492 Words About: A Rifle on a Mountain-Red Dead Redemption 2
Standing next to a frozen corpse on a mountain while the sun rises is a solid vibe.
Let me explain.
I started replaying Red Dead Redemption 2 recently because my girlfriend plays it religiously, but she and I have different play styles. She doesn’t play the story, she just hunts everything and plays around in the world while I try to collect the weapons, cigarette cards, gold bars and actually follow Arthur Morgan’s story. Having recently discovered an interactive map for the game this has made my job easier (and rather enjoyable) and so looking at the Northwest Quadrant I saw that there were, to quote parlance of yesteryear, “Gold in them thar snowy hills.”
Gold in this sense, was cigarette cards and a carbine repeater.
I packed Arthur plenty of food, warm clothes, and snacks for his horse and rode for the snowy mountains. Finding the cards wasn't too difficult, but the carbine required some navigation.
There’s several abandoned cabins in Red Dead Redemption 2 that are haunting in their appearance. Entering them, and looking around, I’m always waiting for an NPC to stumble in through the doors, guns blazing. This cabin was buried in snow and remained empty. I searched everywhere but no gun could be found. I looked outside and discovered a trail that led into the woods and so I followed it.
It wasn’t a long hike. Just vertical until I crested over a hill.
Resting on a small bump of snow was a figure and as Arthur approached I saw it was the body of a frozen human being, clutching the carbine. Pilfering the rifle from its former, and now frozen owner wasn’t difficult, but what was difficult was tearing myself away from the view. The sun was peeking over the edges of the mountains on a new day, and the landscape was nothing but the somber grays and blues of the mountains broken by the blank snow.
It was beautiful.
The popular rhetoric about Open-World videogames that’s often sold to consumers is that they have the potential for players to become, “lost in a new world.” With a few notable exceptions, I’ve found this is usually bunk. Numerous open world games are empty collectathons that are trying to replicate the success of other, and far better crafted games. The promise of the Open-World videogame however is still enticing entirely because there is a hope that a game will create the experience of being in an entirely different reality.
And Red Dead Redemption 2 succeeded beautifully.
The intellectual impression of looking at Arthur looking at a recreation of the Appalachian mountains in the snow was an aesthetic and emotional triumph. I perceived this reality and for a few moments I was effectively in that reality. The freezing air and the screeches of nearby eagles were simulated, but standing next to that corpse and holding that carbine I was alive in a world totally different from my own.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
8.30.2024
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