Red Dead Redemption Undead Nightmare

Undead Nightmare is 10 dollars as a download if you have Red Dead Redemption, and is included in GOTY copies of Red Dead Redemption.  If you don’t have RDR, you should run out and buy it, it is absolutely one of the best game experiences even with its problems.  This game is for people that have finished RDR and just for whatever reason, want a little more.

In RDR there is a professor who is an east coast hotel room intellectual.  He thinks himself worldly and known, having read many books and being hopped up on heroin.  He treats the non-specified English-speaking Amerindian as an idiot savage who can’t speak English and knows nothing of “modern” society.  You do several missions for the professor, all proving what a near-sighted asshole he is.

In the first twenty minutes of Undead Nightmare you get to blow his brains out.  That  justified the first twenty minutes.  The rest of the game is about fast running zombies, trying to deal with RDR’s clumsy melee system, and a targeting system that doesn’t work for multiple fast moving targets.  The rest of the story involves meeting whoever was left alive at the end of RDR.  If you want to meet those characters again, there’s your motivation for going forward. There are no reveals.  You even get to kill some of those characters you meet.  The value in this is if you want more RDR and somehow didn’t find the ending of RDR a perfect end statement to your experience.

Every review and message board talks about the Yeti side mission.  John Marston comes across a crazy mountain man, decked out in furs, with a generic female next to him.  The mountain man claims Yetis are eating babies.  The game then gives you a location on the map to find a Yeti and kill it.

You do this several times, and then have a meeting with The Last Yeti.  He is crying slumped against a tree.  Some psychopath has killed his people.  They don’t eat babies; they eat berries and mushrooms.  Marston is in disbelief.

This also goes against Marston’s grain of salt that he approaches everything else in the game.  A crazy person asks him to kill Sasquatch, and he is all for it.  Or the player is all for it.  The game tells you to do something, you do it, and then asks you to feel bad for it.

The Last Yeti asks you kill him, to end his pain.  So when I had player agency again, I did.  The only way to have a conversation with one of them, was to kill all of them.

I hate this imposed self-reflection in games.  The only way forward is “verb”.  Keeping verbing.  Look at all the verbing you did, look at the consequences of your actions.  Shadow of the Colossus does this with an ounce of class and is fondly remembered.  That guilt is built into your actions there.  In UN you are given no reason to question your actions until afterwards.

I’m reminded of Silent Hill Downpour.  The first part of the game is about getting to Silent Hill.  You’re told to get to Silent Hill.  When you arrive, a pop-up says, “New Objective: Escape from Silent Hill.”  I popped the disc out of my PS3.  “That was easy.”

So if you want to shoot some zombies in a different environment, Undead Nightmare is there.  None of the returning character’s interactions were particularly memorable (though I am glad I got to blow that druggie’s brain’s out.)  This add-on is a case of you know if you want to play or not.  I only played it because I had it.  I wouldn’t have touched it otherwise.

The Mexico section is thankfully brief this time.

Played on Xbox 360
Developed by Rockstar San Diego, Rockstar North