Note: While this game is already 7 years old, it was my first time playing. Therefore, in case it is yours, I’ve tried to keep all spoilers down at the very end of the post and well called out. That being said, there could be minor spoilers in the main body
Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. I’d had a multitude of people recommend this game to me over the years, but I’d never really had a system that I could play it on. For the longest time, I was just rocking a Nintendo Switch due to my travels, but when I got my Steam Deck, I knew it could handle it and it was a matter of time before I finally sat down to play it. After watching my kid play this last time I went back to visit my family, I knew it was time.
When I first started the game, I didn’t immediately hook me and I thought maybe I had missed the boat on this one. It’s happened before with other media where if you don’t catch it when it’s hot, it never quite lives up to the hype. Fortunately, my kid assured me to at least get past chapter 1 and then the game will open up and start getting much better. They weren’t lying. I had been told that I was getting myself into Yeehaw Skyrim, but in reality, it was more like Grand Theft Yeehaw-to in the end. Which is not a complaint by any means.
Once the world did open up, it really started kicking. First and foremost, the map is HUGE and it will take you quite some time to get from place to place on a horse. But it’s not all just boring and mindless holding down a button until you get to your next destination. Along the way you might run into bandits, mysterious strangers who need help / want to rob you, various gang members, snake bite victims, and even hooded strangers who very much are the KKK. While I played the entirety of the game as a no/low honor Arthur, I still think I would have very much been in a shoot first / ask questions later with that last group. Once I unlocked fast travel, I felt like I lost a bit of that worldly experience, but the missions were starting to become extremely far apart from each other so it made sense to quickly jump from place to place.
There’s definitely some core gameplay concepts that I never really got great at, shooters aren’t really my strong suit especially on a controller, but as frustrating as some of those moments could be, the game more than makes up for them in storytelling and world building. The world actually felt alive and bustling and not so much like a bucket of scripts and 3 models running around doing the same 5 things. I also never got deep into the fishing and hunting side of things outside of what was required for the game. I know that this meant I missed out on some of the items that you can get, but even though they are digital pixels and not real animals, I’m just not interested in killing, skinning, and gutting animals in video games.
I ran into some of the typical bugs you see in games of this size, especially around triggered events where a character would get stuck and I’d have to actually reload from a save as opposed to just restarting the checkpoint. This happened several times, and when coupled with the amount of time in the later part of the game you can’t actually save, it turned into a game of relying on the autosave from time to time. But this is really the one beef I have with the actual game itself. I also ran into some actual hard locks along the way, but its tough to tell if that’s the game or the deck. This game is a battery killer and its possible I was stretching the hardware to the limitations a bit as I found out, literally in the last mission, the default settings were set to Ultra… whoops! :D
The story alone easily pushes this game into my top 5 games of all time, no small feat, and I ended up sinking over 80 hours into it with likely 10-20+ hours left behind. If you’ve been on the fence about this, I highly recommend it and, to quote my pal EighthLayer, I’m jealous you get to experience it for the first time.
Beware, beyond here there be dragons (spoilers)
Edit: I didn’t realize that there were different endings based on your honor level and how you played the game. I played as a low honor Arthur which explains how I got my ending
While all of the chapters, minus 5 (more on that in a bit), had amazing story arcs to them that really felt like they were pushing things forward, the entirety of chapter 6 was a masterclass in story telling. It really turned up the heat for me when Arthur gets diagnosed with tuberculosis and I had my first thought of “oh shit, he might not survive this.” Even though I had dozens, if not hundreds of in game deaths, this was the first time I thought he, the character, was in real trouble. The game did an amazing job of driving home just how bad the disease is in having him coughing throughout the endgame, and even having his appearance slowly turn gray and his eyes getting a sunken in appearance.
The leadup to, and including the grand finale, gave me the feeling of a big Hollywood movie. The scenes with Arthur and John built up such an intense excitement that I could feel my heart rate was elevated and when you least expected it, the writers hit you with one of the biggest gut punches they could. They killed Arthur’s horse. Being an animal lover, it already got me when my first horse, TinaYouFatLard, was accidentally run over by a train that I was trying to rob. So when they killed WhoseHorseIsThis, and then had the most heart wrenching cutscene showing Arthur calming his horse down and saying “thank you”, I was literally in tears. Hell, I can feel them welling up even just writing this, which just goes to show the level of emotion the game can elicit from the player.
The final scenes of Arthur, John, Micah, and Dutch, were all paced really well and continued to build the excitement. That end fight between Micah and Arthur is probably one of the most climatic, and unexpected endings, I’ve ever had in a video game. At this point, I knew that Arthur wasn’t going to live much longer, but I expected the writers to give us the satisfaction of pushing Micah off the cliff or putting a bullet in him. Instead, we get the biggest “no way” moment of the game when Micah shoots Arthur between the eyes and goes on to live another day.
As I touched upon earlier, there were some weak spots in the game that felt kind of out of place given the overall arc of the story. The entirety of chapter 5 felt more like a forced side quest than anything truly a part of the story. I think had they treated it as more of a side quest I’d have had less issue with it, but it was too short to really drive any attachment to the area, but simultaneously too long of a break from the main world. If you would have taken out the attachment to Cornwall, it would have felt entirely disconnected, almost more like a DLC at that point. Either way, it’s also one of the shorter chapters so you do kind of get in and get out.
I also felt that the two epliogues with John were really out of place but that was before I found out that the first game was centered around him and that Red Dead Redemption 2 was actually a prequel to Red Dead Redemption. Still, that being said, after the fantastic ending of Arthur’s story, the epilogues felt almost like the tutorial for the first quarter of them. In no world do I want to go from having the most baller set of weapons and mowing down dozens of enemies, to having to mindlessly button press to clean stalls, milk cows, build fences, or the egregiously lengthy amount of time I had to press A to hammer in nails while the house was being built. The missions where you did more of what I consider main game type of content, felt muted and shortened in comparison. Out of the entirety of the two epilogues, the Skinner Boys content and the appropriately epic battle up the mountain to take out Micah were the two shining moments for me. The rest felt like someone said “we should deeply tie these two games together” at the 11th hour of development.