Hot take nearly half-a-decade past its prime: Red Dead Redemption 2 is turning out to be quite the good video game.

I didn’t buy it on its release in 2019 and continued not to buy it all through COVID. Maybe after The Witcher I just wasn’t down with another epic storyline starring a non-customizable character, despite the Wild West setting. I’d played  the original Red Dead Redemption and of course its DLC pack Undead Nightmare (y’know, the one with the zombies) and had a lot of fun but was I ready for more of that? Seemed that I wasn’t, even after I picked RDR2 up on sale over a year ago. So many games, so few finished. I remember as a kid visiting my aunt’s house and seeing games on her shelf still in their shrink-wrap packaging and finding it absolutely mind-boggling that someone would buy a video game and not immediately be playing the hell out of it. Now I understand. Bleah.

BUT. Delayed is not the same as never, and so I metaphorically broke the shrink wrap at long last and started playing RDR2 and its accompanying product of Red Dead Online. Both are largely abandoned by Rockstar these days but it doesn’t make it any less impressive to me what they brought forth, and that’s summed up in one of those words an Old West gentleperson might well have put in their journal: verisimilitude. To put it in more modern terms they are immersive as fuck, which has its downsides since RDO is in its Holidays phase right now which includes everything being really damn snowy and cold, even the Louisiana swamp biome. This happens to matter more than just in looks since there’s a survival element and if you’re not dressed warmly you can rapidly deplete your healthiness. The “story mode” of RDR2 which is the single-player meanwhile also starts out with you as part of a ragtag group of outlaws desperately searching for food and shelter in the midst of a terrible blizzard. And like I said, it’s an immersive game so my timing deciding to play it as Winter begins in real life is perhaps not the best.

BUT. I do live in the Los Angeles area and so can’t complain too much compared to what my in-game avatars are experiencing. Although RDO is most likely stuck in snow until the Holiday event ends, you do get out to greener pastures in fairly short order in the main game and that’s when the tried-and-true GTA-style adventuring begins, alternating free roam open world and scripted missions as you guide notorious outlaw Arthur Morgan through his paces. This is similar to guiding John Marston in the first game but RDR2 is a prequel where Marston is an NPC and where he was mostly a loner during his time, here is the time before when there’s a whole gang of men and women of all races, colors, and creeds, trying to stay alive and free in an 1899 America where law and order are increasingly encroaching upon their way of life.

This change is probably the most crucial difference I’ve found so far, because Rockstar really took their time breathing life into each individual gang member. They move around, they talk to each other, they do chores (and complain at the people not pulling their weight) and you get to react or not to all of them as you choose. You can roam out for days to do honorable or dishonorable deeds but you’ll always return to that outlaw camp of found family and little by little they’ve grown on me and sometimes I want to just sit down and listen to them instead of rushing to the next mission. Of course having played the first game I know there’s tragedy in store but I really credit the developers for putting so much detail into these virtual people and the setting itself. Cyberpunk 2077 (post patches) is the only game that’s come close for me recently but I feel like between the two they’ve really raised the bar for the future. They feel alive. Just the other day I decided to check out a theater in-game promising a Vaudeville-style variety show — now maybe there might be a mission that takes place there later but at the time it had no draw to it except my curiosity and whim, and I got treated to a genuinely great experience, and what’s more an experience that I could sit and watch or get up and actually interact with to change the outcome. Let’s just say as an example that the devs must have heard of real-life 19th Century incidents like the actors having to change the ending of Othello at literal gunpoint because an impressionable cowboy got up and threatened the man playing Iago with a loaded revolver.

So I’m running long at the mouth and have barely scratched the surface, but I think that’s one of the keys is that you feel like there’s so much you’re seeing but also so much you’re missing out on. Unlike real life you could reload a save or do a new playthrough but it feels so naturally presented that even a guy like me that sometimes gets really completionist can walk away from a confrontation because I don’t feel like Arthur gives enough of a shit at that moment. There’s a lot of choice in how to approach certain situations, but also times where it’s just going to go bad because Arthur is, well, Arthur, and Arthur is not what you’d call a born diplomat. He’s grown on me too, I suppose, as I continue playing.

And heck, I even figured out that there’s customization to an extent. It turns out that under all the hairyness he’s normally presented with Morgan is a blonde dude with blue eyes and with the right shave and outfit can do a half-decent Frank cosplay. Now I just have to find a bolt-action rifle to go with.