Red Dead Redemption is celebrating its 15-year anniversary today, May 18, 2025. Below, we consider that it may be better at showing than telling.
As a rule, Westerns are sincere. Sure, there are outright farces like Blazing Saddles. Plenty of classic Westerns like Rio Bravo have a warm, comedic side. Even dark epics like the Searchers have moments of levity. But even when they are funny, Westerns play their archetypes straight. They are easy to make fun of because they are so unfeigned. In this context, Red Dead Redemption struggles to find its place. It imports Grand Theft Auto’s satire into a bare and somber world. In many moments, protagonist John Marston is the only voice of reason among cliches and caricatures. When Red Dead Redemption talks, it is often cheap and unserious. When it shuts up, it manages a real poetry, thanks to its austere landscapes and unpretentious world.
First, let’s dig into its writing. RDR is a sunset Western, set in the waning days of Western expansion. Marston is a man out of time: a cowboy criminal in a world that wants to kill him (and will). Marston is foolish. He hunts down his former compatriots on the behest of the US government, because he hopes they will keep his promise to return his family to him and leave him alone. He is wrong. The killings he undertakes swing back on him and his family alike.
This tragic arc is compelling, but a relatively narrow portion of the game is spent on it. Far more time is spent on Marston cavorting with scoundrels to track his targets. These characters are mostly cliches. Nigel West Dickens is a sniveling snake-oil salesman. Irish is, well, a drunk Irishman. Agustin Allende is a cruel dictator, and Landon Ricketts a noble marshall. Like Rockstar’s other other open-world games, RDR’s story missions are largely siloed off from the rest of the game. Many of them are just ride-alongs: long discussions on horseback, after which there might be a shootout. A huge portion of RDR’s runtime is listening to inane characters prattle on as Marston scolds, tut-tuts, or shrugs his shoulders.
In this regard, the game’s treatment of Mexico is particularly egregious. The Mexican Revolution was one of the most complex conflicts of this time period, with dozens of factions. RDR reduces this to two sides: an oppressive government and a revolutionary army led by the charlatan Abraham Reyes, who only wants power for himself. Marston aids both sides to progress his own goals, thereby holding himself above the conflict altogether. He frowns as he helps the dictator destroy a village and shakes his head as the revolutionaries celebrate their victory. The game’s pessimism is not bleak, but cheap.
In part, the RDR’s political commentary feels incomplete because of Marsten himself. He is both an emblem of the United States’ worst sins, a hired gun meant to kill political dissidents and petty criminals alike, and a victim, a detainee forced to do labor the government won’t dirty its own hands with. This is a meaningful tension that RDR does not flesh out. If anything, Marsten’s plight is directly compared to the native peoples of the game. Both have been displaced from their homes. But Marsten is exactly the kind of white frontiersman who drove so many native peoples from their homelands. Because of the game’s satirical tone and Marsten’s wise-guy, above-it-all posture, it cannot mine that tension for drama.
The game even undercuts its most effective moments. When Marston crosses the border to Mexico, an original song by José González plays. I still remember reaching this moment for the first time. Dawn scattered light across the virtual desert. Blood-red dirt and sky shone in an unbroken line. But this moment is preceded by Irish’s drunken hijinks. The grandeur of RDR’s world makes the needle drop land, but it is a moment that the game does not build to or descend from.
However, the hardline separation between the delivery of RDR’s narrative and its wide-open world is an asset as much as a weakness. This is no Ubisoft checklist world. RDR’s side activities, particularly its minigames like poker and liar’s dice, exist on their own terms. You can’t capture outposts to spread your influence or win a tournament to become the most renowned poker player in the West. Instead, there’s a seat at the table for you, if you want to play a hand or two, but the dealer will deal with or without you. RDR’s random events can feel aggrandizing. Marston always arrives just in time to stop a highway robbery or rescue a fair maiden from vagabonds. But Marston can get swindled too. Highwaymen will try to take his horse or bandits will hide behind rocks to try and ambush him. These systems work in tandem to make the world feel separate from the player. The sun sets and rises. The same folks get drunk at the local bar every night. Marston wanders between them.
RDR’s simulacra of the natural world helps that sense of separateness, of things acting and moving without your input. The game features extensive hunting and foraging mechanics. Even if you don’t engage with them, creatures scatter in the bushes by the roadside, herds of buffalo and cattle graze in grassy fields, and a chance encounter with a bear can ruin your day. This does result in some silly video game hijinks–the game’s predators will attack you for no reason–but there is also a wildness that can settle into its quiet moments.
A large part of that wildness is that the game is still gorgeous. Each one of its biomes has a distinct character. It has its share of spectacular vistas, pulling on real-world locations like Monument Valley, but it is also willing to trade in mundanities: a well-worn dirt road, a chicken coop after dusk, playing horseshoes in the backyard. Rockstar’s obsession with granular, background simulation can be absurd, but it is also obviously a part of how its games feel unique. RDR is also quiet. There are no chattering radios or blaring car horns. There is only the desert. RDR can feel meditative, even boring, in a way few video games do.
The ending is where the best parts of RDR’s talkative side and its quiet side align. After completing his task, Marston returns to his farm and his family. His wife Abigail and his son Jack are not cliches. Both have complex feelings for the man who has been so absent from their lives. The game takes its time unraveling these threads. In the meantime, Marston works like an ordinary man. He does chores. For the game’s last few hours, there is a feeling of merely being in the world.
The ultimate, violent interruption of Marston’s quiet life is all more heartbreaking for how long it takes to come. The force of Red Dead Redemption’s final images help explain its outsized reputation. Marston promising his family he’ll find them when he knows he’ll die. A deep breath before facing the agents sent to kill him. Blood pouring from his mouth as he tries to stand. There is plenty of wanton violence in RDR, but this is a moment that feels actually senseless. It’s all because of how quiet it is, how much build-up leads to here. It is emblematic of RDR’s politics that a white settler is the ultimate, symbolic martyr of US state violence. That in no way takes away from the specter of death RDR summons at its conclusion.
But here’s the thing: One of RDR’s primary inspirations is Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. At once beautiful, bleak, and absurd, the novel follows a band of men as they murder for money along the line between Mexico and the US, loosely based on the real-life Glanton gang. Blood Meridian is ash and gunpowder printed to page. So much of RDR’s power is derived from it, the game can’t help but feel derivative. Furthermore, it reaches emotional depths RDR can’t offer in a fraction of the time. But what those can’t offer is RDR’s aesthetic embodiment. The spontaneous sunrise of a clear desert night, a coyote howl, a distant campfire, as you ride into the darkness.
For more on Red Dead Redemption’s 15th anniversary, read about its spaghetti western cinematic inspirations.
