I haven’t been posting anything about games recently because I’ve been stuck for way too much time in the world of Red Dead Redemption 2. The first game was originally released in 2010 and I really wanted to play it but it was a PlayStation exclusive. It did eventually get a PC adaptation, in 2024, but the second game in the series arrived on PC first in 2019. Pure insanity. It still took a while for me to get around to playing this because it has rather hefty system requirements and I wanted to experience it at full quality. By now the game is old enough that it’s far from state of the art. Yet it’s still so gorgeous and detailed that it doesn’t matter at all and I’m glad I waited to play it.

This is actually a prequel of the first game so the ending is telegraphed well in advance. Here you play as Arthur Morgan, one of the veteran members of an outlaw gang led by Dutch van der Linde who effectively raised and taught him. At the beginning of the story, the gang is fleeing after a badly botched heist in Blackwater. Hiding out in the mountains, they regroup their scattered members and there is dissent about the direction of the group. After a run-in with a rival gang the O’Driscolls, they appropriate their plan to rob a train in order to raise enough money to retire. In doing so, they make an enemy of wealthy industrialist Leviticus Cornwall who hires the Pinkertons to hunt them down. This sets the recurring pattern for the game. Dutch will continually propose just one more heist or scam which will inevitably fail, leading them into ever more trouble. As their desperation mounts and members of their gang are killed, Dutch becomes more unhinged until even Arthur begins to question his leadership.

As usual with these games, the story is extremely linear and Arthur inevitably dies at the end. Not only must the player complete all of the story missions, but each mission can only ever go in the predetermined way. This sort of makes your individual decisions irrelevant as the game directs you on what it expects you to do every step of your way. Go there, pick this up, shoot that. At times, this feels more like a cinematic experience than a game. Outside of the story mode however, there is a very large variety of optional activities to do, which accounted for much of my playing time. There are more collectibles that I could have imagined, more side missions than you might expect as new ones appear in each chapter, and so many mini-games. Attempting to collect perfect pelts of every animal will be a very exhausting endeavor. There are players who will spend days just playing Blackjack or Dominoes in-game. It’s understandable how people can rack up hundreds of playing hours on this.

When I first started playing, I was befuddled vast number of controls and mechanics that you need to remember. Even for metrics like health and stamina, the game distinguishes between a temporary value that fluctuates as you run and fight and a core value that changes more slowly. Being too hot or too cold drains your cores more quickly so you need to change clothes to match the weather. When it comes to controlling your horse, beyond the usual movement controls, there’s a button to calm it down when it gets spooked, you need to keep it clean and fed and you can also save its energy while galloping by matching your inputs to its pace. Other activities like fishing are almost as involved and it’s a fair bet that most players will need to be reminded of the controls every so often. But after a while of playing this, I realized that all this excessive attention to detail does help make this the best Western simulator that exists. Eventually it gets to a point where riding a horse feels completely natural and realistic.

As I noted, this is old by now but it’s still one of the most gorgeous games I’ve played. Whether it’s the woods densely packed with wildlife, sweeping mesas that we’ve seen in so many Western films, or the towns large and small, everything is as intricately detailed and high quality as we’ve come to expect from Rockstar. There’s a wonderful day and night cycle, so you can experience the moors bathed in moonlight, there’s weather with thunderstorms or light rain. The richness and variety of the animations are just as important so you can see Arthur interacting with the world in all kinds of ways. The entire map is objective huge and the effect is exaggerated since your speed of travel by horseback is slower than other other games. I confess though that at times I’d hoped for an even bigger world because in the interests of making sure players have enough to do, the map feels too dense. You can’t track an animal for very far before it gets scared off by some random person riding his horse nearby. In order to create a proper sense of the wilderness, it needs to be big and mostly empty of people.

I found the combat in the game to be merely okay and about par for the course for Rockstar. So long as you get to cover and switch to the right weapons for the engagement range, it never gets very difficult. After a while, healing items are plentiful and powerful. Individually the many other activities you can do aren’t that fun either. But taken together, they add to the verisimilitude of the world. It’s so cool that when enemies get too close in combat, you can grapple them. That you can lasso and hogtie people to capture them is obvious when you need to take them alive, but you can also do it to animals like deer and hogs. Many of maneuvers you can perform with a horse are totally unnecessary for gameplay but it’s kind of amazing that you can even do them. The process for hunting legendary animals isn’t terribly realistic but it’s better than just running into them by chance and shooting them. This is really a case of the whole being greater than its parts.

By far the best thing about the game is the writing. It’s not just the story of Arthur’s personal journey and also that of the other members of the gang. At first, you think they’re just random NPCs and don’t pay attention to them. But each character has their own backstory and their own reactions to the deteriorating fortunes of the gang. If you spend time in camp and pay attention, there are so many rich interactions between them. The story of Arthur’s life and ultimate fate is both affecting and well matched to the themes of the Western genre. At the same time, it’s also the story of the end of the Wild West era as the land is both settled and policed. Dutch may be a hypocritical bastard but there’s a grain of truth to his claim that these new rising elites are just other gangsters who have won and turned the law to serve themselves. Of course, the high quality of the writing also makes the ludonarrative dissonance of the gameplay very apparent. Dutch is always complaining about the gang not having enough money and needing to do just one more job and thanks to the large number of optional activities you can do, it’s possible to amass a large amount of money that will go unacknowledged. Similarly it’s insane how many people you can kill in the course of a single mission but a single death among the gang is a huge event. Just how many members do the O’Driscolls have anyway?

Anyway this game is much better than I’d expected and waiting this long to play it was definitely worth it. It’s way too big for me to aspire for 100% completion but I’m still addicted to trying to finish as many of the loose ends as possible. It’s so rewarding to stay in this virtual Western-themed world as there is seemingly no end of new things to discover. For example I just recently learned if you turn in a live wanted dead or alive bounty target, you can go back later to see the criminal get executed. Come back again even later and you can even witness the funeral. The mind boggles at how much work went into mapping out all of the possibilities players will try. It’s a pity that this didn’t quite earn as much money or credit as the Grand Theft Auto series because I’m pretty sure it’s the best game Rockstar has ever made so far.