War Crime Wizard

red dead redemption 2 story mode is a work of art. the storytelling, the environment, the sound design, the music, the voice acting, the animations, and the gameplay are all absolutely fantastic. after much consideration, i have decided that this game is more of a Cowboy game, but cowboy games are a subset of horse games. after all, what is a horse game, really? are not most of them games where you play as the rider? i learned so much from rdr2, and i enjoyed it so much that i was looking forward to replaying it before I’d even gotten to the end.

in my opinion, the game’s greatest strength is its characters and how they interact with one another. outside of cutscenes, you can walk up and talk to them at camp, and they can walk up and talk to you! they have conversations with each other that you can hear halfway across camp, and if you show up and just stand there, they’ll casually loop you in! sometimes the guy you play as, arthur morgan, will chime in with his thoughts without your input. he’s his own character, and he rocks. and it’s not just the other members of your posse that you can talk to. pretty much any stranger that you pass on the road or in town, you can ride up to and start a conversation with. sometimes folks on the road will need help, and you get to decide if you want to help them or not. if you do, you might be in for a fun conversation as you ride a lady with a twisted ankle back home or help get a bear trap off someone’s leg.

the level of detail is absolutely ridiculous. horse videogame fans will have heard of the shrinking horse ball physics! when you’re on a quest with a friend and they’re having a conversation mid-ride and your horses start getting farther apart from one another, they switch to shouting. seamlessly! and if the conversation gets interrupted because someone had to say “turn left here.” they’ll pick it right back up by saying “anyway, what was i talking about?” even your hair grows!! and your cowboy has an old scar on his chin where hair doesn’t grow! what!!! this world is so, so alive.

during quests, sometimes there’s only so many ways the story can go, so you are just a little bit less free to do whatever than in red dead online. for example, i went on a fishing trip with kieran, and, having just been taught how to fish on a previous trip, i confidently walked up to the shoreline, rod in hand, and pressed the cast buttons. nothing! nothing at all! no indicator that i was pressing the buttons! had i forgotten how to do it? nope! as it turned out, the game wanted me to stand in a specific spot to the right of kieran before fishing. i thought maybe it was because a massive alligator was about to emerge from the lake and drag him in by the legs & arthur needed to be standing in the right spot to save him, but nothing happened.

sometimes you do have room in the quests to put your own spin on things, and your friends will comment on it. for example, when riding with someone to town, i went off course a bit instead of taking the route the game suggested, and my companion said “this is a strange route you’re taking.”

other times, you have so little freedom that you’ll be moving the sticks and buttons, only to discover that at this current moment, arthur morgan is on a ‘move forward’ track during a critical point in the story. the transitions between gameplay and cutscene are beautifully fluid, at the cost of sometimes not knowing where you're at. sometimes it seamlessly transitions from mashing A to push a heavy cannon into place, to a cutscene of them pushing the cannon together, and i keep mashing A, and then the little “hold A to skip cutscene?” thing pops up in the corner and im like Oh im not playing anymore ??

even more other times, you’ll have the means to do something, but the game will just say “no, this is a serious situation, arthur would not be doing that right now.”

for example, after botching a sneak attempt into a building, i ended up stealing a horse and riding away, then riding back and hiding under a nearby bridge with my new horse friend. i assumed (wrongly) that we could just hide there long enough for things to settle down & then i could try to sneak in again, and in the meantime, I wanted to pat my new horse. it wouldn’t let me! it wouldn’t let me pat the horse! and the alarms never stopped ringing, because it wasn’t a regular home invasion, it was a capital Q Quest. there are a lot of situations in Quests where I’ve shot a bunch of cops off their horses & i really should be able to calm and mount the horse before it runs off, but the story is of an escape on foot, so i can’t. but how can i complain? i have no idea how else they could have done it. other games might add a voiceline so that when you try to mount the horse, instead of nothing happening, arthur says gruffly to himself mid-gunfight (interspersed with yells of pain due to actively being shot), “it’s not the time for that” or “can’t do that right now.” which would very much kill the vibe. so i think it’s good what they’ve done, it’s just Different from red dead online, which i played first.

