Red Dead Redemption
Throughout the entirety of Rockstar’s epic Western, outlaw John Marston’s Dead Eye ability has felt something like a superpower. It contributes to the game’s wonderful power fantasy, making you feel like the greatest sharpshooter there ever was, and making Marston at least as mythic as any gunslinger Clint Eastwood ever portrayed. And then, in the game’s unforgettable climax, all of this gets beautifully undermined. A slew of lawmen (who are the real villains here, turning on Marston and his family even after Marston gave them everything they wanted) show up to eliminate him.
Marston pushes open the doors to his farmhouse and strides out to meet them. The game automatically activates Dead Eye, and sure, you can take some of them with you, but against the crushing power of the state, it’s hopeless. It’s an amazing example of video game mechanics being used to give a game thematic weight and greater emotional impact. Even with this ability that has served you so well, that has been the source of so many of your victories up to this point, John cannot be saved, not even close.
That would have been enough to earn Red Dead Redemption a place among the greatest endings of all time, but as it turns out, that’s not even the half of its greatness. After John’s death, we jump forward some years and find ourselves in control of Jack, John’s son. When last we saw him, Jack was something of a bookish child, put off by his father’s predilection for violence, and there was hope, it seemed, that he might escape the life of gunfire and bloodshed. But no. Violence breeds violence, the cycle perpetuates itself, and by ruthlessly taking John’s life, the architects of John’s demise unknowingly put Jack on the path to violence and vengeance himself. Playing Jack as he comes to collect some retribution for his father’s death—using, yes, John’s Dead Eye ability, passed down from father to son—feels both satisfying and tragic. It’s the kind of thematic complexity worthy of a great American epic.—Carolyn Petit
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