Review

I feel extremely conflicted about this game. There were a number of times where I made a noise of disgust out loud when I saw something. The level of detail sometimes made me feel nauseated, not excited. The game will tell me, "Did you know you can actually polish Arthur's antique collection of gravy sauce pans?" It makes me feel a black hole in my gut. Not dissimilar to the all work and no play scene from The Shining. The dread realization of "it just keeps going". There's a saying one of my fave podcasters coined which is "Ignoring things is not a Free Action". It was said in reference to actual obscene shit in games ("It's just cosmetics, you can ignore it", "The crafting system is no good in this game and it's everywhere, but you know, you can mostly just ignore it" etc. etc.) Not in terms of how I'm using it to refer to unnecessary levels of detail. But I think it's still a useful lens to use when looking at games critically. It's a very succinct way of describing the concept of "Art is finished when nothing more can be taken away". Generally, an approach that I highly agree with. In this review, I'm probably going to be talking about the negatives mostly. Red Dead Redemption doesn't really need yet another person sucking it off. Its uncontroversial goods are well-documented in the cultural zeitgeist. It should be assumed that if something is widely regarded as a good aspect of the game and I do not mention anything to the counter, I probably hold a similar position.

I like Arthur though. He's quite charismatic and also a real looker. He does get my horses galloping. Arthur also feels like a well-realized character. Though his behavior runs into a slight complaint of mine, which appears to be standard for Rockstar games as I'm finding out. Which is: a constant and complete lack of reluctance to participate in insane bullshit, particularly from Strangers. This is one of the things that put me off of RDR1 a bit when I attempted it years ago. John would repeatedly find a Stranger who is the most insane person you've ever met. And instead of saying "get bent, weirdo" John would grumble and say "of course I will help you you fucking foul piece of shit". And that just happens over and over where the protag actively seems to not want to help these people. But they keep participating in the insanity anyway because...It's one thing when you have an insane world and an insane protagonist. But when you try to position your protagonist as relatively worldly and above the insanity, it clashes with the insane setting they're in. I hit a point where John ran into some disgusting graverobbing rapist man. John showed clear and utter disgust at the Gollum creature, but just continues helping him. I hated it so much and ended up quitting shortly afterward. It wasn't entirely that character, but more of a straw breaking the camel's back situation. This happens some with Arthur, though at least it feels relatively more grounded than RDR1 or GTA5. It seemed like you were way more likely to run into good folks that a protag would conceivably want to help in RDR2 than you were in RDR1 or certainly in GTA. At least that was my experience.

That's not really my core rant, though. My biggest complaint with RDR2 is I feel the story is a rather bare-bones. I found myself thinking a number of times "So what are we doing here?" Nothing really substantially changes with regards to the plot from the beginning of the game to like fully when you're heading off to Guarma (Maybe 75% or so in?). You start off on the run from Pinkertons. And that's kinda it. That's where we're at by the end. We move from here to there away from the long dick of the law, but very little is actually happening. There's drama yes, but I feel it's frequently not serving a grander structural purpose. Multiple times one of our silly gang members gets shot and we're down a guy now. And other than a couple lines of "Damn, shame that X got shot", everyone just continues doing exactly what they were doing. It feels incredibly weird; we're not really getting any developments. The state of everything is largely static for the majority of the game in terms of narrative. There's just slightly fewer faces around. RDR2 to me sometimes feels a bit like a long-running sitcom, where technically you could say that things are happening, but we keep returning to a median. Things can't diverge too far from that median until we get to the end of the show, otherwise how will we drag this all out for 17 seasons? I get that we're in prequel land so we have some level of restraint put on us from that. But also there's years in between the two games and also I am pretty certain it's not like we gave a detailed description of every RDR2 character and their fate in RDR1. I just think we have a lot more freedom in what we do with the story than the writers are choosing to exercise.

Also, the game seems hell-bent to get you to stop playing it as much as humanly possible. At every turn, you are showered with miscellaneous bullshit you could be doing instead of the main story. Sure, you could rob a train with your little posse of criminals. I mean, I guess if you think that's fun or whatever. You don't player, do you? Oh but Arthur, wouldn't you rather go fish for 10 hours? Or wax your boot collection? Or go play poker in some saloon? Don't you wanna immerse yourself fully in this character until you've forgotten that this isn't real life? No. No, I fucking do not. I wanna experience a bespoke story in an interesting world with interesting characters that tells me something about the human experience. And then I wanna get out and move on with my life.

