Travel to the American Old West in a video game
Embarking on a trip to the Old West might just be the escape we are looking for these days. Explore frontier towns, snow-capped mountains, arid deserts and open plains in one of Rockstar’s best video games. Your journey in Red Dead Redemption 2 is a lot more than that though. If you’re a travel enthusiast looking for a slow-paced, character-driven historical drama, here’s why you should play the video game.
The year is 1899. The game’s vast and atmospheric world puts you in the role of Arthur Morgan, a member of the notorious Van der Linde gang. The gunslinger’s outfit is a cowboy hat, a tan leather jacket and brown pants tucked into the boots. Arthur sets off on a series of missions spanning various territories in an interactive, open-world experience. Don’t worry if you’ve never played the first Red Dead Redemption, the second game is set as a prequel.
The game begins with a failed bank robbery resulting in the deaths of several gang members, requiring the group of men, women, and children to head eastward. You then find yourself playing the role of Arthur Morgan as he guides the gang through a cold Ozark winter.
Throughout the journey, you’ll listen to the tales of fellow outlaws, which will give you more insight into each character. Finally at a new settlement, the gang begins to re-establish its lifestyle of Robin Hood-like crime in the pursuit of financial security and freedom from the law.
Though the game is set in places like New Orleans, the Rockies of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and in Texas, real states and towns (and even politicians) have fictional names in the game. In typical Rockstar style, this gave the creators the opportunity to take inspiration from turn-of-the-century America without having to recreate a map as accurately as the ones in video games like Odyssey and Ghost of Tsushima.
Throughout the game, you’ll find yourself grooming your horse, robbing trains, sipping whiskey in a saloon, having conversations around a campfire, fishing, hunting, and even playing poker and blackjack—but these are often just distractions from the missions. You’ll also be tasked with scouting out locations for a new camp, buying weapons at a gunsmith, bringing in a snake oil salesman for dangerous quakery and defending female suffragettes.
It’s an excellent game for curious explorers. You can spend most of your time simply riding around the American wilderness. You can travel to cattle ranches, hear the tales of drifters and outlaws, give a ride to a stranger heading into town, and bask in the sheer beauty of Red Dead Redemption 2’s realistic landscapes.
Beyond just riding through the wilderness, the game is so detailed that every non-playable character that you meet can be greeted, spoken to and even antagonized. They can be helped by the player or threatened and robbed at gunpoint.
If you’re longing for some action in your video games, you’ll also have plenty of that. Shootouts, train robberies, and exhilarating escapes are there to get your adrenaline pumping. However, the game is mostly about just being in the moment, experiencing life as it was back then, while enjoying conversations with various characters throughout the game.
Many tales and missions in the video game are pulled from cinematic and literary sources, keeping it relevant and historical. Essentially, Red Dead Redemption 2 is a tale of a time and place in history.
A tale where you can rob a train, but also walk into a general store and chat with a shopkeeper, pay for a bath at an inn and then play a game of poker with the other guests.
Another interesting part of the game are the various settlements to explore. They give a detailed sense of settled life in 1899. Rhodes, located in Lemoyne, loosely depicts northern Louisiana. On the surface Rhodes appears proper and clean, but corruption runs deep with two rival Southern families, the Braithwaites who produce and sell moonshine alcohol and the Grays who made their wealth before the Civil War from tobacco and cotton plantations.
Also in Lemoyne, you’ll find Saint Denis, a former French colony, which closely represents New Orleans during that period. It already boasts 200 years of history and functions as the largest and most civilized town in RDR2, making it a bit polluted and busy. Here you can expect to interact with socialites, immigrants, sailors, factory workers and conmen.
Annesburg is a coal mining town established by German settlers. With its smoggy scenery and river water polluted by the mining operations, it’s not the most picturesque settlement in Red Dead Redemption 2, but nonetheless worth experiencing.
Then there’s Strawberry on the western end of the map. Strawberry is a small mountain town once popular as a base camp for lumberjacks and hunters, but over time has grown into a town with a sufficient logging industry. Here you’ll find honest workers and a mayor eager to stay in power and establish a resort town.
Heading north there’s Valentine, a rough and hard-working livestock town nicknamed “Mudtown” due its dirty streets and buildings. Regardless, Valentine offers beautiful mountain backdrops, interesting missions, and quaint farms. It also contains the stables where you’ll purchase your first horse.
Also included in the game is the industrialized town of Blackwater with cobbled streets and gas streetlamps, the territory of New Austin which is based on the Mojave and Sonoran deserts, the swamps of the bayou and the Creole settlements of Lemoyne—all with their own charm and intrigue. There’s no limit to what and where you can visit in RDR2, even if the game does not steer you towards exploring them.
The game is almost like a Western novel, full of stories and chapters that fill the pages of Red Dead Redemption 2. Unlike a book, there’s no one way to play, giving it a life-like and personalized experience for every player. Plus, with four different endings, it’s a great game to play again and again. If you enjoy slow-paced, interactive, and stunning video games that unravel like a cinematic experience, this is the game for you.
