Red Dead Redemption

A true watershed moment in gaming for me.

About 18 months before the idea of a gaming site linked to RateYourMusic was confirmed, I published a list on here titled 'In anticipation of RateYourGames: every game I've ever played, ranked and reviewed'. Originally, the list had a description where I described myself as 'not really an avid gamer', which a couple of people laughed at when the list ended up having over 180 items on it. I was genuinely shocked at that number, because two months before making the list, I literally hadn't played anything other than Civilization and Football Manager in 3 years. I upgraded to a PS3 very late into its life-cycle, having treated my PS2 as a suspiciously expensive DVD player ever since I left university, and having failed to be sucked into the new gen by a brief dalliance with an XBox 360 I got free with a phone contract and an intense two-week love affair with a Wii (also free with a phone contract) that, without DVD capability, turned into a suspiciously expensive paperweight. At this point in my life, it felt like gaming just wasn't something I did anymore.

It was a night spent playing FIFA 12 with some friends pulled me around to the idea of getting another console, but I didn't want to feel like I was wasting my money buying a console for one game and, in lieu of any Tony Hawk's games I hadn't already played on the XBox, I realized that I'd have to leap into bigger, story-driven games to make it worth it. This was something I deliberated over for a while; sure, I'd loved Deus Ex and the Final Fantasy [ファイナルファンタジー] series back in the day, but when you're in school and college you've got a hell of a lot of time to devote to getting involved in games of that scale, and I wasn't sure it would be worth trying to get back to that with a full-time job. Having decided to take the plunge, I only bought Red Dead Redemption for two reasons - Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was one of my favourite PS2 games, and it had horses in it. I figured my fiancee would play it for that even if I turned out to not get into it.

Within three days of getting absorbed in Red Dead Redemption's world, I was wondering why the hell I'd neglected gaming for so long. This thing hit me like a train.

Okay, so I think it's fair to say that I played this at a point in time when I was very easy to impress. While I was away, console gaming had grown exponentially, and while I certainly expected that the new hardware would bring a new standard of graphics and gameplay with it, what I hadn't accounted for it is that the amount of money in gaming right now, along with the increased legitimacy and profile of it, meant that the standard of acting would shoot up. Funnily enough, I'd never even thought of acting as being something gaming should improve on - when I was playing the likes of Vice City or even Tony Hawk's Project 8, the acting was just fine by me - but it was this game that opened my eyes up to just how much more immersive and involving a game can be when it has gifted actors on board. I'm not just talking about John Marston here, either - the actors behind major supporting characters like Bonnie McFarlane, Landon Ricketts, and Nigel West Dickens make their creations fully three-dimensional. Hell, even the character that (seemingly) plays God is acted excellently and you could quite easily play through the whole game without meeting him. It's not a perfect cast, sure - I could do without silly stereotypes like Irish and Seth - but it was shock to see a whole game played out with complete characters all over the place, not just two or three decent actors and a load of other people with one or two lines a piece.

And you know, the horses deserve some credit there too. This is arguably something that Red Dead Redemption gets too much credit for in some quarters, but it definitely gets nowhere near enough in others - the horses throughout this game have actual personalities, look and move fairly realistically (though my fiancee, who has spent most of her life around horses, picked out a few mistakes), and respond to the player in a way not entirely dissimilar to the way the human NPCs do. Whoever was tasked with putting horses into this game has clearly spent a lot of time around them, and it makes a huge, if subtle difference to how easy it is to get sucked into the game. In Grand Theft Auto, you jump in and out of cars as and when you feel like it. In this game, you go back to the same horse you just tied up because it's your horse, and quite often, you do it without even thinking about it.

The world all these characters inhabit deserves a lot of credit too - the lay of the land, the way the landscape looks, the level of detail, the faithful recreation of a specific time and place, even the lore of the places you'll visit that the other characters fill you in on, they're all seriously impressive. The only thing that tipped me off that Red Dead Redemption's map isn't an exact recreation of a real place is the fact that you can get from the Mexican border to a place that looks like a Siberian winter in less than ten minutes. Still, silly as that might sound, the sharp contrasts in the world add a lot to the game, not just in climate but between settlements as well. One of the over-arching themes of the game is that it's set in a world torn between Old and New America, and while the presence of a railway line and the discussions around it are part of that, it's in the contrast between the bustling contemporary city of Blackwater and the creaking, visible aged likes of Armadillo or the homely McFarlane's Ranch that this is best explained. It's a fairly small map, but it's densely packed with detail, fully-fleshed out with ideas, and executed smartly enough to allow for a vast range of settings without making the whole thing seem like a gimmick.

And then there's the storyline. Red Dead Redemption does what all the best open-world games do - open up with a motive, give you a final goal, and then let you work out your own way to get there. In this case, John Marston is hunting down his former gang members at the behest of law enforcement, who have promised him that all his crimes will be forgotten and he will be allowed to live in peace with his wife and son if he brings his former partners down. It's a neat trick, placing a gang history right at the heart of Marston's back story but giving him a family and a future away from it; there is no shortage of books and films that have done a similar thing, but that's just a testament to how powerful an image it is. And Jesus, does the ending of this game ever make it powerful. All John Marston wants is for his son to grow and make something of himself outside of the crime he was forced to turn to, and having done everything he possibly can to ensure that happens, he finds himself murdered by the very officers who's promised him a free life, driving his son to revenge and a life following exactly in his father's footsteps. I was honestly gobsmacked.

There are games I've played since on the PS3 that I prefer, but I think that by choosing Red Dead Redemption to get myself back into gaming, I played a blinder. This was literally perfect for the task, because I wanted to see how far games had come on in the time I'd been away, and Red Dead Redemption does literally everything well - I can't think of a single element of this game that anything I'd played beforehand could better. It's just a deliriously brilliant piece of work, a high watermark for the open world genre that I dearly hope something will eventually be able to beat. I'm not holding my breath, though.