Livin’ It Up In Undead County: A Tribute to RDR: Undead Nightmare

My hands flick the reins again.

I survey the horizon, my eyes scouring the dustbowl for more of those abominations as I refill my revolver with bullets. There is nothing to be seen, but my ears alert me to danger – behind me.

I turn, and hot on my steed’s hooved heels is a small pack of wolves; their jaws slavering and red, their eyes glowing in the moonlight, their ribs yellow and defined against matted black fur.

I concentrate, and suddenly the world around me begins to move in slow motion. I unholster my pistol at breakneck speed and line up four neck-snapping shots in a mere moment.

Four explosions rattle the air, four undead whimpers chiming in an obligato accompaniment.

Because I am an unremitting badass.

Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare does something that I’ve never experienced before in nearly 20 years of gaming: it makes you feel like a bonafide hero. It makes you feel like a saviour of towns, scourge of the animated dead, and a complete and utter gold-plated, cool-dude motherfucker. Riding into a zombie-infested town with pistol or rifle drawn and clearing it of brainsucking scumbags in a storm of hot lead, hotter fire and ice-cold targeting stimulates the part of your brain that Bayonetta clipped a car battery to; that part of your brain that is designed for processing cliched, over-the-top action and then releasing serotonin like a hose, whilst choking any questions regarding sense or logic before they have the chance to become fully-formed thoughts.

I’ve ruminated long and hard on what it might be that Undead Nightmare does so well in order to evoke this, what that one thing is that just makes the whole concept work so perfectly, that so defines the experience, but that’s just it: it isn’t only one thing. Almost everything about the game contributes its own small part toward making you feel the way you do. The towns, for example, are brittle, defenseless bastions of humanity that you and you alone can save from an entire game world’s worth of unrelenting hordes of limping, shambling, spitting monsters. The residents can hold out for a time once settlements come under attack, that much is true, but only you can clear them out and make them safe – for a while at least. You are the fulcrum, the tipping point and the see-saw – without you there would be no change.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: that’s how games work. Take the player out of the game and it’s nothing more than lines of code on a disc – there’s nobody present to make anything happen or to experience and contextualise it. If a zombie attacks an NPC and there’s no player there to witness it, does it really happen?

Undead Nightmare goes a step beyond simply providing a playground for a few thousand pixels to prance about in. The game world is a living, breathing, sweating, dusty place that, crucially, is at just the right scale. In GTA you always felt anonymous, just another criminal in a city full of faceless life, but here in RDR the locals know you; after all, you’re the man who saved their entire perception of civilisation, the only man who can stem the undead flow. Outposts of civilisation are few and far between in Undead Nightmare whereas in GTA you’re drowning in Liberty City every moment of every artificial day. The islands of life (rather than un-death) in Undead Nightmare float like oases on turbulent and dangerous seas, meaning that the sight of a building, a bed, or human beings who aren’t trying to tear your face off are always welcome sights.

Of course, Marston’s combat skills help the whole hero role manifest itself: it’s one thing riding into town and unloading ammo into the faces of a few life-challenged brain slurpers, but flinging a bottle of Boombait into a mob of ’em before dead-eyeing a few in the skull, the explosion of the boombait scattering re-deadified ragdolls across the town centre, is a whole other idea, one occupying its own separate level of cool. Marston’s swagger is also infectious, making Red Dead the first Rockstar open world game in which I didn’t just want to run everywhere because walking simply meant time between arbitrary missions. Instead I’d tether my horse and saunter to my destination if possible, just because the damn game made me feel so cool doing it – it’s just a shame that Undead Nightmare doesn’t include as many human, non-aggressive NPCs to tip my hat to as the main game.

Red Dead encourages you to wallow in the world which it creates, soaking you in pathos as the setting seeps into your every pore. You spend more time staring at the horizon, the wildlife and the scenery in Red Dead than in any other game, and thanks to its leisurely pace (in comparison to its car stealing cousins, that is) you’ve got plenty of time to enjoy this whilst travelling from town to town.

Let’s not forget those random encounters either: witnessing a bereaved lover take their own life after shooting their partner dead, or coming across a small gang of survivors who will be torn to pieces in front of your very eyes if you don’t get busy with your trigger finger, are pretty powerful. With these events you’re immediately thrown into the middle of somebody’s tale: a tale that means life or death for those involved. It’s beautifully poignant, if only because the game pays them no mind, simply discarding them at the side of the road like rubbish for you to discover. These are real events happening to real people, real people who will die if you don’t help them.

It says something about the state of games in general when saving the world from a zombie invasion doesn’t feel quite as important as protecting a town or homestead – even somewhere like Bearclaw Camp, a pathetic smattering of cabins with very few residents hidden in the snowy northern woods – becomes unbearably important when you’re there. Around you the residents whoop, holler and scream, and it’s their voices that drive how important this moment is while you’re pinned against a doorframe, firing the last of your revolver ammo at the dead mob screaming and groaning towards you. Game writers seem to have lost focus on the little things nowadays. They’d rather you save the world, be the best soldier or something else suitably epic in scale than do something small and merely important. Undead Nightmare breaks all that down and pays attention to the minutiae that normal schmoes like you and I can relate to: protecting your home, protecting your family, the idea of community and kinship. Fuck saving the world; there’s a hamlet of log cabins in the woods that needs my help, and I’d rather feed myself to a zombie bear in order to protect those ordinary folk than save a faceless, polystyrene world which you won’t let me see.