Red Dead Redemption 2‘s snowy tutorial in Colter puts a unique spin on teaching. It’s got all the usual things you’d expect from an opening segment — explainers for how to use the controls, how to not get shot, what most of those little icons on the screen mean. But it also goes a step further and teaches you what the game is about. Whether you know what to expect from the first Red Dead or not, the gang’s time in Colter makes it plain the sequel-prequel is about the slow, inexorable decay of hope.
Here you are in this great, vast wilderness with untold potential for Doing Things — and you can’t do a damn one of them. You can ride a horse in a straight line, and then you can do it again. There’s a gunfight, but it’s over so fast. Finally, finally, you can actually be a bandit and rob a train. Except Dutch, the leader of the gang, didn’t think things through — again. So now the Pinkertons are after y’all. Found family problems aside, there’s another issue hanging in the air. Everyone seems weary, and sure, that’s partly because Dutch shot an innocent person and two members of their group are dead. But the malaise goes beyond shock and grief. It feels like apathy.
Red Dead Redemption 2 has a lot of strengths, but one of them is how it inverts the usual storytelling formula. Yes, in a prequel to the original Red Dead Redemption, there’s only one possible way things could play out — badly, for everyone. But rather than building toward a big climax where Dutch’s ineptitude is plain for all to see, Red Dead 2 starts with the end of the dream. It’s just that no one knows it yet, or, more to the point, they aren’t willing to acknowledge it. Arthur and a few of the other more aware members of Dutch’s gang have a hunch that things aren’t going well. Dutch is probably aware, in some corner of his mind, that the future he promised everyone is gone, that there’s no chance of finding a utopia or and little hope of making their own anymore.
So all you and the gang are left with is the promise of a spring thaw and the illusion that things will get better. That’s a pretty grim outlook, and your misgivings are quickly proven true. Dutch steadily becomes paranoid and self-destructive when his charisma isn’t enough to keep everyone together anymore — even he can’t keep pretending a better tomorrow is just around the corner. Micah’s betrayal just so happens to be the catalyst that started the gang’s descent into destruction, but it would’ve happened anyway — from another botched job, maybe, or the inescapable fact that there was really nowhere to hide from the Pinkertons for long.
The wilderness is closed to you in Red Dead 2‘s tutorial, and so is the promise of the Wild West itself and the future that promise held. Your path and actions are hemmed in by forces beyond your control. Things might get better for you, the player, as the world opens up with more opportunities. But Arthur and the Van Der Linde gang never really leave Colter. Their dreams, and the versions of themselves who thought those dreams could come true, die there, and the rest of the game is about making them face that fact.
