Summary
- The best Red Dead Redemption side missions showcase a darkness better left in the Old West.
- Dark characters and disturbing quests make Red Dead Redemption an intense and eerie experience.
- From the birth of artificial life to the eradication of peaceful species, the game delves into dark tales.
The Red Dead Redemption series houses various side missions known as Stranger Missions. These quests can see players uncover dark secrets, disturbing details, and an insight into the terrors that the Old West put people through. Some of the best side quests in Red Dead Redemption will often showcase a darkness that is better left in the 19th and 2 0th Century, and it’ll have players thankful that they don’t live in such indecent times.
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Whether it’s roaming the plains with Arthur Morgan or John Marston, the darkest Red Dead Redemption side missions remain plentiful, and players can stumble across many disturbing sights, so it’s always best to keep an open mind and a cocked revolver, waiting for trouble to brew in what is about to unfold.
7 A Bright Bouncing Boy
Location: Western Saint Denis
- Game: Red Dead Redemption 2
Coming across Professor Marko Dragic, a simple gunslinger like Arthur might marvel, or be confused, by the genius. Players will start an innocent mission where they help to control a little submarine on the water for Dragic’s investors. Yet, the dark side of this quest runs deep when players progress to the next part, where they venture to Dragic’s workshop in the northeast of the map.
Players can help Dragic try to create life in a Frankenstein-styled tale, where Dragic will attempt to bring a robot to life. If players succeed and return, they can find Dragic dead, and in The Grizzlies, they can find the robot, alive, murmuring “papa” to itself, endlessly. It’s dark to think that Dragic was killed by his creation and that artificial life now roams the mountains.
6 The Wisdom Of The Elders
Location: Butcher Creek
- Game: Red Dead Redemption 2
There’s an insidious yet vulnerable nature to Butcher Creek, where players can find a small settlement of outcasts and other oddities. Venturing here, players will need to help someone return home, only to find that Butcher Creek is cursed by demons no less, even though to Arthur or John they simply look like rabid dogs.
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Players will then find that a white man pretending to be a shaman, is responsible for the manipulation of this small and poor population of people. Players will have to destroy charms scattered around Butcher Creek, and then explore an abandoned mine underneath their home, which shows that lead and arsenic have been poisoning their water supply, exploiting the villagers and blaming a curse to sign over their land.
5 Jenny’s Faith
Location: East of Ridgewood Farm
- Game: Red Dead Redemption
John Marston can find a sickly woman, stranded in a scorching desert. This woman announces herself as Jenny, and despite John’s gentlemanly attempts to help her, she declines and believes that God is going to get her through this, and God is going to save her. This test of faith even extends further, as she declines medicine supplied by John Marston.
It’s a sad tale, as Jenny, an innocent woman who wanted to spread the Christian faith across America, dies due to madness, succumbing to the dangers of the heat. She dies in the sun of starvation, thirst, and from heatstroke, a terrible way to go, with her family never knowing of her fate.
4 American Dreams
Location: Valentine
- Game: Red Dead Redemption 2
Players must stumble across a grisly crime scene, in which a body has been mutilated beyond recognition. This grotesque and violent attempt at art leaves a message and scarring on Arthur’s mind, and players will stumble across even more killings in similar vain, confirming that a serial killer is on the loose in the world, perhaps one of the first known ones out there.
Players can discover pieces of a map with the bodies found, and combine them to discover the killer’s lair. It’s a dark place, filled with body parts, heads, and all manners of horrors. American Dreams is a disturbing side mission, and Edmund Lowry Jr. Couldn’t be killed quicker.
3 Birth Of The Conservation Movement
Location: Tanner’s Ranch in Tall Trees, West Elizabeth
- Game: Red Dead Redemption Undead Nightmare
Undead Nightmare is a wild ride from start to finish, mixing cowboys with zombies is thrilling, intense, and odd. Yet, things take a mythical turn when players head to the Birth of the Conservation Movement side-mission, where they are tasked with eradicating the baby-eating sasquatches that roam Tall Trees. These large beasts growl and run, yet they don’t seem to attack. After killing them all, players will venture to the last.
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The sasquatch speaks, through tears, and will say how they don’t eat babies, and John Marston has just committed genocide, killing the entire sasquatch species and leaving but one left. It’s tragic and dark to think that a peaceful species has just been eradicated through misinformation.
2 Eva in Peril
Location: Casa Madrugada
- Game: Red Dead Redemption
Exploring Casa Madrugada, players can find Eva Cortes, a prostitute who’s in an abusive relationship, slave to the will of Mario Alcalde. When players find Eva, she is being beaten by Mario, and players can intervene and even give $2 00 to buy Eva’s freedom. Despite initial thanks from Eva, the mission does not end here.
Players can later head to Las Hermanas and find a nun in a church, who will confirm that Eva didn’t join the church, but instead ran back to Mario. Mario can be found in Sepulcro, digging a shallow grave for Eva, whom he had beaten to death. It’s a horrid cycle of abuse that’s hard to escape, and poor Eva didn’t deserve this fate.
1 I Know You
Location: Hennigan’s Stead
- Game: Red Dead Redemption
A strange man with a top head beckons to John, and seems to know far too much about the gunslinger and former gang member. It’s a puzzling side mission and one of the strangest encounters in Red Dead Redemption. The Strange Man could be many things, and theories run rampant on what this character is. Could he be God? Satan? A harbinger from beyond? There’s no clear answer, but what makes it the darkest side mission in Red Dead Redemption, comes from the fact that he is seemingly immortal and not of this plain of existence.
Players will find the Strange Man overlooking Beecher’s Hope, calm in demeanor, as always, and suspiciously standing on the plot of land that would eventually take John Marston as his final resting place. The Strange Man can be shot, but the bullets have no effect, and when John Marston damns him, the Strange Man simply replies “Many have”. It’s strange, it’s dark, and it remains open to mystery.
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