For those who don't know, Red Dead Redemption is a game for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 which follows the story of John Marston. Marston was an outlaw who changed his life after his old gang left him for dead. He now lives on a farm with his wife and son...well would be anyway except that government agents kidnapped his family and are using their safety as leverage to get Marston to kill some of his old outlaw buddies.
The game play is pretty much the same formula as the Grand Theft Auto series except set in the old west. So instead of cars, there are horses, caravans and trains. All in all the game is a fantastically written open-world experience. The adventure plays out somewhat typically as we progress through the story until, of course, Marston kills Dutch. Now with that being the main plot point of this whole game you expect that once this is done, the ride home to meet your now released family will mark the end of this adventure. Well, this game has more in store.
After reuniting with your wife and son it soon becomes clear that more missions are available. These missions are all rather tame and unexciting compared to the recently executed and exciting missions that were offered prior to the family reunion. Honestly, I got bored and stopped playing. I imagined that the end must be near but I couldn't deal with these mundane tasks so soon after taking down Dutch and his gang.
So almost two months later I picked up the game again to tackle the single player aspect (I played on-line multiplayer a bit in that time however). I guess having been away for a while I didn't mind the missions so much now. That is until the penultimate mission which suddenly had the army coming after Marston. It was a fantastic mission that had Marston fighting valiantly against scores of trained soldiers to protect his family. In the end, his family escaped on horseback and Marston remained behind to hold back the army while they made their break. What happened next surprised me.
Marston, held up in a barn with twenty or more soldiers waiting for him outside the door, pushes open the large barn door and(in dead eye mode) attempts to take down all of the soldiers. I thought: "Wow, what balls!" But then, having only taken out a few soldiers Marston is shot and killed in a very cinematic fashion. At this point I am thinking I am gonna have to try this again but then the game saves and doesn't offer an option to retry. At this point my heart deflates a bit. I think: "Did I do something wrong?" "Was I supposed to kill them all?" "This can't be how it ends."
I soon realise that this is the path the story takes and soon we see John's wife and son return to the barn to bury him. Then as the focus remains on the grave we see it age and then next to it appears Abigail's grave. And who is standing by the grave but his son Jack, all grown up and the splitting image of his father. One last mission remains and in this mission you play as Jack as he goes after the man that orchestrated the death of his father so many years before; Edgar Ross.
At first the ending took me for a loop. But I thoroughly enjoyed it. Those boring missions gave me an opportunity to get to know Abigail and Jack and feel for them and their loss even more. It also gave me a chance to see how hard John and Abigail were trying to keep Jack away from the life they led, the contrasting mundane farm life being a much better and safer option. After these missions, John's death really hurt me. I felt like I had failed when he was shot down. And I felt good taking the life of Edgar Ross and yet saddened by the fact that despite their best efforts, Jack seemed to have followed the same path as his father. All in all I say well played Rockstar, well played.
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