When I first played Red Dead Redemption 2, I vowed to myself that I would not kill any innocent bystanders. I was so determined to complete a high honour run, and while that did largely happen, I can't deny the fact that there were a few casualties along the way. Sometimes you accidentally hit the wrong key and end up quickly firing your gun, or perhaps someone caught you doing something you shouldn't. I don't have the money to keep paying my bounty, so unfortunately, some lives were lost in the name of convenience.
It can be easy not to feel bad about offing a few characters when all they really are to you is a slight inconvenience. As long as you don't get caught, chances are you can escape with no consequences. Besides a slight ding to your honour level, there's no real impact on your character or psyche. Until now, that is.
YouTuber Blurbs has created a truly evil mod that'll trigger a tragic cutscene of NPC memories as you murder them—represented by a slow motion closeup of the deceased before a fade to an incredibly brief animation of the events before jumping back to real time and letting you carry on. As shown in the YouTube video, this can be anything from gazing lovingly at a pet dog, or watching the sunset on a boat from the middle of a lake. For the most part, they're by no means dramatic, in-depth cutscenes that will cause emotional damage. But they do bring characters you'd probably ignore to life in a way that would definitely make me feel some guilt.
To lighten the load, some of these memories have been tagged with phrases like "you have to have a very high IQ to understand Rick and Morty" and "One day I'm going to find the greatest treasure of all. I'm going to become the pirate king. I'm going to find the One Piece" which definitely takes away some of the emotion and probably won't leave you wondering why you did that in the first place. Especially not in comparison to the memories of things like writing a letter to your daughter begging to meet for the first time, or the wedding with your beloved.
This feature isn't just limited to humans either. Blurbs has ensured these memories work for things like horses and bears, but rather than having flashbacks linked to their species, the same rotation of human memories plays. Such as a bear holding their very human newborn, or a horse attending a wedding with a human woman. You know, all those completely realistic memories to get you right in your feelings.
Of course, the mod isn't perfect, and the YouTube video shows plenty of examples, such as headless corpses taking the place of the deceased in the memory, or remaining tied up or injured in the same way they died. Which results in some incredibly graphic cutscenes, to say the least. It's probably for the best that I can't download this mod for myself anyway, given I already feel bad enough about the deaths Red Dead Redemption 2 forces you to witness, which are completely out of your control. I don't need the memories of a dead deer to keep me awake at night.
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