We start with a long interlude scene that precedes a classic train robbery and immediately fails to find a place to stop the gaze. The signs of the horses in the snow, the saddlebags rocking, the sun reflecting on the mud puddles where the thaw began, the light fog rising from a pond. A sensory assault to which you should be accustomed after years of "such a graphic design had never been seen", and instead you always return to that child who opened his eyes passing from the Commodore 64 to the Amiga.
The train robbery goes through a thousand beautiful genre clichés and you're happy, but all in all calm because yes, okay, Red Dead Redemption 2 looks beautiful, but it's a beauty to which Rockstar has accustomed you. It's like eating pasta with your mother's sauce, a familiar, reassuring goodness, that doesn't tire you but doesn't take you any further.
Then suddenly you find yourself on a small hill above a dusty road that in the distance goes between two rock plateaus that someone seems to have divided with the slit of a huge sword. In the distance there is a chain of whitewashed mountains. The wind moves a bush close to you, at the bottom a diligence that moves slowly and some guitar notes in the background offer a discreet accompaniment at the moment.
You're on your horse, wearing a leather jacket up to your knees, gray pants and a worn black hat. As the developer moves the camera around the landscape, he talks, but you're not listening to him. You are in there, you are on that horse and you want to find out what lies beyond that road, in those mountains. You want to do it because there is no indicator on the screen that tells you where you should go or what you should do. Finally, after Breath of the Wild, someone figured it out.
You think about all the western movies you saw with your father, about when he sewed your cowboy costume, about when he gave you the errands to do by telling you "You dig". Why does your head always go back there? Damn roots, damn eyes.
After a couple of minutes of showing you how to ride a horse, how to access the inventory of the saddle and how to extract the weapons suddenly the guy next to you in the Rockstar shirt gives you the pad. "Do you want to try it out?"
- It almost gets out of hand because you didn't notice that your hands started to sweat more or less from the beginning of the demo.
At first it's like learning to walk, you get close to someone, you try to say goodbye to them or threaten them and you see how they react. It's a clever, sensible system, because it automatically puts you in front of people, not potential targets as in GTA. You're driven to behave in a civilized way, because there's no reason to be uncivilized with those who meet you on the street and greet you with a "Howdy!". But maybe you're just older and no longer want to see how quickly you can reach the five stars. You even give two dollars to a blind old man begging on the street.
"In Red Dead Redempion 2, weapons aren't always the answer." I hope you have an idea of the importance of such a phrase in a game like this. It means getting closer to the reality of things, it means giving the player a different alternative to escape and violence, it means, finally, take the medium beyond the idea that a game has "mature content" just because you can kill or see the nude. Maybe it's the first time a game has seen the possibility of firing a warning shot.
Shyly try to hunt a deer, the developer shows the view of the hunt and twists your mouth for the first time. It's like seeing Assassin's Creed: everything gets grey and the colour shows you your wind-borne smell, blood traces and nearby animals. You understand its general meaning, but you perceive it as a betrayal and you promise not to use it at all.
Take the fallow deer, but it runs away for a while, I find it a little further on agonizing. I take a breath and end up with a hunting knife. Then I see my alter ego literally skinning him in front of me and loading the carcass on his shoulder. When I put it on the horse, I see the blood stain on my coat and my eyes peel off. "You know, in the city they will react based on how you're dressed and certainly as dirty as six could respond with coldness and detachment.
You've heard such phrases so many times, but it's the only time you've heard that it's true. You walk through the streets of a village with mud that dirties your boots, you listen to the stories of passers-by, you caress a dog, you buy a new gun and on the mother-of-pearl stock you have the symbol of a scorpion engraved. You take a bath in a hotel, you go down to the saloon and you f**k off, in other situations it would have ended with you killing everyone in the place, instead the sheriff says "This time you pass" and shortly after the pharmacist talks about what you did.
This system will surely have limits that will come out in time, but in the meantime there is, and there is, and before there was, not so, not with this naturalness that leaves you all the time to enjoy the game world virtually without detachment.
At a certain point you lose yourself in the details, the birds that you can only hear if they are in the area, the footprints in the mud, the various types of horses, clothes and weapons, the beard that grows naturally, the sunset, the peeling paint of a sign. You'll be exalted for no reason when you discover that you can put on glitter and you don't know why. This leads you to ask stupid questions: you see your alter ego with skin cooked by the sun and you ask "Can you tan too?".