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classicswim
General consensus: Present day, still one of the best DLCs of all time.
Vast majority, yet again: The greatest zombie game ever produced.
For myself? It has stayed the quintessential Halloween experience each and every year.
Downloadable Content hadn’t taken off until this era of gaming with Xbox 360.
Rockstar Games had already been instantaneously ahead of the curve with Grand Theft Auto IV’s Episodes From Liberty City. (The Lost And Damned/The Ballad of Gay Tony)
This was also an era of gaming - - and really just a general statement on ‘09 and 2010’s pop culture; Everything was zombies...
There were people who couldn’t stand Walking Dead and all the oversaturated zombie stuff... but still couldn’t dispute Red Dead’s high quality with this expansion pack.
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Episodes From Liberty City set in force a complete narrative saga for GTA IV, often crossing over Niko’s story until TBOGT brought a more lighthearted conclusion.
Undead Nightmare... separate universe... alternate timeline. That whole spiel.
But in the same breath, Undead Nightmare takes place spot-on at the end of Redemption.
The approximate timeframe being after Dutch’s death, but before John was killed.
EFLC was more or less produced with the intent of “yeah, of course you’ve played Niko’s story already.” Only, you could eventually buy a separate disc of those expansions, and not even have to previously own Grand Theft Auto IV. Though, it’d be very weird, and selling the experience drastically short if you did.
Undead Nightmare’s a shameless direct sequel. It provides additional closure and a completely different badass story for a protagonist who was already beloved by this point.
It’s a healthy mix of not taking itself too seriously and also understanding key things that made Redemption entertaining.
Like yeah. This has zombies, undead wildlife like the already existing bears + cougars, Chupacabra and Sasquatch you can hunt.
But I LOVE what really sets it apart from Redemption’s usual grit would be the knockoff Vincent Price narration at the very beginning. I’m more appreciative of that now than when I first played in 2010.
The beginning gives you a lengthy cutscene with John enjoying the company of Jack and Abigail.
Redemption’s ending was so focused on the gut punch of Marston losing himself after only just getting his family back. So it’s a very nice thing to get this brief glimpse of John cherishing what’s ideally his paradise in the moment.
I’d say if Undead Nightmare overall truly was John Marston’s purgatory and hell, then what you see of him and his family alive as a unit was his heaven.
Angelic music playing when John’s zoning out, interrupting Jack’s foreshadowing. I love that because the foreshadowing from the contents of Jack’s books was important for the main game, but here it is not. To the player, John had already died. So it’s an unsung detail for him to not even take in the bad this time around. He doesn’t need to hear how the story ends, he’ll be guided toward it in short time.
The first undead to make the scene, and the one to alter the timeline was Uncle.
A cowboy who just left the ass-end of the 1900s isn’t gonna know what in the fuck a zombie is. John just sees his freeloading tenant eating the shit out of his wife’s neck and kills the old man in self defense.
By the time both Abigail and Jack are infected, John trades his gun for a rope and ties both of them up.
Played for good laughs. They’re tied up whilst howling for blood and he leaves plates or steak and fucking orange juice before boarding up the bedroom and embarking on a cure.
You’re given the same motivation of saving the wife and son like in the main story. Except in these circumstances it’s not a hostage situation, and John has the comfort of knowing exactly where the two are while he’s out in danger.
Edgar Ross for that matter doesn’t exist as far as you can tell. For where it counts, anyway.
The circumstances of John’s death stay the same, but John’s mortal enemies are not given the satisfaction of tormenting or even clouding his judgment while stuck in this dimension.
The only point where the mask nearly falls off are when John’s testing the barriers with failed results.
The aftermath of Dutch is simply referred to as “that Van Der Linde operation.” Generic soldiers might be aware of it, but it’s something that mostly exists in the corner of John’s mind.
John makes one joke about Bill Williamson, and only then was he treated like he was from another planet.
The villains of the past weren’t needed to be put to rest, but much of the key cast from the original still returns. Just with very limited material.
Bonnie MacFarlane upon revisiting her ranch will mention the trouble in West Elizabeth. She’s subliminally talking about the attack that happened to John.
The missions with the returning characters are all structured like Stranger encounter tasks, and that’s the most underwhelming aspect, story wise.
You can tell Rockstar had the bandwidth and the coding to pull off a fun game mode, but there’s a significant lack of budget where you’ll just be doing things with John, and not having the time for any back-and-forth dialogue or teamwork in missions.
