In terms of realism, there isn’t a game that tops Red Dead Redemption 2. Rockstar took this little franchise that started as an arcadey mess from the PS2 era and made it something beautiful. Although each entry lost more and more of the campy Wild West attitude, RDR 2 contains a lot more supernatural elements than the previous entries, even counting Undead Nightmare. And the ghosts and monsters that lurk within RDR 2 are mostly hidden in the same plot of land.
Okay ignore the fact Arthur’s a pirate in this picture if you can
Have you seen this Easter egg for yourself yet? It’s not an unknown one, but I think it’s still flying under a lot of players’ radar. This giant orange snake is found just South of the deserted town of Pleasance, which happens to be at the edge of Lemonye and its swamp.
A lot of fans first assumed it was a reference to Kipling’s The Jungle Book, but this fan theory was shelved after other players discovered this snake matches old Biblical drawings of Satan. Now, how Satan as a snake could die is a bit hard to understand, yet having a reference to the actual devil just under a deserted town with “beware plague!” written all over it is enough to get the theories pumping.
Nothing supernatural about the game makes sense, and it’s rarely commented on, but tha just adds to the mystery. For example, Arthur will not say anything about that snake. But when this open-ended non-answering works, it works, and it leads us to experiences like the Night Folk.
Arthur got eaten by an alligator while I was getting footage, so I lost the hat.
Since launch, one of my instant favorite things about Red Dead Redemption 2 was the nightmarish Night Folk who live in the swamplands. There’s a stranger mission revolving around an Old Cajun whose land they stole, Arthur and Dutch will hear mention of them in a story mission, and that is all you ever get in terms of an explanation.
These mysterious swamp folk kidnap and mutilate random people for no known reason, often leaving them tied up or hanged. Your horse is terrified of them, to the point of sprinting more than a mile away in seconds. They seem to have some sort of leader, an old woman that many players have noted appears to be heavily based on the Mexican folklore witch La Llorona.
But that really is it. There’s no admission of blood relation like the Murfree Brood, and they aren’t known outlaws like the Skinner Brothers. They won’t get an entry in Arthur’s journal and don’t even get added to the “gangs” section of the completion menu, no matter how many times you tussle with them. So good luck guessing what they wanted with the Old Cajun’s land, and I mean that—that’s a mystery I’ve been pondering since discovering that mission, as it’s so out-of-character for the group that there must be more behind it all.
The tricorn wasn’t on my horse, so I switched to the Conductor’s Hat. Sorry this somehow also became the story of Arthur’s hat.
The Nightfolk are a cherry on the top of this already unnerving area. There’s also the ghost who will send shivers down your spine, the cabin seemingly owned by The Strange Man, and let’s not undermine the natural predators, as both alligators and panthers can one-hit kill you before you know they’re there, which is a different kind of terror altogether.
RDR 2 does a lot of things right, but frankly, if there’s only one thing I need to point to for where it truly excels, I always point to Lemonye. The territory showcases the lush greenery of the map the best, the wildlife is at its most dense, and it’s one of the most terrifying places in all video game history.