I should say that I perfectly well understand what the developers are trying to do. And for clarity before anyone lynches me, I think that they are indeed succeeding at doing it. They want this to be cowboy simulator where you do in fact go fuck off and polish your guns and hunt and do all that shite. And I understand that a lot of people like that. But reader, you must empathize, I got up to 70 hours in my playtime thus far and that involved wholesale telling a lot of the extra shit that wasn't Stranger missions to get fucked. 70 hours. And there's people out there who would have the fucking gall to tell me that I simply must invest more of my time to truly get the RDR2 experience? Take a long walk off a short pier. If you are a storyteller and you cannot tell your story in under 70 hours, then that is your problem and not mine. You know what I could do in 70 hours? I could watch 90% of a Sopranos. I could watch Twin Peaks twice. Disco Elysium changed my life in half the time it would take Arthur to get his assless chaps on. This is not what I want from games. It does not light my soul aflame. I am not borne aloft on golden wings of love being told that there is yet more to do after investing 70 hours. I am tired, boss. If I've invested that kind of time into something, I want to feel like I've gone on a incredible odyssey where we've all been changed by our experiences and nothing is going to be the same. Which as I stated previously, I really dunno if the RDR2 story is barking up that tree.

I do like all the big cinematique moments. Whenever we get our shit together and decide, oh yeah what if we stop rolling around in mud doing nothing and have some big movie moments with camera angles and lighting and actual stakes, it's quite fun. I wish we'd focus more on that. I don't want it all the time, because then it would just turn into any number of modern setpiece Uncharted-esque games where you're never able to breathe. The games where everything is action all the time and thus it all becomes a mire. But there is, in my opinion, way too much breathing room here. There is sometimes such a large stretch in between those big moments that I kind of forget they exist and have to re-realize "Oh yeah, Rockstar is like a capable game developer and can do big shit." And that is after I have purposefully shaved off a lot of the nothing by not participating in lots of side shit.

Something I did find greatly annoying in the character department, enough that I have to call it out is Dutch. Dutch is a fucking conman. And I know that we all know that. My assumption is that the intention is for the player to realize this before Arthur does and so for there to be dramatic irony as Arthur continues following orders when we know it's gonna lead to doom. But I have to say, I do not feel this works given how obvious Dutch's bullshit is. This was not a case where I went along with him for a while, started having nagging doubts turn into dire realizations. Waiting for Arthur to also realize and for the boot to drop. Dutch's bullshit is loud and proud and obvious from the beginning of the game and I can't understand how the ship continued as long as it did. I get that we are told that Dutch in many ways raised Arthur and co and so there's loyalty there. But I don't feel we are effectively being shown that.

I have a plan...We just gotta get one last score and then we are outta here to Tahiti, boys.

He says these exact lines fully dozens of times over the course of the game and I'm not exaggerating. It is way too much and I struggle to suspend my disbelief. It's comical. I really wish there had been more subtlety here. Because I feel it could have worked. There needed to be more moments of humanity shown to us. I liked the little scene where Arthur, Dutch, and Hosea go fishing together. With them all singing as Arthur rows them back to shore. That was good stuff, why didn't we have more of that? We need more of an anchor to keep us from drifting away. At no point did I have any desire to do any missions for Dutch because he's just crazy and makes everything worse and that's clear like 5 minutes after meeting him. He ain't charismatic enough to be this shit at actually leading.

I want to camp out on the epilogue for a moment or three. I think I hate that it's there. I have not completed it. You could say, "well you've already put in 70 hours, what's however many more?" But I really really feel it's a narrative mistake. My first thought is that all it's effectively doing is catering to the "game must never end and credits are a sin" crowd. The "I need colors in my eyes 24/7 or I will literally shoot myself because I refuse to just see a therapist" crowd. But that really doesn't make any sense because Red Dead Redemption is a slow game. It is lumbering. So I can't really imagine these people going for this game at all. That leaves me not entirely sure which crowd the epilogue is catering to.

