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Red Dead Redemption: The Hero
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Bringing law and order back to the Wild West isn't for the faint of heart.
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by
Greg Miller 
May 10, 2010 - After six hours of
Red Dead Redemption, I don't see how anyone could play this game as an outlaw. The title toys with your emotions – anger, love, sympathy, guilt – and casts you into a world that's crying out for a hero. There were plenty of situations I encountered where a bullet to the head would've made my mission easier, but these weren't just faceless folks in a videogame world – I needed to help them. I can pinpoint the moment when the depravity of the henchmen I was up against made me sick to my stomach and I knew that being good was the only way for me to play this game.
A number of campsites were found raided, complete parties wiped out by a gang of bandits. The sheriff of Armadillo and I were on the trail of these bastards and came to a farm that was far too quiet. We made our way to a barricaded barn, busted in, and found death. In the center of the room, a naked man was hanging by a noose. He was the patriarch of the house, and he was dead. Below him were the beaten and tortured bodies of his family. From the shadows, the murdered man's daughter emerged and told us that the rest of her family was being held captive in the main house.
Avenge the dead.
The entire barn episode angered me in a way few games have. I was completely enveloped in the experience and furious at the monster who would do such horrendous things. I made my way to the house and relished every headshot I pulled off as I killed these men room by room. I saved a few women that I found bound in bedrooms, but their faces were beaten, swollen and bruised. One of them would only tell me that the captors had done "unspeakable things" to them. When I got back outside the house, I found another group of abused women, but rather than the traditional "Thanks, hero!" most games give you, these ladies wailed and blamed the sheriff and I for letting this happen to the family.
It was this event that cemented the fact that I could never play this game as a bad guy. The main character of Red Dead Redemption is on a quest you won't fully understand for quite sometime – I played for six hours and don't truly know the scope of his mission – but the themes will ring true. In a world with this much heartache, there needs to be a hero, and John Marston is meant to be that savior. Hell, the title of this game gives away the man's motivations. John Marston already did terrible things long before you ever pushed start. He's looking for redemption.
Last week, IGN's own Erik Brudvig walked you though his hours in the town of Armadillo, except
he played as a bad guy. He shot horses in the head, left women to die in the desert, and raided the countryside. Basically, he was a maniac, and that's the kind of the virtual life I can't live. I need to save people. I need to walk the straight and narrow.
Trouble is, being that beacon of hope isn't as easy as I thought it would be in Red Dead Redemption.
No matter how empty the area, a hero needs to be on the lookout.
When I first stepped off the train in Armadillo, I assumed being the good guy would be no sweat. Don't kill innocent people, help people in need, and do whatever it takes to make the world a better place. Turns out, Red Dead's open-world freedom Rockstar is always talking about makes being the good guy a little more difficult. During my first real ride across the countryside, I heard gunshots and stopped in my tracks. I did a 360-degree turn, scanned the horizon and did everything I could to find the disturbance, but I had no luck finding out what was going on. Was someone getting hijacked? Was there a fight? Was it just some idiot shooting birds out of the air? I rode towards where I thought the shots were coming from, backtracked, and searched all over the area, but I never found out what was going on.
Things like that haunt me as Marston. There's so much disturbing stuff going on in this world that if I hear a commotion, I'm emotionally compelled to investigate so there won't be someone's rape and/or murder on my conscience. In Red Dead, our hero isn't a superhero. He has no telescopic vision to explore the horizon and no other-worldly sense to hone in on trouble. When something goes on around you, it's up to you to figure it out and act.
Now, these situations come in all shapes and sizes. There are the easy hero decisions, like coming up with the cash to pay a man for his property instead of the easy "blow him away and take the deed" route, but the harder decisions are the ones that need to happen in a split second. At one point, I was leaving a %#*%* house (no services rendered), when I heard a blood-curdling scream from down the road. I ran over to the commotion and found woman on her back with a knife-wielding man on top of her. I pulled my gun and blew the assailant away. Later, I came across a woman asking for help by her stagecoach. As I approached, armed men jumped out as part of an ambush/robbery. After using the Dead Eye feature to kill all the men in a split second, I had the choice of murdering the unarmed !!%@+ who set me up or letting her go. Of course, I let her leave.
Your relationships will make or break the emotional impact of Red Dead.
These random crimes speak to that urge to be the hero in a pinch, but don't think that you're only going to get the good/bad choice if you're stumbling around the back alleys of this tumbleweed town. One of the first side missions you'll come across is a woman sobbing at the sheriff's station. Her husband journeyed to a remote area and hasn't been heard from since. If you want, you can just ignore her and go back to drinking in saloons, but if you take her quest and ride up into the hills, you'll find a severed limb and a pool of blood. As the days go by, more and more people turn up missing and you keep finding leftover feet and arms like discarded chicken bones before coming across an injured man and a moral conundrum where you have to pick whom you believe. Later, a woman you know gets kidnapped, and her life is left in your hands.
You could be an outlaw and see all of this, but you wouldn't have the same frame of reference. You'd be killing innocent people, running from the law, and striking fear into the hearts of the good people of Armadillo. That's no way for Marston to live. Why even bother trying to take out bad guys when you're worse than all of them? I'd pick patrolling the homestead with a dog named Charlie – a reoccurring side mission where you chase off poachers and drunks – any day of the week.
Be on the right side of the law.
I love videogames. They connect me to characters and stories like no other medium can.
Red Dead Redemption makes me feel, but it doesn't always take me places I like. That's awesome. As we have these arguments about what a game is and if it's art and yadda, yadda, yadda, it's profoundly interesting that a fictional guy in a fictional town can make me feel so many things so genuinely. I can't wait to play Red Dead Redemption, but I also dread it in a way. I know that I'm going to have to see those beaten and violated women again, and I know that I won't be able to save them. For someone who wants to save whatever world he's in, that's a hard pill to swallow.
Still, the people of Red Dead Redemption need a hero, and I'm going to be there for them.
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