Returning many years later because at the time I thought it might be a masterpiece for its incredible sadness as a thing in its own right, and for its advancements within Rockstar games' linear history (if this is indeed 'GTA with horsies'). GTA IV pared back the 'scope' of San Andreas which was frankly too big for its own good (according to its detractors), shooting instead for a world which was living, breathing, and, crucially, inhabited (where SA was 3-4 cities surrounded by hills and (both intentional and unintentional) ghost towns). Red Dead proved you could have it both ways — when playing it feels lonesome it's thematically lonesome (rather than forgotten by devs) — there's enough variety in the environment that everything feels significant, and if that's not enough then the NPCs and animals found in the wild acknowledge the player's presence, whether through fear or violence.

My issue with it then was that everything post-Fort Mercer disappeared in a haze and then it was over. I've tried to pay attention to it this time in order to account for lost time, and what happens is that after Fort Mercer, Red Dead actually does become something like Grand Theft auto: Horsies. The landscape becomes secondary to the action or to advancing the plot, and all is lost in a blur of cutscenes, quirky NPCs, fighty-bits, and however much John Marston protests "I'll only help you if you advance the plot for me," (thus contextualising the fighty-bits) decentralised activity making for a sort of action-game lobotomy. This becomes incredibly obvious having 'completed' Mexico, riding (if, as you should, one refuses to fast-travel) through those war-torn deserts to the familiarly barren Rio Bravo/Cholla Springs, and stopping for a second in the prairie of Hennigan's Stead where the formative bits of Red Dead played out: in a silent introduction our hero is coerced into enacting a revenge that he does not believe in, where we think he will show off his ability to enact said revenge but is instead overpowered in spite of his stoic-cowboy verbalising, where he then wakes up in a shack on some prairie thanks entirely to the kindness of strangers, removes himself from his bed, and shoots rabbits and shit in the thickened and tender time of the prairie.

The body is a tomb and the body is vulnerable — in spite of the metaphysically astounding skies (the way different types of light effectively re-paint the entire world as it occurs in real life: from the harsh sun of midday where the game plays prickly, to the diffused magic hour where one moves slower) and weather (the storms with the power of a JMW Turner), Marston walks down the stairs one at a time. If I could write for shit I would write 100 pages on John Marston walking down the stairs one at a time and what this means experientially for the player, but these non-sentences will have to suffice: because the character is 'trapped' in this situation (depersonalised revenge on those who mean something, personally) and the player is trapped with him (as him?), the tragedy is gut-wrenchingly fatalistic. The body is a tomb, the revenge is hollow, the fights are both confusing and dissatisfying (almost Peckinpah-esque), and the videogame medium has been used for this anti-western in a way that is distinct to the videogame medium — it's embodiment as punishment. The painterly dimensions and cross-media references (Rockstar's pop culture regurgitation and the fact that most 'westerns' we admire are samurai films re-tooled as examinations of the values and tropes of the western previous) are worthy of critical discussion and admiration, but the way the game plays as a game (kinaesthetically) is where the ineluctable art lies. Even when one was not flying in GTA there was a forward momentum and impression that the body could transcend the world-as-prop. The best one can do in Red Dead is shoot birds from the sky, to bring what is up there down here with us. Whether one agrees that the landscape is the protagonist or not, it is sublime in the Schopenhauerian sense (i.e. not just beautiful skies) — it reminds again and again that the player is trapped in it, that it cannot sustain her, and that it will outlive her.

This cosmic insignificance is acknowledged and worked with in the early game, killing rabbits, herding cattle, and attempting to use in-game markers rather than the inexplicable horse GPS. As a build-up to a doomed stand-off, the game is perfect. One could certainly account for the blur of violence, narrative sub-plots, and ends-driven travel that begins at the 33% mark by pointing out that the further the character returns to his 'old ways', the less he gives a shit about his sublime insignificance, shooting rabbits, ascending/descending the stairs step by step, etc, and the more he welcomes the psychosis of ends-driven ultraviolence. But three things in particular stand in opposition to this: the fact that the player is 'welcomed' to Mexico with a forced on-the-rails twitch-game massacre (in stark contrast to the game earlier asking the player to consider every life they might take), the late game where Marston receives his payment (and the prairie-like 'every little thing matters' nature of the early game returns with it), and the ending (whose tragedy/fatalism/etc is reinforced or even resurrected by the return of the aforementioned prairie-style gameplay).

Red Dead Redemption is bookended by folk tragedy and low-key non-heroics brought about by a body that cannot help but react to every single rock, tree, patch of grass, drop of rain, sunset, staircase. What happens in the middle is one of the downsides to creating something expensive when success is measured by financial returns, and the way to guarantee said returns is to imagine the dumbest possible audience. There's enough to argue the case that Red Dead is one of the more thoughtful, fatalistic masterpieces of the medium, but the concessions it makes to fulfil its obligations to an imagined audience who want GTA: Horsies are difficult to ignore.