I myself liked seeing Arthur's life. I played as him for hours and fucking hours. He dies doing some small good for a friend. It was generally a satisfying ending. And then it continues. If the game is engineered with the clear intent of immersing myself in the world of Arthur Morgan, why are we now switching to John in, not the 11th hour, but the 12th? That feels like a misstep. I don't want to keep playing this goddamn game, but the developers really fucking seem to want me to. We had a big ol sweeping musical score. We say goodbye to our character we've come to know and love. Arthur dies and then...no credits. I just want credits. 70 hours is enough. It's too much. Instead we immediately continue into the epilogue. You can say "just quit, nothing's stopping you". But again, I return to "Ignoring things is not a free action". The game does not want you to quit, it wants you to continue. And so even if I'm not completing it, I still feel a compulsion to do so. To see if there's some clear narrative reason why we have to do this. I've never felt a need to skip an epilogue in a book, for example. It would feel very strange to do it in anything.

I have no knowledge of how the epilogue ends up. For the record, I got to the point in it where John buys the plot of land and then they started shoving more missions into my inbox with Sadie. I got tired and quit and at the point of this writing more than a month has passed since last playing the game. So I'm doubtful that I'll ever get back to it. But my assumption based on basic media literacy would be that we're gonna have John fuck about on the ranch for a bit and then he gets wind of Dutch or Micah and we use him to kill either or both of them off. As a tying loose ends thing. Here's my problem with that, though. The story of RDR2 is not about Dutch or Micah. And it's not about John. It is about Arthur Morgan. And Arthur is dead as hell. Why would I still care about these other characters? Sure, they are both assholes and could stand to die, but my protag is dead. If we bother killing them off, it doesn't do anything. The gang has already shattered, so what purpose would it serve? I can at least understand conceptually somebody just being pleased to play as John. For the sake of it. I understand he's protag of RDR1 and so being him in the epilogue bridges the games. But here's my issue with that. We already bridged the games prior to the epilogue. The last mission or two when Arthur sees the end coming, we become obsessed with at least getting John and his family out of the shit as some last good deed we can pull off. And we do that. Not only do we do that, but we give John our hat before slapping him on the ass and telling him to get the hell outta here. The torch has been metaphorically and literally passed. So, I don't think an epilogue where we play as John serves a particularly strong purpose. If you the player really wanna see more of this John Marston guy, boy do I have some news for you.

The thing that frustrates me with the epilogue is that this is Rockstar and they are perfectly competent game devs. We're not in a Ubisoft or Konami land or what have you. Where basic decisions need to be questioned, because they've demonstrated a lack of awareness of how to make good games. So when I'm going against this section of the game, it's not because it's poorly written or anything. I think the central story of John struggling to be legit and all that is perfectly well done. It's a perfectly nice little small story, at least from what I saw. But again, he ain't the protag of this game so it all just feels like wasted effort to me. I'm not sure. I feel like something that would have made this all less of a bugbear for me is if it were properly separated off from the main game as a side scenario. Something that became unlocked once you beat the game and you select it separately in the main menu. I feel that would have more clearly demarcated this as a related, but at the end of the day separate, story.

Another thing that I quite liked, enough that I feel compelled to point it out, is the music moments. There are a couple moments where we have some good music during or after an emotional moment. I really wish they weren't so stingy with these, because they all work really well. I wonder if perhaps Rockstar thinks they will lose their value if overused, so they happen very sparingly. I can assure you, this is not so. As I've exhaustingly said, I feel there are sometimes great gulfs separating the particularly pointed moments that actually carry emotional weight. I pinky promise I will not grow accustomed to having some nice music play to help get across the emotions we should be feeling. I'm thinking of the music playing during Arthur's last ride towards camp, the music playing when he actually is dying, the music when John is riding away from the Geddes ranch. They're all quite good. I mean the music in general is very good in the game, but I like the couple times we get vocals and I would have liked at least one or two more. And I don't think I'm alone here. One moment that I do recall from RDR1 is when you are going to Mexico, they have a song with some vocals playing and I thought it was quite poignant and good even if I wasn't really fucking with the game in general. I believe it's notable enough that it is talked about by people who are not me as being a standout moment from the game. I have heard it mentioned on the winds.

A comparison I have with Red Dead 2 is that it feels similar to Black Mirror, in terms of how I feel about it at the end of the day. I think both have a lot of hills and valleys to them. With enough disparity between those two extremes that I feel uncomfortable averaging them out to a review of "It's fine" or an "It's good". When I'm having fun with Read Read, I'm having quite a lot of fun. But sometimes it sucks the stars from the sky. It contains multitudes. I really desperately want to take the scissors to a lot of the extra bullshit and focus things in on what matter. As well as some general story rewriting. It may not be what the general populace wants from these games, but it would make me ever so happy.

