Systems: PlayStation 3/4/5, Xbox 360/S/X, Windows, Linux, Steam OS, iOS, Android, & Nintendo Switch
Release Date: May 18, 2010 - December 2, 2025
Time Spent: 33 Hours 12 Minutes
We're going to keep this a little short.
Red Dead Redemption is a 16-year-old game, although the Steam port is almost two years old. This is a game with over 25,000,000 copies sold across all platforms since its initial release. Between 2010 and 2011, it won 17 of the 37 awards it was nominated for. It has a Metacritic rating of 95, if those kinds of ratings are your thing. The point is, the only thing I can offer about this game is a brief look at how I've been playing it and how it's been running on the Steam Deck so far.
Before I started playing, I had Patrick Gill's 2024 video about roleplaying in Red Dead Redemption 2 in the back of my mind. I don't think I've rewatched it since then, but I remembered the parts where he said that he rediscovered a newfound appreciation for that game when he was roleplaying the character, and not just playing a video game. For the most part, that is kind of how I already enjoy playing 3rd-person adventure games, like Tears of the Kingdom and Skyrim. So, without knowing the mechanics, I planned to roleplay John Marston as someone who needed sleep, would take jobs when he needed extra cash, and would jump into story missions when they made the most sense. And for the most part, that's worked out well.
At the beginning of the game, when John Marston is recouped by Bonnie McFarlane, I thought it important to perform as many tasks as I could around the farm before heading out to do significant exploration of the area. I then made the mistake of trying to take a bounty and capture bandits before I did the story mission where you get a rope and learn how to lasso horses and people; I thought bounty hunting would help earn money to pay back the doctor's fees, which I was sad to find out you don't actually need to pay Bonnie and her father back. As it turned out, a lot of the story missions on the McFarlane ranch also functioned as tutorial levels, but without explicitly keeping you on the ranch with invisible walls or guards pushing you back if you tried to leave.
I was sad to find out, thankfully pretty early on, that the only purpose of collecting flowers and plants, and collecting resources from animals like meat, skin, and antlers, was to sell them to make money. Granted, there are a couple of optional side quests where an NPC will ask you to collect three of each flower that grows in the region to give to his ailing wife, but for the most part, it's to make money. I was also a little sad that the bank in the town of Armadillo serves no function, and that the bank clerk is stuck in an endless animation of tending the furnace (I think it's the furnace), hoping that I could deposit my money, thinking that if I died, I would lose a portion of it as another doctor's fee when I respawned; which is not actually how the game works. I was then shocked when I went behind the counter to talk to the clerk, and he immediately freaked out; I got a wanted rating and a bounty for attempting to rob the bank.
That's another thing that I've found I'm a little frustrated with, but in an amusing way, in RDR. Accidentally doing something I didn't mean to do and everyone going absolutely apeshit. Just last night I was riding along, and someone on horseback was being attacked by a small pack of wolves. I entered Dead Eye mode (a mode you activate when aiming to slow down time to be that much more of a badass), and in the process of shooting the aggressive wolves, I accidentally also shot the leg of the horse. This led the person I was trying to help to start shooting me, and when I returned fire, my Honor level plummeted by 100; I think it was around 250 or 300. In another instance, I accidentally rode my horse into a nun whom I was trying to talk to to turn in a side quest, but the game registered that as an attack, and she ran off into the bush, and I failed.
I mention this because these instances are the few and far between times when I haven't roleplayed. I reload a previous save file. But saving in the game isn't as straightforward as a modern auto-save or a start>menu>system>save file progression. Saving in the game is done automatically when you complete quests, when you hitch your horse, and when you manually save when you go to sleep. There have been a couple of times I've pulled up an autosave or a previous game file, losing 15-20 minutes of gameplay because of unintended actions I didn't mean to perform. However, I just read about a method to "trick" the game into autosaving and not having the game progress time by six hours, which is what usually happens when you manually save. I guess I'll need to buy a second horse deed.
I'll wrap up this article with some positivity.
Right before you go up against Bill Williamson at Fort Mercer, I was afraid I was reaching the end of the game, maybe 15-20 hours in, and with so much of the map that was either inaccessible or that I just hadn't explored yet, I was confused. Thankfully, the game pulled a minor deus ex machina: Bill Williamson escaped during the assault, and now John Marston finds himself in fictionalized Northern Mexico. While in Mexico, there is no attempt to have the player understand Spanish unless the player already understands Spanish. There are Spanish subtitles, but that's because I have subtitles turned on. I think it would be a fun mechanic to have John learn/study Spanish while he's in Mexico, so the Spanish dialogue is roughly translated over time, but that would be assuming that the game takes place over months, and not just an eventful fortnight. But for the meantime, I enjoy having John sheepishly looking at his feet while two people have an argument in Spanish around him, and there's no effort to tell the character anything about what's being said.
Like millions of people have already known, Red Dead Redemption is a gorgeous game with some great voice acting and, so far at least, is telling an engaging story. There hasn't been anything revolutionary, and I might be a little terrified to find out what my body count so far is, but that's the same thing that was brought up with BioShock: Infinite. I'm really enjoying riding my horse between locations, and when I do use a stagecoach to "fast travel," it's usually because I don't want to ride all the way across an expansive land and run the risk of getting ambushed and not initially being able to tell who the bandit is and who the hostage is, or getting ganked by a mountain lion out of the blue. And even then, I'll sit and watch about half of the trip for the rotating camera angles before pressing A to skip to the destination. I enjoy having John buy three to four drinks at the cantina, drinking himself into a near stupor after setting fire to a village of rebels so that he can progress the story to find out where Bill Williamson might be in Mexico. I'm enjoying this game. I enjoy roleplaying John Marston, as I think he might have lived in/about a fictionalized 1911 Southwestern United States.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
P.S. I realized I didn't talk much about the experience of playing on the Steam Deck. It runs just fine without any compatibility issues. I play the game locked at a maximum of 60fps with a lot of the graphical settings turned up to High and Ultra, which is probably why the fan blows a lot, and if the Steam Deck isn't plugged in, it will run the battery down from 99% to 10% in less than an hour. The only annoyance is that because the game automatically logs you into whatever Rockstar server you're forced to log into when you start the game, if you pause the game and power down the Steam Deck, I'll get kicked out of the game when I turn the system back on. Progress is lost after the last save/autosave. So that's not fun, but otherwise no other issues that I've noticed.
P.P.S. I get that there are a lot of randomized encounters that the game generates, but one of the stranger and darker ones happened while I was running back to the McFarlane ranch because my horse got shot while I was trying to take out some bandits. A woman was crying over a dead man, and this was out in the middle of nowhere; northeast of Armadillo and west of the McFarlane ranch. I stopped and looked at them because I couldn't talk to them; the game didn't give me the option. Then this woman bent over, picked up a revolver off the man's body, and then shot herself. Like, what's their story!? I get it's random, but still. Damn.
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