Because even though you know Arthur will somehow muster the strength to see the game through to the end of its narrative course, he will now approach every story mission in worse health, looked on as sickly and incapable by those around him. Why? Because it puts a ticking clock on you. A death sentence that will be enacted in the cruelest way - by making Arthur progressively weaker and weaker the longer he manages to hold on. For me, it happened on a sunny afternoon in Saint Denis when, suddenly, fresh from a job killing rats in a local dive bar for a couple bucks pay, Arthur starts coughing. And with every forced move or desperate fight, the gang (and, therefore, Arthur) becomes weaker.īut then, around mid-game, there comes a moment when this leeching of power becomes personal. The gang is constantly on the run, being hounded and hunted by the law, Pinkertons, the forces of industrialization. Nothing will ever go as well as things went in the imagined past, before we snapped into Arthur's skin.Īnd for the first half of the game, this is all done gently - jobs going wrong, splinters of division in the gang, an increasing sense that Dutch (a bookish psychopath, but also Arthur's friend, father-figure, mentor and image of criminal decency) is losing his grip on both morality and sanity. But Blackwater is where it all turned sour on them. Previous to it, we're led to believe that they were all both skilled and lucky - a gang at the height of their strength and power. When we meet Arthur et al., they're on the run from a job gone bad in the town of Blackwater. They just wanna make a few bucks, find a place where no one will bother them, and live out their days free of the shackles of their rapidly modernizing society. They don't want to live with The Man's boot on their collective neck. But they're noble (or believe they are) because they commit their crimes in service of Dutch's vision of Utopian personal freedom. They are a band of outlaws - bank robbers and loan sharks, working girls and stick-up artists. That's the power curve: the only absolutely true and inviolable law of the video game world.īecause here, Arthur Morgan and his pals in the Dutch van der Linde gang begin the game just past the apex of their power curve. By the end-game, you're basically a god walking among men, capable of defeating the Final Boss and bringing peace to Hyrule (or whatever). But whatever it is, you learn that through hard work and dedicated grinding you can become. At its most basic, it works like this: You, the player, are dropped into a world as a (nearly) helpless pixel-blob, alone and vulnerable. It is the core narrative and gameplay mechanic in virtually every game since Pac-Man. The Power Curve is what makes video games work. So seriously, stop reading now if that sort of thing Clints your Eastwood.Īll Tech Considered Reading The Game: This War Of Mine So instead, I'm going to focus on one brave, subverting, possibly unique choice, made early in the Rockstar writer's room, that, narratively speaking, makes this Red Dead unlike any other game I've ever played. It's why deconstructionists are often very little fun at parties. It is a film brought to life, a novel given legs, and to speak about any piece of it is to necessarily reduce it to a bunch of cogs and sprockets - how this piece fits with that one. It is, in the universe of video games, our Godfather, our Star Wars or Wild Bunch - the work that transcends its genre and, in this case, its medium. Enough, maybe, to say that it tells, over the course of 60-plus hours, an epic, bloody tale of betrayal and obsolescence. It is, in the universe of video games, our 'Godfather,' our 'Star Wars' or 'Wild Bunch' - the work that transcends its genre and, in this case, its medium.īut RDR2 is too big, too sprawling, too full for taking on in a piece-by-piece look at the story.
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