‘Red Dead Redemption 2’ Isn’t Boring ~ Digital Library

Red Dead Redemption 2 is available now on PC. Here our thoughts again on the original release. Just imagine this but potentially looking way better.

When I’m reviewing a game, I try to stay away from the talk surrounding it, The Discourse, until I write my own review. It’s a common practice. It helps me make sure my thoughts are original and makes me more confident in my own opinion. But this was pretty much impossible with Red Dead Redemption 2 considering how close I started playing it to release, how long the game is, and how much Discourse the next big Rockstar game was bound to generate. I’m just glad I got my fairly pure thoughts on the game’s opening hours out there.

But once I did break down and start checking on what some other folks were saying about the game, I saw a trend quickly emerged in the window between embargoed reviews and the general public playing the game for themselves. There’s this idea that Red Dead Redemption 2 is so simulation-level realistic that it’s slow and tedious. That the game is boring. This game is so huge and different that there are a lot of theses I could’ve hung all my disparate thoughts on. But after like fifty hours of playing, in my opinion at least, my main thought is that Red Dead Redemption 2 isn’t boring.

I say this as someone who didn’t particularly love the first Red Dead Redemption. As the folks behind Grand Theft Auto, Rockstar knows how to put together a fun enough open-world. But all of the slow cowboy-specific mechanics, from the horse controls to the cattle rustling to the generally sparse Western landscape, made me just wish I had a car and a better gun. And to be fair, a lot of that control fiddliness is in the sequel, especially when it comes to having to press buttons, move sticks, and release buttons to use items. But in general doing anything in the game doesn’t feel that much slower than your average overly animated AAA third-person action-adventure game.

I also say this as someone especially sensitive to tediousness in games. It’s why I hate the sluggish combat and obnoxiously opaque design of Dark Souls and Monster Hunter. It’s why I hate the endless resets of roguelikes. It’s why Super Meat Boy only works because death is fast and meaningless. And death is largely meaningless in Red Dead Redemption 2. It’s slow but it doesn’t fetishize difficulty, keeping progress steady and your time not wasted. Even when I did fail missions, the kinesthetic pleasure of shooting old-timey guns doesn’t lose its luster (even if guns do, needing to be periodically repaired).

Maybe the methodical pacing is more acceptable too because it seems so thematically appropriate. It just feels right to gallop across quiet fields on horseback instead of figuring out the perplexing fast travel system because you’re a cowboy, dang-it. I need that time to think about how to trim my real-time beard growth or rustle up the 25 cents for a bath following a sloppy muddy drunken brawl. Or maybe I’m riding off into the wilderness to hunt or fish, tasks that are boring but optional here because they’re boring but optional in real life. The particulars of the gameplay encourage you to have an 1899 experience that feels like it has an authored tone even if your actions are entirely up to you, and I respect and appreciate the confidence of that strong intent.

It’s also tough to stay bored in any open-world game with enough freedom for players to be dicks in creative emergent way, even before using the cheat codes (which you should know prevent you from saving progress). I kept body slamming and hogtying cops when they chased after me. I took a date to a show and kept heckling the performers shouting “Garbage!” and “Trash!” I lost weight after not eating for days, endlessly crashing my horse instead. I investigated murder scenes and stole top hats from corpses. I bought tons of new fancy boi outfits for looking like a hobo Abe Lincoln and keeping my temperature healthy in different climates, like in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

And speaking of Breath of the Wild, Rockstar and Nintendo are similar in that they both approach open-world games as crafted spaces for the players to truly live in, not just maps for content delivery. In Red Dead Redemption 2 just the sheer variety of breathing communities, connected through dream logic geography, kept me fascinated the entire time. There are prairie towns, southern bayou plantations, snowy mountains, smog-filled industrial cities, and even an entire sugar colony. It’s like going from the city of Vice City to the entire state of San Andreas.

But more than anything else, what kept me going throughout this very long game without wanting to stop were the story missions. When you just focus on the story Red Dead Redemption 2 has moments of downtime but is largely set piece after set piece. You’re robbing a train. You’re escaping a town that turned against you. You’re shooting up and burning down a southern Gothic mansion. You’re launching cannonballs at warships. It’s banger after action-packed banger, cleverly designed and expertly paced. It’s not boring to snipe prison guards from a hot air balloon. It’s really exciting! It’s pretty much unfair, too, because the only way to pull off this volume of great design is having more money than God and, as we now know, the ability to get away with grinding your own employees to dust.

The missions are broadly strung together by a story that mostly fascinates me as more proof of Rockstar attempting to be more Serious and Mature ever since GTA IV ten years ago. Michael in GTA V may have cracked jokes but that was a clear cut case of the dadification of video games, and as a game about sad old outlaw cowboys and their desperate dying way of life Red Dead Redemption 2 is also extremely for dads. Considering the loose continuity of GTA, I was surprised just how super connected this prequel is to the first game, too. John Marston fans won’t be disappointed.

I actually lost a ton of progress while playing because I didn’t realize I couldn’t save with cheat codes and because the game crashed a few times. Normally this would devastate me. It would stop me from playing the game anymore. But I wasn’t that bothered because the thought of replaying an entire chapter, maybe making some different choices, genuinely sounded like a lot of fun. It didn’t bore me.

There’s a ton to criticize in Red Dead Redemption 2. Again, there are some clunky controls and menu designs. Western settings just inherently have emptier spaces. Much of the story is tangents with cool texture but not substance and Arthur being a blank slate until the very end. Besides some Black, Latinx, and Indigenous lip service it’s white as hell. Educate yourself about the labor issues at Rockstar. But a game that let me have so much fun, that got me playing it and thinking about it for so long, I could never call boring.

For more on Red Dead Redemption 2, to tide you over until you can play for yourself, check out the latest gameplay trailer and character portraits and fancy special edition.