I should have known better, as the whole cowboy genre is terrible as fuck. Westerns (as boomer Americans call the genre) have the slowest dialogue, the corniest patriarchal story-line, and are obviously filled with a heap ton of other problematic bits. Of course, I had to try as the game got great reviews. I thought I'd try it with the Steam summer sale.

Fuckkkkkkkk the long boring ass cut scenes. OMG pls talk faster and have dialogue that's interesting. The beginning of the game is just 30 minutes of video and riding your horse so slowly through the snow. I thought that my TikTok brain couldn't stand some old slow game from a bygone era, but I'm checking this shit and it was released in 2018!

If I was some prat who loved the mythology of the "settling of the west", a game with a white dude on a horse on a mountain would get me hard. Why can't more games be like Atomic Heart? I wanna defend the land of Stalin and have cut scenes with good dialogue a talking glove that debates theory and a sexy refrigerator that probably wants to murder me.

  • Stolen_Stolen_Valor [any]
    ·
    6 months ago

    Does the debtor thing change over the game? I remember that incident early on being what gets him really thinking about who he is.

    Major spoilers for RDR2.

    spoiler

    The entirety of the debtor storyline pretty much sums up Arthur’s entire character arc. He loathes working for Muller Strauss in the (first?) collection mission he contracts the illness that eventually wakes him the fuck up. Over the course of the game when you accept missions from Muller, Arthur snipes at him over the nature of his work and grouses about having to be his attack dog. When he finds out he is dying, he starts wrestling with his mortality and with it his morality. This culminates with him giving Muller Strauss the boot from the camp. (Or I think outright killing him? It might be a decision I can’t remember.)

    My biggest criticism of the games writing is it saying “Arthur doing these shakedowns is the thing that literally kills him” It’s a bit too on the nose but overall the writing is great.

    • ButtBidet [he/him]
      ·
      6 months ago

      Sorry if I don't get involved in this discussion as I don't know the game enough. I just think that it's cool that you two are really hashing this out.

      • QuietCupcake [any, they/them]
        ·
        6 months ago

        This discussion shows one of the main reasons why it's such a good game though. It has a depth that very few other games have achieved, not just in terms of the world and lore, but as a genuinely human kind of story that also manages not to turn all its social commentary into tepid, lib-friendly clichés.

        However I don't know why people in this thread keep calling the loan shark character "Muller." His name is Strauss.

    • Tunnelvision [they/them]
      ·
      6 months ago

      My biggest criticism of the games writing is it saying “Arthur doing these shakedowns is the thing that literally kills him” It’s a bit too on the nose but overall the writing is great.

      There is literally nothing wrong with this? What exactly is the criticism?

      • Stolen_Stolen_Valor [any]
        ·
        6 months ago

        Its a minor criticism, but my issue with it is it’s not subtle. Like working for a debtor was obviously killing Arthur spiritually and metaphorically, making it also literally killing him seemed unnecessary.

        • Tunnelvision [they/them]
          ·
          6 months ago

          Oh I get you, but I don’t think that was because they couldn’t be subtle, that was because it was a prequel and there is absolutely no mention of Arther in the first game, so he kinda has to die.

          • Stolen_Stolen_Valor [any]
            ·
            6 months ago

            Oh no I agree he has to die, the story is a tragedy, just the manner of his death in this way was a little silly.

    • Nakoichi [they/them]M
      ·
      6 months ago
      spoiler

      I don't think you can kill him you just get the option to run him out of camp eventually