The Best Way To Play Red Dead Redemption 2 Is To Do Nothing

thegamer.com:

There are so many things to do in Red Dead Redemption 2. Even just playing the game as intended, you’ll spend well over 100 hours working your way through the story, filling compendiums, and helping out eccentric gunslingers, painters, robot makers, and potential time travelers. The best way to play the game though is to just do nothing.

I’ve played Red Dead Redemption 2 three times in total, and I still haven’t seen it all. Those dinosaur bones are never getting collected, sorry mate. I'm still discovering new things, and last time around I finally fell in love with the snow. The story is overlong in places - Guarma, mostly, but there are other indulgences - but each individual mission is almost faultless. Even the Guarma missions are excellent in isolation; they do Uncharted better than Uncharted.

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Other missions that you can snip out of the overarching narrative - John’s jailbreak, the hot air balloon, drinking with Fenton - are all so enjoyable on their own that you can understand why Rockstar kept them in, even if someone somewhere probably needed to trim ten hours here or there out of it. Playing it three times, I feel like I’ve seen everything these very linear stories have to offer, and I’ve done as many of the side quests as I care to do. Again, those dinosaur bones? Never happening. But there’s still something in Red Dead Redemption 2, and that something is ‘nothing’.

It would be impossible for me to fully complete RDR2: there are too many animals to hunt, too many games of poker to play in too many specific ways, and of course, too many dinosaur bones. I really do hate those bones. Because I know I will never actively complete the game, and