As we’re enjoying the rich intro with the plot set up, the stakes start to twist to a resoundingly silly moment. After introducing Marston and his quest to take down ex-gang brother Bill Williamson, the ex-gunslinger goes up to Williamson’s uninviting Fort Mercer in plain sight and lets Williamson know his busin

That especially hurt for two reasons: one, Arthur Morgan can't just end Micah right after that, even though I really wanted to, and second, I had spent so much time petting local dogs and cats that Micah's actions seemed to erase all the time I had spent giving them a pat – by the way, you can give every dog in this game a good ol'

I consistently struggled in trying to figure out just what Dan Houser and his co-writers were trying to convey throughout the story in Red Dead Redemption 2 . Whenever it appeared that some allegory was being set up, the scenarios would delve into quirkiness and involve stereotyped characters. Without detailing each one, I played three particular Stranger missions that put me off with that exact formula: the ones involving the characters of Margaret, Bertram, and the pair of Mr. Black and Mr. White. This video game, which is presented with the themes of modern Western stories, comes across more like a subpar attempt at subversion. Houser perhaps wants to satirize the caricatures of old Westerns, but ends up creating caricatures of his own. But hey, this is also coming from the same train of thought that replacing "Metlife" with "Getalife" in Grand Theft Auto IV was brilliant satire.

Obviously, a man made the Man-made Mutant as seen by its label, but we still don't know exactly who created this monstrosity. Sure, we can go to its location and marvel at its grotesqueness, but I want to know the story behind

However, if your player decides not to beat Downes for the payment, the game kind of just implies that Arthur beat him anyway. It takes choice away from the player, and if you miss the implication, you're left wondering why on Earth Morgan got himself

In mouse click the next article Mexico section, Marston is placed in the middle of a Civil War between the ruthless Government and the hapless rebels—both sides of the conflict offer Marston's help on his quest in return for his gun-for-h

These bones clearly depict a humanoid creature, but it is far larger than your average human. We are led to believe that we have discovered the skeletal remains of Big Foot. This find is purely just around for the curious wanderer who happens to walk

Of course, all media finds its inspirations from what came before—just look at all of the "Westerns" that Quentin Tarantino has done in the past few years, such as Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight . Interestingly enough, some of the other staff of DualShockers found the harsh winter of the game's first chapter to be reminiscent of The Hateful Eight . But usually, that inspiration and reuse of imagery have to go further than "the director thought this looked pretty." With that, I remained confused about exactly what head writer Dan Houser was going for with Red Dead Redemption 2 , other than proving that he has a lot of thoughts about American society (as he previously demonstrated in Grand Theft Auto V , a game that felt like a sequel to Goodfellas from some alternate timeline) and that yes, he has indeed seen a lot of movies.

Geology for Beginners is a stranger mission given to you by the maybe time-traveling Francis Sinclair, who tasks you with finding various rock carvings. Unlike the dreaded dinosaur bones which take forever, this is over in no time at all. After finding just one carving, you are paid $10 (and a bottle of bourbon). And after five, you are given a rock statue which can be sold to a fence for $50. All told, you are given a cool $60 after finding just five rock carvings, which shouldn't take very long (provided you use a guide.) Plus you get to see all the trippy engravings, so it's a win-

The thematic discrepancies of this game couldn't be more evident to me every time that goddamn deer showed up in Arthur Morgan's dreams. These are brief sequences that felt like a fetishization of the frontier—they recall not just nostalgia for the Old West, but for the first Red Dead Redemption game, with the basic melody of the theme playing in the background. It can be debated for hours what the English-class level metaphor that the deer is meant to represent, but I had this feeling that by showing us Arthur trying to remember the "glory" of the West, the game is trying to invoke the same feeling in the player. Think of the way that Kingsman: The Secret Service attempted to argue in favor of bringing back the camp and irony of old spy films, which undid its own argument when the movie ended with an homage to sex scenes of James Bond films past, reminding viewers of how problematic that era was.

The only element that I could track consistently was this feeling of disdain from the characters. Even with the game's 1899 setting, I kept thinking back to the contemporary Western Hell or High Water by director David Mackenzie and writer Taylor Sheridan, who is also responsible for Wind River and the Sicario films. To sum up the film's themes, it was implicitly about the "silent majority" that became disillusioned with the rest of the nation's move towards progressivism. It's a cops-and-robbers film in rural America, where ordinary people rob banks out of financial desperation, citizens openly carry firearms, waitresses complain about city folk and their values, and indigenous people are pushed around and bullied by their peers.