I complained about Landon Ricketts last time and he’s arguably even worse here. You give him undead bait tonic as well as some dynamite and that’s literally it. Suddenly all the shit and indifference he had for John is absent, albeit the smug is more deliberate and noticeable. Of course the cutscenes were entertaining, but in some cases like with Ricketts, all it would end with would be one or two cutscenes. They just didn’t have all the money in the world to do what they really wanted, and that problem becomes prominent the more you play through the campaign.
The worst would be Nigel West Dickens, one of the most fun characters returning to sell fake elixir to the citizens...... and all you do for him is collect flowers you can already find in the base game. It’s such needless and barebones time waste when you know just from the actual missions you had done with Nigel before that it could’ve been way more exciting.
This horror story wouldn’t be complete without Seth Briars. He fits in more than naturally and manifests plenty of the surrealism being shown. Seth implements gameplay objectives that already needed to be fulfilled, but the mission setup was at least done more tastefully.
I didn’t understand at first why the zombies played cards and danced with Seth besides absurdity sake, but then it clicked how often he’d talk kindly to the bodies he was exhuming. John naturally saw Seth as insane (and he was), except Marston himself overlooked being responsible for plenty of bodies reaching cemeteries in the first place. I think Seth made it a point somewhere that he was the only one giving those poor bastards company in a long time. Which yeah, demented Ed Gein serial killer behavior. But if anything, the undead make Seth less lonely and more alive.
Most of what you’re doing with or without story missions would be saving every last town from zombie herds, cleansing graveyards and rescuing survivors from further attacks.
Money currency does not exist in DLC, and you realize quick how scarce ammo can be when there’s no shootouts and no merchants to back you up.
Cryptic doomsday graffiti on the town buildings range from literal context of zombies taking over, to just stuff left over from Marston’s personal dire. Dutch’s last words being one of the graffiti choices.
The honor and fame system is gone entirely, guess it was more convenient when John was among the living.
Rockstar’s satire blended in swimmingly for the genre leap.
The townsfolk that previously respected and admired John were now timid idiots blaming the outbreak on Jews and foreigners. A good handful of on-screen deaths are a direct result of them all being such dumb motherfuckers.
A fan favorite sidequest was R* delivering on past speculation from Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. GTA players who attempted hunting for Bigfoot in the forest would find Sasquatch in Undead Nightmare for real this time. The achievement was called “Six Years in The Making” because it was on the dot six years after San Andreas had released. A meme in the Rockstar world ever since!
So much from amateur zombie films had been embraced.
The music was always a strong hallmark for Red Dead, so you get a good dosage of Pulp Fiction style surfer rock.
In spite of any shortcomings, it’s played very straight like an old Halloween special should.
The cause of the curse is revealed to have been egotistical Abraham Reyes taking an Aztec artifact from its burial so he could obtain immortality.
The original game had Reyes go from being a funny asshole to someone who would starve and kill his citizens in the years to come, so this was a way to dial that back a little and still keep him cartoonishly on brand.
The final mission stopping Reyes (Bad Voodoo!!) and advancing in the catacombs to return the artifact just feels nice replaying every year.
For gameplay purposes, you’re obviously not going to buy a DLC with zombies and then finish it with what you paid for being gone.
But you do get the satisfaction of John Marston singlehandedly ending the apocalypse and returning to his family in loving arms.
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[On a Pale Dead Horse]
Again. Gameplay purposes.
The plot ends on an ambiguous few months of normalcy before John’s eventually killed, and Seth takes the artifact precisely as Abraham did before.
Another epic feel good moment. A more spooky tone of the gunslinger’s theme plays while our hero emerges from his grave with gun rack in handy.
John being buried with holy water that protected his soul.
Despite the artifact still being stolen with no way of once again returning it, Aztec gods have not forgotten John. Everyone left alive can only see Zombie Marston as the human he was before death. Only the undead can recognize that he too has left the ways of all flesh.
It’s a great way to end off, even if most would just reload a save game where John is still alive.
Does leave you with some... interesting implications about the ‘back to normal’ phase with the world that you can’t really see.
When John returned to Jack and Abigail, the wife and son had no recollection of not being with the living besides going a little crazy. John’s words to calm them down supposedly worked once their curse had been lifted.
So that leaves you to wonder if the people who survived still have their memories of the curse intact, or if they’d only recognize the vast amount of bodies Marston had left. If it would all just be a way of going full circle to blame John for murders.
Not too clear how much time John had left in those last few months, but a grace period nonetheless. Suppose for the original that you never had to do the last mission right away.
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Date: 2025-10-11 02:26 am (UTC)