’Red Dead Redemption 2’ Reaches for Magic on the Shoulders of Indie Games

Red Dead Redemption 2 begins in the harsh dead of winter. As roaming outlaw Arthur Morgan, you accompany your half-extinct gang into a barn, barely making it out of the terrible blizzard before hypothermia sets in. It's a slow, miserable trudge, and the first few hours of the game are equally slow and miserable. You linger in this frozen waste, barely alive, for days, learning to hunt, fetching a friend from the mountains, and moving at a crawl as the snow clings to your horse's hooves.

For people who pick up the game expecting the brisk, freeform playfulness of most other Rockstar games, this might be too much to handle. As its early priorities, Red Dead Redemption 2 demonstrates less an interest in the freedom and expansiveness of its world--though it gets there, eventually--but an interest in forcing you to take your time. Look at the snow, it insists. Feel the weight of each weary step you take. Listen to the long, meandering conversations between these faux cowboy criminals and try to sympathize with terrible men. There's no rush.

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Even once the game moves beyond this opening chapter, into the freedom more familiar to the Rockstar open-world formula first established by Grand Theft Auto 3 18 years ago, that emphasis on slowness remains. Red Dead Redemption 2 goes out of its way to complicate simple things. Horses have limited stamina, and require food and upkeep, which forces journeys to go slower than they would otherwise. Fast travel is inconvenient, and gated behind limited early-game resources, to force the player to get accustomed to lengthy travel time before doing anything else.

Every interaction is suffused with this sort of depth, which doubles as a slowing complication. You have to clean your guns. Hunted animals need to be carried back to camp on the back of your horse. Keeping Arthur clean requires retiring to a hotel for a bath, wherein you have to scrub each individual body part in turn. And the distance between locations, the swaths of open wilderness separating townships and mission areas, is, by videogame standards, astounding. For long stretches, Red Dead Redemption 2 is spent in busywork and quietude.

This is not a bad thing. It might, in fact, be a very good thing, and one of the big points one would lean on if recommending this game. By creating frustration and imposing slowness, it allows a type of involvement with the world unattainable in more straightforward games. It forces you to pay attention, to learn and follow its rules, to shaped yourself in such a way as to successfully inhabit its world. The degree of involvement required by the game's slowness forces a strange, added identification with Arthur Morgan and the petty frustrations that make up his outlaw life. It's a novel means of player engagement.

Or, it would be, if it was new.