Red Dead Redemption 2
Developer: Rockstar Games
Publisher: Rockstar Games
Platform: Reviewed on PS4
Availability: Out on Xbox One and PS4 on October 26th
It's those thousands of small details that do the convincing: the way the oil shimmers on the surface of the water that sits outside the factories of chilly Annesburg, the cold stare and silence that meets you when you drag your scruffy frame through the saloon doors of the more cultured Saint Denis, the lamps that flicker across the midnight quiet in the town of Rhodes. It's the way it'll make a keen botanist of you, admiring the Spanish moss that hangs from the bald cypress of the bayou, the pines up in the mountains or the white oaks down on the plains, all shifting beautifully in the breeze. Even before you get to the fauna that lies underneath, it's a world that feels alive. It's in the way you'll see that weather build overhead, thick crops of cloud rolling in over the expanse of country - from most vantage points the horizon is thrillingly distant, the sky so vast above it all - while meticulously studied cloud formations swirl together. The craft that's gone into Red Dead Redemption 2's world - painstaking, expensive and arguably at too great a human cost - is evident in every frame.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is a world of vivid textures, too. There's the thick mud you brawl in along the main strip of Valentine, the town where your adventures start, the coarse leather of a coat you've crafted from the wildlife you're free to hunt down, or just the taut hide of your horse that ferries you from place to place. It's a world you have a tangible place in, thanks to Rockstar's use once again of Euphoria animation technology that sees you stumble, sprint and collide with objects in the world, grounding you in it. Impressively - and somewhat cruelly - that extends to your horse now too, an aggressive trot into a tree trunk proving just as grisly as any of GTA's more violent moments. That physicality, brilliantly, extends to your inventory system. Kill a deer and to take it back to your camp you'll sling it on the back of your horse for the ride home, watching its soft belly jostle in time with the canter. The same philosophy extends to the weapons you take with you, picked up from your horse and slung over your back. It's a smart way of grounding you even further in Red Dead Redemption 2's world, even if - in what becomes something of a recurring theme - that elegance isn't met by the deeper design, where an overly fussy rotary selection system has you all fingers and thumbs when performing even the most perfunctory task. That philosophy can be effective, though. Red Dead Redemption 2's world leaves an impact on your avatar, the pointedly gritty wilds muddying your horse's hide and your clothes until you either brush your ride down and pay to use a bathhouse or incur the disgust and disdain of those around you. That dirt will clog up your arsenal as well, requiring you to clean your guns lest they lose their potency. It's part of that same busywork - very engaging busywork, mind - in which you can maintain the length of your hair and beard or let it grow unruly, can choose to pomade it in the morning or cover it with your favourite hat (which you may well lose in a fight if you're not careful - though thankfully you can pick up anyone else's in its place), or you can get thin or fat depending on whether you overindulge in the food you're required to eat in order to maintain your stamina core.
But Red Dead Redemption 2 wears its RPG trappings lightly, and wilfully so - it's happy, you sense, to take on a little fuzziness in order to sidestep fussiness, streamlining systems in order to keep you grounded in its world. That same approach is evident in your encounters - you can interact with every single non-player character, though your verbs are limited to simple interactions such as 'greet', 'callout', 'antagonise' or 'defuse'. There's always 'shoot' too, of course - something which is a bit too easy to do given a context-sensitive control system that, bewilderingly and fatally for some poor bystanders, occasionally has the button you draw your weapon with as the very same which you use to pull the trigger. In a game of often impeccable detail, it's a strange oversight. Red Dead Redemption 2's best stories, as ever in a Rockstar game, are to be found in the margins, the very best to be scribbled yourself. Sometimes that's just picking up on environmental details and connecting the dots - the gold prospector that sifts through their haul in the middle of a river, or maybe something even more sinister as you pick up the trail of a serial killer. Or maybe it's losing yourself in an epic hunt - there are almost 200 species here, each lovingly realised for you to shoot and skin and scalp - or stopping to help a stranger in one of the seemingly endless incidental encounters.