For as long as anyone can remember, Rockstar has always loved putting obscure, mysterious, and sometimes downright creepy easter eggs in its open worlds. And as the most ambitious open world game the studio has created to date,Red Dead Redemption 2was obviously no exception to this.Spread all across Red Dead 2’s five statesare mysteries hidden throughout the wilderness that range from humorous Easter eggs to downright bone-chilling mysteries that may or may not get any sort of resolution.
While not the official starting region of the game, most players have their earliest memories withRed Dead Redemption 2in the state of New Hanover. Home to the now iconic little hamlet of Valentine and the start of the actual free-roam gameplay, New Hanover is the quintessential great plains region where cowboys are free to do as they please in the last great American frontier. As a result, there are a lot of unexplained mysteries littering the wild regions of the state.
Valentine’s Serial Killer
The first mystery in New Hanover is the Valentine serial killer. This might just be the most unsettling and creepy easter egg in the game, if only for how open-ended and unresolved it may end up being for most players. The first indication that a killer is roaming the wild west is a dead body strung up underneath a train track near Valentine. This is easy to see on a first playthrough, as the body’s location is very much between the first camp and Valentine. This is thestart of the “Look Upon My Works” sidequest.
Players can follow up on additional clues found in Scarlett Meadows and Big Valley to get the final location of the killer; a broken down, dilapidated cabin just to the west of Valentine.The serial killer’s lair, which lies in the basement of the destroyed home, is a grisly scene with blood, viscera, and skulls caking the walls and floors; it looks like something more akin to a horror game than a cowboy adventure. If all quest requirements are met upon entering the cabin, the killer will strike and let players finish the quest. If the cabin is found before the quest requirements are met, however, the site just serves as a confusing, creepy vignette in the player’s time roaming the wilderness.
New Hanover Shark Attack
Far tothe eastern reaches of New Hanover, along the coastline, players can find a washed up ship that has been almost completely destroyed. There are no obvious hints as to what caused such a devastating accident, but checking out a lockbox washed up on the beach nearby may provide some clues as to what caused this ship to meet such a violent end.
The box in question contains a single item:a shark tooth trinket. It’s a unique item that permanently boosts the player’s horse bonding experience by 10%. While this is certainly an excellent score with minimal effort, the trinket seems to imply the ill-fated crew might have had something of aJawsmoment before meeting their untimely ends. And from the size of the wreckage, it appears there’s an absolute behemoth of a shark prowling the waters of New Hanover. A bigger boat might not cut it.
Don’t Play With Fire
Another fun/useful easter egg will give access to a newrecipe for a new variety of throwable. After exploring the Heartlands, players will notice a conspicuous patch of burned out forest, with trees and grass completely scorched in the surrounding area; all telltale signs of a forest fire so devastating it would give Smokey the Bear a heart attack.
And there definitely was a forest fire, but not the natural type one might expect in one of the dryer regions of the country. By venturing into the burnt out husk of wilderness, players will find what remains of a campsite. The only thing in the campsite of note is a lockbox containing apamphlet for the volatile fire bottle, among other randomly generated provisions. Safe to say, whatever poor soul cooked up that pamphlet needed to practice more fire safety.
UFO Sightings and Real World Tragedy
UFOs and aliens have long been a staple of Rockstar games, andRed Dead Redemption 2keeps the tradition alive and well. There’s a cabin north of Emerald Ranch and south of Moonstone Pond with the aftermath of what appears to be the aftermath of an occult ritual. By looting the bodies, players can find a note with instructions to watch the skies “on the second hour under a half moon.” Of course, a game as detailed as this has its own lunar cycles. Returning to the scene at 2:00 am when a half-full moon is in the sky will give players the chance to see a UFO flying high above.
This macabre easter egg is a very on the nose reference to the real life mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate movement in 1997. The group believed their souls would latch onto the passing Hale-Bopp Comet and that they would go on to live in an afterlife with extraterrestrial beings. A dark real life reference for sure, buttheRed Deadseries isn’t exactly a stranger to darker themes.
Manmade Mutant
One of the most bizarre easter eggs in the game lies in aruined mansion just to the west of Van Horn. In this overgrown and rundown dwelling players can find a strange and unsettling science experiment whose owner is unaccounted for. Though it’s not overtly gory or grisly, the scene is pretty grizzly in its own way; the project in question was a mad scientist’s attempt to fuse a bear, a human, a boar, and a vulture. The result is a lifeless, stitched to gether hybrid that would make even Mary Shelley blush.
Despite the fact that this is one of the strangest things one can find while wandering the game’s open world, in context this mystery is a little more cheeky than one would expect. The man-bear-boar fusion is an obvious homage to the now legendarySouth Parkepisode featuring the fictional cryptid ManBearPig. But even though the origins of this easter egg are purely comical, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a pretty creepy thing to stumble upon unprepared even if the player is in on the joke. Even creepier is that data miners have found code in the game that suggests that at one point in development this abomination was supposed to move and actually be alive, though this was scrapped before release.
Red Dead Redemption 2
WHERE TO PLAY
America, 1899. The end of the wild west era has begun as lawmen hunt down the last remaining outlaw gangs. Those who will not surrender or succumb are killed. After a robbery goes badly wrong in the western town of Blackwater, Arthur Morgan and the Van der Linde gang are forced to flee. With federal agents and the best bounty hunters in the nation massing on their heels, the gang must rob, steal and fight their way across the rugged heartland of America in order to survive. As deepening internal divisions threaten to tear the gang apart, Arthur must make a choice between his own ideals and loyalty to the gang who raised him. From the creators of Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption, Red Dead Redemption 2 is an epic tale of life in America at the dawn of the modern age.
