Apocalypse #23: Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare
Like Red Dead, but un-Dead
Initial release: October 26, 2010
Developer: Rockstar San Diego
Platform: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 (original), PlayStation 4/5, Switch, PC (remaster)
Remember when zombies were cool? Or at least popular? Or at least profitable? Yeah, I remember that too. I saw 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake in theaters. Land of the Dead, too. I pre-ordered Left 4 Dead and religiously followed the development of They Hunger: Lost Souls until Neal Manke got sick and dropped the project. There was The Walking Dead, The Last of Us, DayZ, Dead Island and its (much better) spiritual sequel Dying Light, the list goes on. So of course someone would stick zombies into an otherwise serious game about sad cowboys. Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare is exactly what the name suggests.
Right around the turn of the Tens, there was a trend among developers to release horror-themed DLCs for otherwise non-horror games. Off the top of my head, I can think of Zombie Army for Sniper Elite V2, Festival of Blood for InFamous, The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned for Borderlands, and more debatably, The Tyranny of King Washington for Assassin’s Creed III, Far Harbor for Fallout 4 and Dawnguard for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Or how about the zombie apocalypse mode for Civilization VI? And we can probably trace it all back to the Zombies mode introduced to Call of Duty with World at War. The point is, devs were doing a lot of it. Undead Nightmare is absolutely of this persuasion, taking the base game and laying on a thick horror pastiche over it (that was the other thing, most of these DLCs ramped up the camp aspects, with Undead Nightmare even having a classic 70s-style deep-voiced narrator in the opening minutes.)
It’s a pretty simple premise, albeit one that contradicts the main storyline in a lot of ways; you could argue that this is an alternate universe, but I prefer the term “failed timeline” — a branch of the timeline where things don’t go the way they should. Like Skynet taking over the world. In any case, Undead Nightmare drops us sometime in the fourth and final chapter of the main storyline, where Marston and family are trying to run their ranch like the good honest people they really are (or want to be.) One night, Uncle — a rascally old degenerate who spends most of his time drinking and shirking work but comes through when it counts — returns from town, but he looks quite sick. And then he bites Abigail, who then bites Jack, and with that, Marston is hitting the road looking for a cure for his family, which he’s got tied up in the master bedroom. (Fuck Uncle I guess.) Along the way, he meets characters from his adventures, from the talkative, mildly racist Yale professor (who gets eaten) to Bonnie MacFarlane who helped nurse him back to health early in his adventure to Herbert Moon, the paranoid, ultra-racist shopkeeper (who also gets eaten) and so on. The plot doesn’t really matter, does it? Some guff about a mysterious Aztec jade mask stolen from a sunken temple. It doesn’t matter — get in there and shoot some zombies.
And oh boy is there lots of shooting zombies. The basic mechanics remain the same, but your Dead Eye meter — the slow-mo that the series is famous for — gets a bit of a boost to help with the headshots you’ll need to be making. Money is worthless in the apocalypse, and there’s nothing to buy, so you’ll have to scavenge your own ammo, from chests or off zombies, most of whom carry no ammo but the ones that do will be marked on your minimap. The actual mission tree is pretty short; most of your time will instead be spent liberating towns and settlements. Over time they’ll come under attack again, though fast-traveling is a bit easier this time (you can fast travel from any bed — but camping is no longer possible.) You get new gear for doing missions as well as clearing towns and settlements, so this will be your way of upgrading your arsenal. Healing supplies are a lot rarer, though…
The writing is such that it exaggerates a lot of the qualities of existing characters almost to the point of self-parody, which of course only further leans into the grindhouse vibe of the game. The voice acting is intentionally hammier, the characters are more stupid, there’s some more fantastical elements such as Sasquatches and chupacabras — it’s as B-movie as it gets and it’s glorious.
In addition to being DLC, Undead Nightmare was actually sold as a separate physical release back in 2010; these days, it comes pre-bundled with the remaster of Red Dead Redemption for modern consoles and PC. So now you can play it on pretty much any of the major platforms, ain’t that cool?
If you liked Red Dead Redemption, you’ll probably find Undead Nightmare fun. It’s got a different vibe, with subtle color grading that tends towards green, and a more warped, spooky ambient score that’s punctuated by some slamming good licensed tracks by The Kreeps (this is in fact what introduced me to the band.) It still plays mostly like the base game, but with a very gentle zombie survival aspect that I’d love to have seen expanded upon in Red Dead Redemption II (but alas Rockstar seems to have forgotten that game. Pity — it’s their best work!)
And hey, how many games can you say let you ride into town on a zombie horse?
