Red Dead Redemption 2

⭐ 10.0/10

(Originally written by Tim)

When you leave a game and you think, “is that the best game I have every played?”, you know you have just experienced something special. I won’t spend this review comparing this game to other ones that make me ask that, but very early on I could tell that this game was going to be a standout. You play as Arthur Morgan, a member of a gang of outlaws who is struggling with the weight of what he has done and the loyalties he has built and what he wants his life to mean. That makes this sound like a prestige drama from the 2010s about a bad man constantly struggling with the fact that he is a bad man, but the depth of the world and the time you spend with Arthur makes it so much more than that.

The world here is more immersive that anything else I have ever played. It is vast, and open, and full of surprises that can come in the form of a cool item, a zany side quest, or just a mind-numbing detail. For instance, I noticed that when you ride with someone and they are chatting with you, as you ride further away they start talking louder, eventually yelling. This means that all the millions of lines of dialog for the hundreds of unique characters you need to record all that dialog in different ways for these different scenarios and account for that. Truly blew my mind when I realized this was happening, and that just scratches the surface for the amount of time and detail a game like this requires. Everything feels real. In this game if you bump into someone they all have unique responses and actions. It has made the game I am playing now feel incredibly wooden by comparison, and honestly I think it will ruin every other game for a long time to come. I would ride from point A to B every time, never fast traveling, because I didn’t want to miss all the beauty this game had to offer.

Even with this vast world, the game takes its time. I never felt like I had an endless backlog of tasks, and when I was doing a quest I was solely focused on that quest. That helped drive the narrative, and also helped me connect with Arthur, since I was focused only on the tasks at hand. I spent hours hunting and fishing and completing challenges and helping random people with random things, but I almost never multi-tasked, which is something all open world games encourage. It was a breath of fresh air, and not only did it make me feel more like a cowboy (which is the point of basically every game, make you feel like you are living the experience), it kind of liberated me as a compulsive video game completionism.

For all those amazing things, the story here is also as good as they come. You grow to love and hate certain characters, and there were several moments where I felt like I was going to cry because of what my character was going through. There is a bonkers interlude that comes out of no-where that I thought was genius, a touching epilogue that genuinely moved me, and several moments that felt completely random but were fully fleshed out. I have never played a game where you have so much freedom that when something happens it actually feels like you caused it.

So what else can I say, this game is clearly a masterpiece, and there were uncountable moments I will never forget. I will say I was let down by a couple of the story climaxes, but the life of a cowboy is not a glamorous one, and the story doesn’t need to have a perfect bow to feel right. The combat was great, although I don’t play a ton of combat games so hard to compare, and again it was just another piece that fit perfectly with the game and the world. Some of my favorite memories are early in the game where I was low on cash and truly struggling to survive in the world, connecting me even further to the life of the protagonist. I could go on and on and all the special moments, but I would rather you play it experience it for yourself. This game is truly a marvel, both technically and in terms of storytelling.