It feels like my whole life has been preparing me to fall in love with this game. The chain of cause and effect was winding and drawn-out.

When I was a teenager, one of my favorite series was Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. The protagonist, Roland, was inspired by Robert Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” and the film The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. King described Clint Eastwood’s character and the Western landscape as the magnum opus of the American myth, the bedrock of our modern cultural code.

Reading The Dark Tower coincided with a time when I, at 15, was making short films, working at the only film school in a small town in Eastern Europe, and losing myself in Italian neorealism and the French New Wave. Westerns weren’t my favorite genre, but I wore out the Dollars Trilogy by Sergio Leone. I soaked in the atmosphere of the time, imagining what it must have been like to live in that world.

But it’s not the Wild West setting that defines Red Dead Redemption 2, nor is it the main reason for my love of the game. Back in 2018, I heard players marveling at the sheer level of detail, from the muddy tracks of Valentine’s main street to the behavior of horses and the physics of snow. I didn’t have a console then, and it wasn’t until December 2022, on a Steam Deck, that I finally got to play RDR2. It was the first game I bought with my first paycheck from a game studio—and I was lost in it.

Since then, RDR2 has become my second world. I’ve played through the story twice, always delaying that mission where Arthur contracts tuberculosis (surely not a spoiler anymore), simply to keep exploring. I lived the life of a cowboy. A bounty hunter. A treasure seeker. A simple hunter. I spent nights in Saint Denis, went to the theater, paddled through rapids in a canoe, and fell asleep under the glow of the Milky Way. I stormed cabins, robbed travelers, read letters, investigated outlaw camps, and watched as freshly felled trees tumbled slowly to the ground.

It’s a true simulation of another life, a journey through time. An entire era recreated through digital technology. Where once we could only travel through the pages of Cooper, Twain, Jack London, and Henry James, or the films of John Ford, Robert Altman, and Sam Peckinpah, now we inhabit the body of Arthur Morgan and ride across a tamed Frontier.

It’s my favorite open world in any game. Alongside The Witcher, it’s a masterpiece, not just for its central story but for the hundreds of random encounters, the landscapes, and the richness of nature itself.

Life is full of pain… but there is also love and beauty in it.