Red Dead Redemption II | Ep. 22 – The Sun Sets on Good Men and Outlaws Just the Same

Arthur Morgan returns for another chapter of our Red Dead Redemption II adventure. The frontier is changing, the shadows are growing longer, and the difference between good men and outlaws isn’t always as simple as the stories would have us believe.

This week, we found ourselves getting involved in everything from expensive gambling and questionable haircuts to sneaking around an oil facility and defending our camp against an unexpected attack.

Another evening of incredible storytelling, difficult choices, and probably spending far too much time investigating things that have absolutely nothing to do with the mission we’re supposed to be doing.

🐎 About the Game

Red Dead Redemption II follows Arthur Morgan and the Van der Linde gang, a group of outlaws struggling to survive as the American frontier changes around them. With federal agents and bounty hunters closing in, the gang must rob, steal and fight their way across the country while trying to stay one step ahead of the law.

The game combines an enormous open world with a detailed story about loyalty, survival and the consequences of the gang’s decisions. There’s always something interesting to discover, whether we’re following the main storyline, investigating the countryside or getting ourselves into trouble while exploring.

🧭 Where We Are in the Journey

We’re now on Episode 22, continuing through Chapter Four, with much of our attention focused on Saint Denis and the surrounding countryside.

During the previous stream, we’d attended a rather fancy party and met some interesting individuals, including people who were becoming involved in Dutch’s latest plans. This week, we were picking up several of those storylines, with three more missions ahead of us.

By the end of the evening, our overall completion was sitting at approximately 48%, and I was beginning to wonder how much longer we had before reaching the next chapter.

🔥 What Happens in This Episode

We began the evening catching up with everybody in chat before heading back into Saint Denis. JD had been working on the towers of his Minecraft castle, which led to more conversation about his position as the Turnip King, while Vvoornth was discussing Seafarer: The Ship Sim.

That reminded me of my own rather unsuccessful experience with the game some time ago. I’d ended up refunding it because it was in such a poor state when I tried it, although apparently things have improved quite a bit since then. JD was also telling us about his recent doctor’s appointment and how his recovery was progressing, so we had a bit of a catch-up before getting properly underway.

Once we returned to Red Dead Redemption II, I had to remind myself exactly where we’d left Arthur after the previous week’s adventures. We’d attended a rather fancy party in Saint Denis and met several interesting characters, so we decided to investigate the missions currently available on the map.

Our first mission was American Fathers, Part I, which turned out to be a relatively short introduction to a new storyline.

We met Evelyn Miller, Rains Fall and his son Eagle Flies, who were trying to prevent their people from being displaced again. They explained that previous peace treaties had been broken and that there were suspicions that Leviticus Cornwall and the government were interested in valuable oil reserves beneath their land.

They needed somebody to obtain evidence of what was happening, and Arthur wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about getting involved initially. However, once they mentioned payment, he became a little more interested in helping them.

The mission itself was mainly dialogue, introducing characters and circumstances that would become important later in the evening. It left us in Saint Denis, with instructions to meet Eagle Flies near the oil fields in a couple of days.

I wasn’t entirely sure where those oil fields were. I had a vague recollection of visiting some sort of industrial facility during our earlier explorations, possibly somewhere we’d managed to get ourselves shot and killed. We’d have to investigate that later, because there was another mission waiting for us in town.

That brought us to A Fine Night of Debauchery, where Trelawny had arranged for Arthur to take part in a rather elaborate robbery aboard a riverboat.

Before we could do anything, however, we needed to make Arthur look like a respectable gentleman. This required something we’d somehow managed to avoid throughout our entire playthrough: buying a suit and getting a haircut.

We started at the tailor shop, although there didn’t seem to be much choice. The game appeared to want us to purchase one particular outfit, and I couldn’t see any controls that would let us select anything else. Perhaps there were other options that I simply hadn’t noticed, but we bought the required suit and continued towards the barber.

That’s where things became considerably more complicated.

We spent a good fifteen minutes experimenting with the different hairstyles, beard lengths, moustaches and sideburns. I hadn’t realised quite how many customisation options were available, and we started investigating what Arthur would look like with various combinations.

Unfortunately, we discovered that Arthur looks absolutely horrific without his beard. His face definitely needs to be covered up, because removing too much facial hair didn’t seem to improve his appearance in the slightest.

Chat was having plenty of fun with the different possibilities. Happy_Cat_Lady wanted pink hair and declared that if pink wasn’t available, we should uninstall the game. JD was commenting on the various facial-hair arrangements, including the rather unfortunate weak chin, while we also discovered some impressive mutton chops and a particularly strange Amish-looking style.

Some of the beard options looked as though Arthur had grown a pair of plums underneath his face. The French-fork arrangement was especially unfortunate, and there were several other combinations that didn’t look much better.

We eventually settled on a hairstyle that unfortunately resembled a certain tangerine tyrant’s comb-over and gave Arthur’s beard a slight trim.

I wasn’t particularly happy with the result, but it satisfied the mission requirements. We’d already spent long enough at the barber, so I decided we’d come back next week and have another look at the customisation options. We might even put Arthur’s hair back to something resembling its original appearance.

With our supposedly respectable gentleman ready for the evening, we headed down to the docks to board a magnificent paddle steamer.

Now, everybody knows how much I enjoy things like steam trains and paddle steamers, so there was absolutely no chance of me going directly to the objective.