in short, sometimes it feels less like you’re playing as Arthur Morgan and more like you’re playing behind him and convincing him to do things. he moves realistically, so when you press the crouch button, he takes a second to get into that position, during which I’ve usually pressed it again, so then he gets back up. it’s the same delay you’d get from telling someone to crouch and uncrouch, not from crouching and uncrouching yourself. make no mistake, i think it’s awesome, I’m just trying to convey the feeling of this game.

speaking of red dead online, i strongly recommend playing the story mode first, like i didn’t! there’s just so much to the mechanics of everything that the tutorial in red dead online didn’t cover in depth, but that the quests in story mode make sure you’ve got a handle on before continuing. for example, at one point i couldn’t progress until i remembered how to ‘get into cover’, which i had to look up as it had been so long since I’d last played. but i never forgot it afterwards, and turns out you really, really need that button in order to Not Get Shot. additionally, if you don’t have a ton of experience aiming with the mouse, it turns out that if you play with a controller, your guy will automatically aim at things whenever you raise your gun, and you can just hold the button and it’ll track your target for you! it’s a whole world easier, and it even helps with just Finding What You’re Supposed to be Aiming at. it only works within certain distances, too, so it’s not too overpowered. since switching to controller, I’ve stopped placing so low in the red dead online shootouts. :) or, maybe there is a way to do this with the mouse and i just missed it. don’t know.

on the note of tutorials, though, there is One Key Thing that the red dead redemption 2 story mode tutorial does not teach you how to do: Save the Game! ???

every time you quit the game, it warns you that all unsaved progress will be lost. but there wasn’t a Save button in the menu. so for the longest time, every time i quit the game, i made sure my cowboy had just gone to bed and slept for a while. but then, i experienced a tragedy. my horse and I were attacked by bounty hunters, and for the first time ever, my horse was downed. the game quietly reminded me up in the corner that horse reviving tonics can be purchased at the store, so i stole someone’s horse and galloped into Valentine at full speed and bought three of every horse medicine. then, on the way back to his side, bounty hunters attacked again, and i died!! upon respawning, my dying horse was simply gone, without a trace, without any evidence that he had existed at all. the only way I knew he had genuinely vanished was because my main saddle was now on my backup horse, who’d teleported in from the stables. so then I took to the internet. ‘rdr2 horse died how to get back’. this is where i discovered that there are save files, listed under the ‘story’ option in the menu. luckily for me, there were lots of autosaves. i had to go back so far that i had to redo two mainline quests, but i got my horse back! i learned to save more frequently, and to dismount when i start getting shot at so that my horse can flee. here’s Dakota!

outside of quests, the game is largely exploring a beautiful world alongside your horse. there’s at least 2 places where your horse gets a moment in the main story cutscenes, and when you pat your horse while riding, arthur says sweet things to them. you can steal horses, catch horses, buy horses, buy them nicer tack, buy them different mane and tail styles. sometimes, a fellow traveler will challenge you to a race. if you shoot any horses, your honor decreases.

horses also possess the spectacular ability to teleport! no matter how close to the quest you park your horse, they will have moved to next to your companion’s horse by the time you’re about to ride out. you can ride in on a random stolen horse, or your secondary horse, but your primary horse will just inexplicably Be There in just the right spot. sometimes your secondary horse will also be there, but the Quest won't let you progress while riding that one instead. odd.

other things you can do with your horse: trample animals to death, transport big game and hostages, block paths and get yelled at, rear, jump, drift, lasso animals, lasso people, and so on and so forth. you can also pet the horse, brush the horse, feed the horse, and take the saddle off, although it’s designed for you to only do that when you’re switching another horse to your primary horse, not just letting your horse relax at camp.

the year is 1899, and it’s frontier america. now, i haven’t researched just how realistic the game is, but it seems pretty darn researched itself, and I’ve learned a ton from the things i looked up because of playing this game. things like when was the hot air balloon invented, when did women get the right to vote in the U.S., when were the first treatments for tuberculosis invented, cowboy stew recipe, cowboy coffee, landback wikipedia, dominos wikipedia, what the hell is a good hand in poker, etc etc. many such cases. i even went down a rabbit hole researching state parks and tourist attractions in the U.S. west, and you can imagine my face when i found Palo Duro Canyon state park.

