Video game review: Meditative Red Dead Redemption 2 is a slow masterwork

You may find the first hours of Red Dead Redemption 2 somewhat ponderous. The game’s introduction and tutorial levels are intentionally slow. Players are locked into a linear experience, during which time you learn a bit about the person you’ve become, Arthur Morgan, and his role as a lieutenant in the criminal gang of Dutch van der Linde.

If you played Red Dead Redemption, some of the characters in the gang are familiar, because they appeared in that game as antagonists. In this prequel, though, they are part of your family.

I bristled a bit at the lack of independence but realized that was how the developers at Rockstar Games got me to recognize that this open-world game is not like other open-world games. It’s more of a simulation. The systems in place are intricate and intertwined, the world existing whether you engage with it or not.

And the pace doesn’t change much after the world has opened up. You’ll spend hours on horseback simply riding from place to place. You won’t be looking to the map for side missions, because you just discover them occurring where you happen to be. The slower gait of the game gives you time to appreciate the attention to detail and the exquisite characterizations and dialogue, time to meditate on the themes of expectation, honour, and freedom.

Available for PS4 and Xbox One, Red Dead Redemption 2 is set in a fictionalized version of the American frontier in 1899 and is carefully constructed to peel away the myth and romance of the Wild West.

The role-playing and crafting systems in the game are a bit arcane, and the controls of the game are soft, much the same as they were eight years ago.

But if you don’t mind a game that plays things slow, it’s easy to be at peace with those limitations.

And for an open-world game, this one has value. The game’s epilogue is almost as long as the 50-hour narrative itself, and it all concludes with the map opening up even more. The world of Red Dead Redemption 2 is one you will want to continue exploring long after the game is done with you.