There are so many things to do in Red Dead Redemption 2. Even just playing the game as intended, you’ll spend well over 100 hours working your way through the story, filling compendiums, and helping out eccentric gunslingers, painters, robot makers, and potential time travelers. The best way to play the game though is to just do nothing.
I’ve played Red Dead Redemption 2 three times in total, and I still haven’t seen it all. Those dinosaur bones are never getting collected, sorry mate. I'm still discovering new things, and last time around I finally fell in love with the snow. The story is overlong in places – Guarma, mostly, but there are other indulgences – but each individual mission is almost faultless. Even the Guarma missions are excellent in isolation; they do Uncharted better than Uncharted.
Other missions that you can snip out of the overarching narrative – John’s jailbreak, the hot air balloon, drinking with Fenton – are all so enjoyable on their own that you can understand why Rockstar kept them in, even if someone somewhere probably needed to trim ten hours here or there out of it. Playing it three times, I feel like I’ve seen everything these very linear stories have to offer, and I’ve done as many of the side quests as I care to do. Again, those dinosaur bones? Never happening. But there’s still something in Red Dead Redemption 2, and that something is ‘nothing’.
It would be impossible for me to fully complete RDR2: there are too many animals to hunt, too many games of poker to play in too many specific ways, and of course, too many dinosaur bones. I really do hate those bones. Because I know I will never actively complete the game, and because I’ve played the game the ‘right’ way enough times that I don’t feel the need to race ahead, I’m at peace and can instead do nothing.
I can gallop through the fields, not chasing any exotic snake, not trying to make a certain quest spawn, and not heading off to any mission marker. Just galloping to gallop. I can fish just to fish, play cards just to play cards, or collect dinosaur bones just to collect dinosaur bones. I’m not going to do that last one though.
Red Dead Redemption 2 offers you the world and everything in it, but I’ve already had that three times. I’m… well, I’m not quite bored of it, but I’m definitely ready to try something new. I don’t need to play a new game to try something new though, I just need to not play RDR2. Not play it and instead exist in it.
RDR2 is one of the most gorgeous games around, and the vast map makes for incredibly varied and detailed landscapes. You can travel around it, experiencing all facets of America in one day, or set up camp and breathe in a single location until your lungs fill with the atmosphere of the wilderness. People talk a lot about the stories you stumble across in RDR2, and I have plenty of those myself. The hillfolk being conned out of their land always catches me by surprise when I wander into it. But having already seen all of these stories, I'm having more fun writing my own. While the map is packed with events, it's also full of gaping holes of nothing, and it's in these pockets where the game surrenders to you in a way its linear missions and heavily scripted side stories cannot.
There are endless things to do in Red Dead Redemption 2, but sometimes the best way to enjoy them is to just let them end anyway.
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