The rules and limits of Red Dead Redemption 2 are indifferent to what your idea of “fun” might be. This outlaw gang that should be able to do whatever they’d like have run out of choices. The player and the outlaw gang share their predicament: they’re in a world full of promise, but they’ve been forced into a confining, tedious and dangerous scenario due to their own actions. In the game’s early hours, these former western outlaws plod through snow, constrained to a strict path, prevented by the weather (and the designers) from journeying too far into the world. Over and over, the game subverts the expectations established by its creators previous games, taking power away from the player. Red Dead Redemption 2’s open world isn’t like the open world of Grand Theft Auto where you can get drunk on power with minimal inconvenience or ramifications. We’re witnessing the final days in which the characters can even pretend to be in charge of their fates, as they realize that the life they’ve been promised doesn’t match up with the reality of living by their own rules. That familiar, violent Western power fantasy happened before the prologue. As you listen to Dutch pontificate around the gang’s camp, he bemoans the realities of the newly settled frontier as a “beautiful fantasia” and “such a beautiful dream, so poorly rendered.” Discovering what went wrong during that failed robbery, and how Dutch’s actions redefine the group’s sense of honor, provides much of the game’s tension.įittingly, the gang is running east when we first meet them.įrom the early moments, Dutch’s personal Wild West myth - his own power fantasy - has begun to collapse. Dutch had painted them as a righteous crew bound by an unlawful, but justified, moral code. In a botched heist, which takes place just before the events of the game, the van der Linde gang had their faith in a mythical Western lifestyle challenged. The gang, when we meet them, is seeking a new home, fleeing from a deadly mistake that cost them lives and money. The gang in Red Dead Redemption 2, your surrogate family in the story, is a cult of personality held together by the charismatic Dutch van der Linde.ĭutch embodies the old Wild West myth, an outsider who has accumulated a band of like-minded outcasts to help create both his fortune and his legend. This year’s big, open-world western, Red Dead Redemption 2, would seem at first blush to be the perfect marriage of genre and medium if the goal was to give the player a sense of power and freedom, but Red Dead Redemption 2 - at its most interesting - rebuts the open-world power fantasy, the western genre and, occasionally, the legacy of Rockstar games itself. These games suggest that the world only exists for your enjoyment - that you can go anywhere and do anything, making your own fun and forging your own path, all with minimal consequences and abundant collateral damage The genre skews towards power fantasies: stories of individual freedom, rugged self-reliance and a fresh start (and accompanying riches) at the expense of strangers, the government and indigenous people.Ī similar type of power fantasy fuels many AAA games, particularly open world games. A mythology of entitlement surrounds the American frontier of the Western genre.
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