Post-Epilogue Update

I ended up finishing the epilogue. I hated the feeling of something being left out there unfinished. I got past the credits and to the point where, of course, we go to freeroam. Because the game cannot just fucking end...

Eh. I really feel that my criticisms toward the epilogue held true. Also was bang on in my predictions of where it went. It did not feel necessary. Nothing happened during it that I could not have extrapolated from the actual ending of the game. And I feel that the ending of the main game is so much more emotionally resonant than the ending of the epilogue. It's not a bad story, as I said before. It just feels misplaced. Why has John become the star only for us to immediately then leave him again? I had a foul dark thought as I was watching the credits. They go by and then...we start following Charles and the cycle continues...Darkness within darkness.

Why do we give a shit about Micah? He's hardly the only psychopath we have a run-in with in this game. I feel it's almost stronger of a repudiation of him to leave him behind to rot in the dustbin of history. Than to pay him special attention and go on a little adventure to kill him. But Dutch gets to walk away? Why? He's insane and tried to have both Arthur and John killed. Why do we hate Micah and not him? Blow him away if you're gonna get your hackles all raised and pick a fight.

Also I do not like that we got the money from the Blackwater stuff. It is such a stronger idea, Arthur realizing that the money means so little. That it was the people he had met and the good that he could do was what gave life meaning. What is the takeaway now? Hang on long enough and you'll eventually get rich? Then you can pay off your bank loans and you're good to go? I mean, I guess. But there's still the Pinkerton assholes so it's all for naught anyway. We work for happiness and then what? Sorry, you were an asshole before so you'll get your due in the end. Don't bother trying to improve, that blood don't wash out. It's just dark. I don't have a problem with dark per se. But I do feel that it's a bit much to end an odyssey with dark. I feel it's more effective in a shorter narrative. Call me basic, but I want my huge long odyssey to end with some sort of a happy ending.

Another criticism that crystalized for me near the end of the epilogue was I really don't respect Rockstar's general game design. What I mean by that is every mission is so proscriptive. You are directly told at each step "Do this, now do this, now go here, shoot this guy, etc." And if you ever divert from that, even an inch, you immediately get a game over. There's a moment during the ending bit where Charles gets shot by a sniper and John and Sadie get pinned down. I saw where the sniper was so I immediately returned fire. I hit him 5 or 6 times in the forehead and yet he would not fall over. I didn't understand what was happening. Sniper kills me and I'm told to redo it. I then understand that I was told that I needed to get 10 or 15 feet closer, so the mission would move to the next stage where they tell me it's time to kill him, then I'm allowed to kill the sniper. Fucking disgusting. This shit happens constantly. The moment you go off the red carpet Rockstar has prepared for you, everything immediately comes to a crashing halt, either via a game over or a weird awkward situation where people aren't doing the dialogue they're supposed to.

I remember a scene earlier in the game where Arthur was with that native man who got him some silly plants that surely would help the consumption. That man's horse had a terrible transmission issue, because it could not get past the first gear. I could go faster, but he just would not match the speed. And so we very very slowly made our way along the path that was prepared. There would be a conversation and then a horrible long lull of complete silence for several minutes at a time. And then he'd occasionally start bitching and moaning about how slow we were being. You piece of shit! It was weird and awkward and I hated it. Couldn't understand what the issue was. But it lodged in my head as an example of how everything falls apart the moment something doesn't go according to plan in this game.

Rockstar has a vision of a cinematic game where the player is given a round peg and a round hole. They put the peg in. Then they're given a square peg and a square hole. They really do not trust the player at all. At no point in the game are you just given an issue and asked to find a way to deal with it. This is one of the most paint-by-numbers games I've ever played. Any playthrough of this game would look exactly like any other playthrough. And again, I get that they're going for cinematic. But does that not completely clash with the previously stated intention of RDR2 being cowboy simulator? Is this a simulator where you're given toys and a sandbox to play with them in? Or is it a tightly controlled reality TV situation where everything has been decided long long before? I don't know. Immensely frustrating in a number of different ways. Don't care if the rest of the world screams at me that this is the best game ever and it has no faults. It fucking does and I'm not insane for laying out said faults before us.