Red Dead Redemption 2 game: three hours with the most anticipated game of the year

Having played Red Dead Redemption 2 on my own devices for a few hours, I was expecting to see sweeping plains dotted with mesas, dusty frontier towns with swing-door saloons and wary inhabitants, and a gang of hardened bandits sharing stories around a campfire, then walking through the woods on their way to a shootout. This amazing virtual west models itself on the classic Hollywood image of the era, the same fantasy depicted in Westworld . What I didn't expect in my brief preview was a town, Saint Denis, inspired by turn-of-the-century New Orleans.

Saint Denis is as detailed as the modern American cities Rockstar previously created for the Grand Theft Auto series, brimming with period details. Driving through the city as an outlaw barricade man, Arthur Morgan, I suddenly felt like a tragic anachronism. A streetcar passed, and I harnessed my horse to board the next, riding along wide, tree-lined avenues, past the bustling docks and the grand train station, through industrial areas where chimneys belched smoke and workers marched to and fro between factories and houses. Stepping out onto the streets, I saw boys frolicking in the water, people buying and selling things at the market, hundreds of simulated people going about their make-believe lives. Drawn by the lights outside an ornate theater, I went inside and bought a ticket to a vaudeville show and watched a virtual crowd cheer the virtual actors for a good five minutes before remembering it was a video game and I could leave at any moment.

I became slightly obsessed with testing the limits of its realism, heading to tobacco fields to see if there were people working there (there were), switching to a first-person view to meticulously examine the characters' faces and the inside of drawers (I found some ointment there), greeting each character I passed to see if they would respond differently (they did). What's different here is the verisimilitude. You can hunt animals in many games, their useful materials disappearing into your inventory, but here, you kneel, skin the animal, throw its hide over your shoulder, get back on your horse, and attach the hide to it, before heading into town to sell it. There are animations for all of this. Eight years of work by hundreds of people working across Rockstar's various studios went into achieving this level of realism.

This is what Red Dead Redemption 2 aims to offer: a simulation of a time and place in history, so vast and detailed it's hard to believe, where you can rob a train or hunt a bounty, but also walk into a store and examine the cans of beans on the shelf, or pay for a bath at an inn and chat with the young woman washing you, or collect 30 different saddle horns for your horse. In three hours, I hunted rabbits and men, practiced dressage on a mountaintop, shot at a group of rival gangs hiding in the forest, rode through perfect snow with some friends, and made a stew. I was able to do all this without the game setting me up on its own predetermined path.

No open-world game can avoid the unexpected things that happen when a disobedient player goes off course. These moments are part of what makes them fun, if the game can accommodate them. The world of Red Dead is impressively robust once you start testing it out, seeing where you can go or what you can do: the sticky situations I got myself into didn't end with death or a “mission failed” screen, but with adventures.

When I took my horse for a spontaneous swim in an unexpectedly fast river instead of following a hidden trail around its bank to find a fugitive, I ended up about 100 yards downstream on the wrong side of the water – but that turned into a opportunity for a scenic detour off a cliff as the sun set, heading over a rickety wooden bridge back to the other side. When I wandered the private grounds of a plantation mansion on the outskirts of Saint Denis and began to be shot at by guards, I escaped on horseback, only to find myself at the bottom of the swamp with a skittish steed, alligators strangely still in the water.

Saint Denis impressed me the most. I don't think I've seen more than maybe a quarter of it, and it's right there on the edge of the modern world that I expect Red Dead Redemption 2 to tell its most interesting stories. It gave me more of a Cormac McCarthy vibe than Westworld, hinting at the death of the Old West, the consequences of rapid American industrialization, and the death of a way of life, rather than a straightforward romanticization of the frontier and its outlaw heroes. The players' stories will be just as interesting as Rockstar's when RDR2 launches later this month: with millions of people seeking their own frontier experiences, we'll see just how vast and flexible this extraordinary game is.