it’s silly, but it’s one thing to read about history, and it’s another thing to feel like you’ve been there. 1899 was only 127 years ago as of 2026. that’s like, four generations. your grandma’s-mom-many years ago, maybe. the game feels less like “going to the past” and more like “going to 1899” like it’s a location. so much has changed so fast and it never really stops, does it? in the game, they talk about how times are getting worse as the Wild West shrinks into nothing. reminds me of an anthropology class i took that talked about different cultures throughout time and their contrasting views, like how some (ancient greece maybe???) believed that the mythic past had been amazing, and compared to that, current life had gone way downhill. as opposed to the 90s or so when people thought the boom in technology would just keep going and we’d have flying cars and world peace in just a few decades. it just makes you think, you know? the more things change, the more they stay the same. it’s worth noting for your timeline context that Sinners is set in 1932. excellent movie, by the way.

(quick aside - i really wanted a picture of playing dominoes with Tilly, the most formidable dominoes opponent, but every picture i found online had big watermarks on them ?? so i figured i'd better slap one on the one i spent 2 weeks replaying to take) (second aside. dominoes rock)

you might assume that a cowboy violence game full of lawlessness and guns and blood and guts might lean towards the conservative side, but i was pleasantly surprised. the cowboy posse is pretty diverse! lenny talks to arthur about racism in the south, tilly tells him about how her mother was a slave until she was 15, sadie forcibly escapes the kitchen and becomes a gunslinger, javier was a mexican revolutionary, and charles is both black and native. arthur and charles work with the Wapiti indians as peace treaties fall through, as the government believes there’s oil in the lands it granted to the Wapiti Indian reservation & now they must do everything to get the stupid oil, obviously.

and it’s not like every character is politically correct, either. there are multiple people in the posse who suck ass, & at one point a guy says women obviously cannot ride in hot air balloons because it causes harm to their “vapors”. many such cases. i don’t think there are any chinese people in the posse, but there are in the cities, and i found someone on reddit talking about how nice it is that they hired actual Cantonese speakers to voice them. it’s all so cool!

considering the sheer scale of this game, it’s really impressive how few glitches i experienced on my first playthrough. i saw a random floating object one time, and it figured itself out and vanished while i was looking at it. other than that, the only glitch i had was this really creepy one where an electric pulsing nether portal starts from a pocket of purple pixels and grows and grows, encompassing the sky like an infection.

i wish i had gotten a video of it, it’s happened to me twice. and then you turn around and back, and it’s gone.

on my second playthrough i'm exploring a lot more & encountering a more typical number of glitches, but nothing game-ruining. for example, i accidentally ended up with two identical horses (my buddy bagel on the left) and when i tried to sell one and ride out on the other, i kept riding out on the sold horse while my intended mount got stuck walking in place by the doors. in the end i sold the same horse five times, only got $6 total, then told her to flee & i havent seen her since.

in short, this game is a literal masterpiece, and I’m sure hundreds if not thousands of people have already waxed poetry about it & there’s not too much that i can say that other people haven’t said.

that isn’t gonna stop me from trying, though!! i said it was a great outside simulator in the red dead online review, but that doesn’t do it justice. this game captures every single visual and audio joy of the outdoors. you still can’t feel the sun on your back or the wind in your hair, and you can’t smell the grass and the pollen and the sweat of your horse, but you get pretty damn close to it. there’s a real joy to the outdoors here, and the guy you’re playing as understands that well. he belongs out there.

compared to this, the city feels claustrophobic. you can’t just head towards your destination, you gotta figure out which street to take in the maze of buildings. you can’t even canter without trampling someone. [videogamedunkey voice] playing the game really makes you feel like Arthur Morgan. and i haven’t even talked about the story yet!! the story might be the best part!!! i don’t want to spoil it, though, so you’ll have to just take my word for it. it’s a great story. made me cry.

I’m rating this masterpiece 5 out of 5 stars!

★★★★★