#625: Red Dead Redemption
Grand Theft Horsie it may be — but it’s still a mighty fine game
Initial release: May 18, 2010
Developer: Rockstar San Diego
Platform: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 (original), PlayStation 4/5, Switch, PC (remaster)
I fell into loving the western by accident. I understand why some people don’t — perhaps they associate the genre with a certain style of masculinity that they’d rather avoid engaging with, and sure I get that. Or there’s the unfortunate tropes that a lot of westerns — especially the older ones — tend to rely on, which turn people off. I get that too. Or maybe you just fucking hate John Wayne, who seems to be the embodiment of both of those objections. And I definitely get that. But I was never predisposed against the genre myself, it just wasn’t something I paid much attention to. But part of any journey towards better media literacy meant learning to not just take the bad and the ugly along with the good, but to understand media as a whole, the stories we tell, the way we tell them, and why we tell them. I’ve watched a lot of westerns at this point, and I think I have a pretty good idea as to why I like westerns: the genre is fertile ground for storytelling. You can use a western setting to tell any kind of story you want — even film noir! But though we criticize American mythmaking for its colonialist narratives of conquest and ideas of what civilization looks like, the one key element that binds nearly all westerns, both the American ones and the cynical European films of the spaghetti era, is change. And Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar Games’ 2010 opus, is all about change.
The year is 1911 and the Old West is dead; but not everyone who lived in it is gone yet. John Marston is one such vestige of an older, crueler era. Once a member of the notorious Van Der Linde gang, killing and robbing their way across the country in the name of some high-flying philosophical ideal of freedom, Marston left the life years ago to try his hand at ranching and raising a family. But the past has a nasty way of catching up to you. The Bureau of Investigation, a newly-founded federal police agency (and the predecessor to the modern-day FBI) has kidnapped his wife and son to force him to track down his former comrades and bring them to justice. After being shot and nursed back to health by a rancher, he sets forth to get the job done, traveling across the American southwest and into Mexico, meeting a range of colorful characters from untrustworthy drunks and necrophiliacs and snake oil salesmen to self-obsessed revolutionary leaders, wide-eyed idealists, and contemptuous government agents.
While I played the game when it was new, I hadn’t played it again since. So if you’re coming at Red Dead Redemption after having played its sequel you may be shocked at how primitive it feels. Leaving aside the PlayStation 3-era graphics, there simply just isn’t as much to do in this game. It’s much less of a cowboy simulator; horses are basically disposable, there’s little to do in towns besides buy things and gamble, customization is almost non-existent. The clothing system, such as it is, is anemic, limited to a few outfits, some of which need to be unlocked by doing certain tasks such as clearing a gang hideout or buying the right scrap. While hunting is certainly a thing, it’s not half as involved. There’s not much cause to explore — just about every location in the map will be visited by the main story at one point or another, sometimes repeatedly, and there’s little in the way of environmental storytelling. (The ghost town of Tumbleweed is about the most interesting it gets in that regard.) The bounty hunting system doesn’t have a lot going for it compared to the sequel, narratively speaking. Everything just feels simpler, more empty and uncomplex. It all feels a little more mechanical, a little more scripted, the NPCs a little more NPC-like. The storyline is also surprisingly short; it’s not like the lengthy, bittersweet epic of Arthur Morgan. The central plot feels disjointed, with little connective tissue between most of the various acts. Everything feels smaller than it should be, more crowded; the lonesome dusty trails sometimes have outright horse traffic jams. You’re rarely alone; even the wildlife is never far away, which makes for interesting moments where a pack of wolves can screw up a stranger mission or other encounter.
But for all that, Red Dead Redemption is still a hell of a game. The America of Red Dead Redemption is beautiful, dry and sunbleached, scrub desert stretching as far as the eye can see, windswept rock formations looming in the distance. The music is on point; crossing the river into Mexico to the tunes of José González’s “Far Away” is perhaps where the game most lives up to its potential. The gunplay is solid, however basic it sometimes feels; the Deadeye system is straightforward and uncomplicated. While you’ll run into a lot of the same kind of encounters, they’re fun while the novelty lasts; more interesting to me are the stranger missions, which while they aren’t as in-depth as in the sequel still do a lot to give the game a little more life. The story, however episodic it may feel, effectively builds its central arc, a theme of the old ways being cleared away for the new, be it good or bad. Marston and his former fellow outlaws are relics, with Marston wanting to leave it all behind and the others unable or unwilling to adapt. Mexico is in revolution in the hopes of something better. Bureau agent Edgar Ross has nothing but contempt for outlaws, reformed or otherwise; to him, men like Marston are undeserving of redemption, and must be put away for the good of a kinder, gentler America. (I’m reminded of the sheriff from The Shootist, who was practically pissing himself with glee over the main character’s impending death by cancer.)
Red Dead Redemption used to be hard to play. Its initial release never saw a PC version, leaving it relegated to the now-ancient PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. A remaster in 2023 for the PlayStation 4 (and 5 with backwards compatibility) and Nintendo Switch was pretty much a straight port, albeit with a 60fps framerate; the long-awaited PC version released in October 2024 allows for 4K and is just generally nice to have if you’re primarily a PC gamer. (I played the original release on PlayStation 3 a decade ago, this review is based on the PC version.)
After playing Red Dead Redemption II (and crying so hard I about dehydrated myself) I found it really jarring to go back to the 2010 original; some games age better than others, and Red Dead Redemption 1 sits in that weird spot where it’s closer to Grand Theft Auto III than V. But there’s still a good game in there, and I think with time it will redeem itself.
