I didn’t brush my horse because it decreased its health degradation (I am literally not sure if this one actually does anything or if the game made me afraid for nothing), but because I wanted my horse to love me. I didn’t want to be the odd man out of the stage-play, breaking character just to satisfy my impatience. This test of immersion resolve comes most powerfully in Red Dead 2’s traversal. No other big budget open world game from the 2010s is this stingy with its fast travel options. There are options that reveal themselves during the game, but many of your hours playing the game will be taken up by typically silent rides from one point to another. It’s reductive, though, to pretend like the majority of my trips in Red Dead 2 happened so linearly. Taking off from wherever the last mission dropped me off in the first hints of dawn, I would chart out for Saint Denis for the next box to check off my list. Halfway there, I would hear a hunter caught in a bear trap, or a woman recently robbed, and I would help them in the way I knew Arthur would. Then I’d see a white question mark appear on my map, and I would discover a woman from the city looking to learn how to hunt, or an amputee veteran who lost his horse. I would satisfy their desires, and on the way find myself in awe of the way the sunset perforated the cloud cover and illuminated the obscuring mist hanging over the swamp. There are very few tangible rewards in Red Dead 2, but the screenshots that I took at moments like these were adequate payment for the time I had taken on the unbeaten path. It’s not just that the game’s beauty is overwhelming in its close hewing to an America that seems unimaginable in its wayward majesty, but the way that it coincides with the themes and historical placement it presents.
Chapter 3: In Medias Res
Red Dead 2 presents itself as portraying the dying breaths of the Wild West, a time that, second to maybe the founding fathers and revolution, is the primary source of myth making for American history. Unlike the beginnings of the country, the period of Wild West has no tangible beginning. One can point to an event like the Louisiana Purchase as a time when European colonists began to explore uncharted lands west of the Mississippi, but that fails to explain the “wild” part of Wild West. The gunslingers robbing trains and the vast, lawless frontier that they rode upon is indicative of something more than what can be defined by a set period of history. It’s present in Dutch’s continual gambits toward finding a world where the gang can live out some stagnant simulation of what they once had. You can see it in the game’s journey eastward, as the player transitions from the freedom of New Hanover and Ambarino to the cramped claustrophobia of Saint Denis; the irony of Dutch’s quest being that he is constantly moving away from what he loves so dearly. Indeed, the Wild West is a microcosm of America’s conflict between its prescription of being a land of freedom from overbearing monarchy in Europe and the descriptive reality of robber barons and a new kind of king. Everything is readily available in Saint Denis, but it isn’t fun to exist in. You constantly find yourself bumping into civilians and other riders, receiving bounties for actions that would go overlooked in other towns. Thinking that I was going to help another distressed character, I got robbed for a significant amount of money in an alley, unable to get it back. It feels like a different game riding around the city, and you never truly feel welcomed there. There isn’t a place for people like Arthur Morgan in Saint Denis, but was there ever a place? Dutch’s gang, and the rival O’Driscolls, routinely feel like losers. They get away with petty crimes here and there, destabilizing settlements of a couple dozen people, but they are never formidable. Run out of Blackwater, the law seems to always think of them as an afterthought, sending two Pinkerton agents to deal with the entire gang. The truth of the Wild West is that it was never very wild at all, at least in the mythological frequency of duels and robberies and complete lawlessness. There was undoubtably a greater freedom due to one’s distance from civilization as they advanced westward, but industry and the order that it necessitates would not be very far behind. There is also the unceremonious exclusion of indigenous people from the freedom that is so widely touted by the Wild West myths. As you get to the tail end of the game, you can witness that it wasn’t the cowboys and swindlers that lost their way of life first, but the people who called that land home. The rebellion that Eagle Flies wages against the US government, and the end of the Van der Linde Gang, both happen in the shadow of Annesburg—A town that is representative of the inevitable expansion of eastern progress to the west. Half of the settlement is taken up by the coal mine, which is surrounded by a sudden onset of tree stumps and billowing smoke. With historical context, one knows that a tragic ending was always in store for Arthur and the gang, the indigenous tribes, and the freedom that they both sought, but the tragedy that Red Dead 2 really exemplifies is that true freedom from tyranny was never anything but a dream. One can only find fleeting gestures toward it in the snapshots taken of wild, uncolonized plains rolling into the horizon. When you can exist in this place for as long as you’d like, watching the distant mountain range meet with a star-perforated sky, you begin to feel like freedom is not only more than just a dream, but something truly attainable.
Epilogue
All signs so far point to Red Dead 2 being a crushingly bleak game. For every moment of beauty observed in the world, there is a reminder that none of it will go untainted in the future. It isn’t universally tragic, though, as John Marston’s epilogue injects some hope into the narrative. John, who is finally convinced into leaving his status as an outlaw due to Abigail’s threat of leaving forever, finds that living a domestic life on a ranch has given him some semblance of peace. Even with the knowledge that this peace won’t last for very long, the enjoyment of it is reflected in gameplay. John’s missions are some of the best in the game, matching the heights of Arthur’s wild rides on the run from whatever chaos he wrought with the complete opposite kind of experience. The game insists that you take your time building John’s house, healing his relationship with Abigail, and finally giving attention to Jack. Jack is different from everyone else who grew up near Dutch. He is a thoughtful boy who has yet to be jaded by a world that can only be disappointing to him. You find that he is some of the better company to have in the game and along with Abigail, Uncle, Charles, and Sadie, he represents the hope that a man like John can cling to in absence of the freedom he once yearned for. While there’s no hope for the America that Dutch idealized to exist, there’s a humble ranch house and a loving family to prove that peace can endure in a brutal world. It is unfortunate, then, that John is unable to allow Arthur’s killer to escape, which kicks off the events that lead to his own murder. However, until that day comes when Edgar Ross knocks on John Marston’s door, there is a sense of finality to the violence. You can take as much time as you’d like to exist in a place where you are loved unconditionally. Time cannot bring with it the progress that will eventually undo the peace you hold, and you can make believe that, for this is the composite of everything you hoped America would be.