Red Dead Redeption 2’s polygon review

Early in Red Dead Redemption 2, I meet a has-been gunslinger crumpled over a grimy bar in a livestock town on the outer fringe of the American West. He goes by Boy Calloway, but the codger’s a long way from that persona geographically, temporally, mentally. Aside Calloway sits his would-be biographer, in need of my services. Unable to squeeze a cogent anecdote from this puckered lemon, the author requests that I locate the living members of Calloway’s crew to gather stories of his former greatness, or strike dead those who would dispute the book’s “authenticity.” The assignment — like much of the game — is optional, but I take it, figuring I’ll meet some legendary cowboys and gunslingers. That’s not quite what happens.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is a prequel to the 2010 open-world Western, but I hesitate to say that it shares the genre. Like Calloway’s quest, the game isn’t quite what it claims to be. Set almost entirely within the American South two decades after Reconstruction, it tells two parallel stories: one, a fish-out-of-water journey featuring good-hearted criminal Arthur Morgan and his colleagues, all members of a notorious gang; the other, about the hollowness of mythmaking in the American West. It’s the latest entry in the trend of games that seem paradoxically crafted with love and a potent dose of self-hatred.

Safe to say, Red Dead Redemption 2 is the weirdest, slowest, most confounding big-budget game of this decade — if not any decade.