Like I’m sure many of you have been doing, I’ve spent a portion of my weekend playing that new cowboy game everyone has been talking about. Red Dead Redemption 2 has been the game of choice in my off-time these past two days and even though I’m surely not as far into it as some others are, it’s easy to see after any amount of playtime just how gorgeous its open-world is.
Perusing John’s inventory, you’ll notice he has a lasso, which he can use to rope all types of animals, including people. If you’re on horseback, you’re able to lasso unsuspecting civilians and drag them for as long as you please behind your galloping horse. It might not seem that revolting at first, but when you realize that this was a common form of justice not only in the actual West, but for centuries all over the world, the implications of dragging someone needlessly behind your horse takes on a disturbing nua
In the town of Blackwater, John encounters a sobbing pregnant woman who’s praying at a church. She asks him to go to the child’s father to ask him for money so she can have a better life for her and her child. When John finds the father, who (surprise!) is a total asshole, he challenges John to a standoff for insulting his honor. John guns him down, loots his body for cash, and heads back to the sobbing mot
The zombies are grotesque, bloated caricatures of the former residents and wildlife, John can ride rotting mounts, and the surviving residents are eaten and dismembered amongst their last gasping screams. The whole ordeal is disturbing to the senses; watching your favourite characters get killed or turned undead is bru
What Rockstar has built with Red Dead Redemption 2 isn’t just a vast world of splendor and beauty within which they have place random mission markers and enemy bases to go clear. Instead, this is a place that they’re legitimately wanting you to live in. Can it be tedious at times? Sure. But more often than not, I think it gives me a stronger sense of intimacy with both Arthur and this setting of the Wild West, and that’s something I haven’t felt in an open world Games collectibles-world title in quite awhile.
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson ( Boogie Nights , Punch-Drunk Love ) and featuring a towering Academy Award-winning performance from Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood ‘s emphasis on the struggles between the old ways of the West and the impending boom of the oil industry carries with it several ties to the time period that the Red Dead titles have explored, and likely will play into the themes of Red Dead Redemption 2 .
While it’s great that Rockstar is probably creating a whole new map for Red Dead Redemption 2 , it would be a lot of fun to revisit a location from the previous game to see how it’s changed. While it’s still unclear whether or not Red Dead Redemption is a prequel or sequel, either way it would be fun to see how towns like Blackwater and Armadillo have changed. If it’s a prequel, maybe players could see the early settlements of Blackwater, or a time when Thieves Landing wasn’t just filled with brothels and, well, thieves. If it’s a sequel, it would be amazing to see how a town evolved, like Armadillo, either grown to a hustling town like Blackwater or turned to a ghost town by bandits. Getting to explore areas that players did before would not only be a fun shout out to the original game, but help cement the world that Rockstar is trying to cre
One of the spookier finds thus far has been the discovery of a woman chained inside of an outhouse. She’s been disfigured and continues, with apparent difficulty, chanting off numbers in a specific order. If you’d like to see or hear her for yourself, you can head to the Braithwaite Estate. On the outer edge is the outhouse with the inmate in question. What’s her story? What do the numbers lead to? Is she locked in there for good reason? Or is it simply because she’s differ
What’s worth noting though is that I don’t think what Rockstar has done with these ideas is really all that revolutionary by any means. No: instead, they’ve just leaned into these things that other developers would certainly stray away from for the reasons that I’ve already heard many complain about this weekend — it ends up being too slow and too boring. However, Rockstar knew before release that Red Dead Redemption 2 would sell millions of copies no matter what they did. This notion allowed them far more experimentation and more willingness to take chances compared to what other studios might attempt. For the most part, I think it’s an experiment that has worked to Red Dead Redemption 2 ‘s benefit so far.
As the newest of the five films curated here, There Will Be Blood doesn’t quite fall in line with the more traditional “Westerns” that you might expect. Though the film doesn’t feature the gunfights, betrayals, and cowboys that mark more traditional Western, at its heart, There Will Be Blood is a dramatic and savage exploration of the American West and the turmoil it felt at the turn of the century.
