They just wanna make a few bucks, find a place where no one will bother them, and live out their days free of the shackles of their rapidly modernizing society. They don't want to live with The Man's boot on their collective neck. But they're noble (or believe they are) because they commit their crimes in service of Dutch's vision of Utopian personal freedom. They are a band of outlaws - bank robbers and loan sharks, working girls and stick-up artists. That's the power curve: the only absolutely true and inviolable law of the video game world.īecause here, Arthur Morgan and his pals in the Dutch van der Linde gang begin the game just past the apex of their power curve. By the end-game, you're basically a god walking among men, capable of defeating the Final Boss and bringing peace to Hyrule (or whatever). But whatever it is, you learn that through hard work and dedicated grinding you can become. At its most basic, it works like this: You, the player, are dropped into a world as a (nearly) helpless pixel-blob, alone and vulnerable. It is the core narrative and gameplay mechanic in virtually every game since Pac-Man. The Power Curve is what makes video games work. So seriously, stop reading now if that sort of thing Clints your Eastwood.Īll Tech Considered Reading The Game: This War Of Mine So instead, I'm going to focus on one brave, subverting, possibly unique choice, made early in the Rockstar writer's room, that, narratively speaking, makes this Red Dead unlike any other game I've ever played. It's why deconstructionists are often very little fun at parties. It is a film brought to life, a novel given legs, and to speak about any piece of it is to necessarily reduce it to a bunch of cogs and sprockets - how this piece fits with that one. It is, in the universe of video games, our Godfather, our Star Wars or Wild Bunch - the work that transcends its genre and, in this case, its medium. Enough, maybe, to say that it tells, over the course of 60-plus hours, an epic, bloody tale of betrayal and obsolescence.
#RED DEAD REDEMPTION FULL#
It is, in the universe of video games, our 'Godfather,' our 'Star Wars' or 'Wild Bunch' - the work that transcends its genre and, in this case, its medium.īut RDR2 is too big, too sprawling, too full for taking on in a piece-by-piece look at the story. It is a masterpiece in several different ways - the look of it, the feel of it, god, the sound of it, which is worthy of an entire essay all its own.
It is undeniably gorgeous (as you've probably heard), representing uncountable hours of effort by hundreds of men and women responsible for, among other things, designing the way leaves move in gentle breezes and making Arthur's horse poop. This newest Red Dead, a direct prequel to 2010's original Red Dead Redemption, is big (as you've probably heard). Everyone who plays the game can, because RDR2 is a lot of things (a clunky shooter, a gorgeous art project, a love story between a man and his horse), but it is mainly an engine designed for the creation of stories - places where the competing strands of algorithmic AI and narrative benchmarking collide to make unique moments that are ridiculous, bloody, and sublime, often all at the same time. Big stories and small stories, loud ones and quiet ones. I could tell you a hundred stories about my life as Arthur Morgan, gravel-voiced anti-hero and the poet's heart of Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption 2. So we're running an occasional series, Reading The Game, in which we take a look at some of these games from a literary perspective. In Red Dead Redemption 2, you don't exactly level up.įor years now, some of the best, wildest, most moving or revealing stories we've been telling ourselves have come not from books, movies or TV, but from video games.
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