The boat had already sailed a little way out onto the water, and we started inside a large room filled with gamblers. Naturally, I immediately left the room to explore the ship instead.

We headed outside onto the deck, wandered around the vessel and investigated the areas we could access. I wanted to see how much of the paddle steamer we were actually allowed to explore, rather than simply walking straight to the table and beginning the mission.

Eventually, we made our way back inside through the upper balcony, looked around a little more and finally headed downstairs to join the card game we were supposed to be playing.

Unfortunately, I know next to nothing about playing poker.

We spent quite a bit of time trying to work out whether we should call, raise or fold, and whether the cards we had were any good. At one point, I was even wondering whether it would be easier just to shoot the other fellow rather than keep playing cards.

Chat was helping us through the process. ASmith501 explained that the card game was fairly easy and appeared to be arranged in our favour, while Gary admitted that his preferred strategy was simply bluffing, despite not really knowing how to play either.

Thankfully, the game seemed to be helping us along. We kept getting reasonable cards, and I got the impression that this was a scripted sequence we probably couldn’t lose.

I wondered whether it might be worth returning to an earlier save and deliberately trying to lose, just to see whether the game would allow it. I think we still had a save from before the mission, but that would be something to investigate another time.

Eventually, our opponent was defeated and revealed that he had a particularly expensive Swiss watch stored in the ship’s safe. That was exactly what we needed, because our gambling success had been arranged to give us access to the valuables upstairs.

Once we reached the safe, the robbery began. There was a brief disagreement involving a guard and a firearm, but we managed to take the watch and the other valuables before heading back downstairs.

Unfortunately, that was when everything started going wrong.

We returned towards the main lounge, where our presence was discovered and we suddenly found ourselves having to shoot our way out of the paddle steamer.

I’d suspected that the mission would eventually turn into a gunfight, but there seemed to be an awful lot of enemies appearing as we attempted to escape. We were struggling a little with the controls and trying to follow our companions through the ship while dealing with the guards.

Our companion ended up getting killed during the first attempt, bringing another appearance of the familiar Deathloop.

On the next attempt, we decided to try a slightly different approach: the “Halo Run.”

Rather than standing around fighting what appeared to be an endless supply of enemies, we simply ran straight past everybody, headed outside and jumped off the boat into the water.

That worked surprisingly well, and we escaped without having to eliminate everybody on board. I had a funny feeling that the enemies might have been continuously spawning anyway, so running away was probably the more sensible option.

The mission concluded with us safely back on shore and approximately $800 better off. Not a bad result, considering I didn’t really understand the poker game that had started the whole thing.

With that adventure finished, we climbed aboard Tesco Lasagne, our faithful horse, and began travelling north towards the oil facility for American Fathers, Part II.

The journey wasn’t entirely peaceful.

At one point, we spotted somebody hanging beside the road, and I stopped to investigate whether there was anything we could do. I wondered whether we could cut the unfortunate fellow down and possibly save him.

Unfortunately, stopping turned out to be a mistake.

A group of knife-wielding attackers suddenly appeared from the surrounding area. They seemed to spawn almost out of nowhere, and the whole encounter was rather unpleasant. They looked like zombie hillbillies coming out of the trees, and we found ourselves in trouble before we’d really worked out what was happening.

After that little incident, we continued our journey towards the oil facility, where Eagle Flies was waiting for us.

This mission required us to sneak into Cornwall’s operation and retrieve documents that could prove what was happening with the oil reserves and the land belonging to Eagle Flies’ people.

The important part was that we were supposed to do it quietly.

Now, we have a particular interpretation of stealth on this channel: if there’s nobody left alive to tell anybody you were there, then technically nobody knows you were there.

To be fair, we actually made a reasonably good start.

We managed to sneak inside the facility by jumping onto the back of a cart that was passing through the entrance. That allowed us to get past the initial guards without immediately attracting attention.

Once inside, I started investigating the building to see whether there might be another way to reach the office containing the documents. We even climbed up onto the roof because I thought there might be an opening that would allow us to drop down into the area we needed.

Unfortunately, that didn’t provide the solution I was hoping for, so we climbed back down and began dealing with the guards.

We managed a few reasonably quiet takedowns, and things were going quite well until we discovered that one of the people I’d taken out had another chap standing a little way behind him.

He spotted what was happening, and we may have got slightly caught.

That didn’t deter us, though. We still needed those documents, so we started shooting our way through the facility and eventually made it upstairs to the office.

Once inside, we intimidated the gentleman who had the information into giving us what we needed. After obtaining the documents, we also decided to remove the possibility of him identifying us later.

That took care of the evidence, although our original stealth plan had now become considerably less convincing.

Outside, more guards were waiting, and we had to fight our way through them to escape. There were a few difficulties involving cover, finding the correct route out and dealing with enemies who seemed determined to keep attacking us.

At one point, we needed to recover some health before continuing, and a tin of beans proved particularly useful. We eventually worked our way through the guards until we could reach Eagle Flies, who had been keeping himself occupied by blowing up one of the oil storage tanks.

The facility was now in a considerably worse state than when we’d arrived.

We managed to reunite with Eagle Flies and escape on horseback, leaving the oil operation behind us. He seemed rather unimpressed by our interpretation of stealth, but we had obtained the documents and completed the mission.

We handed over what we’d recovered, received our payment and began making our way back towards camp.

Away from Red Dead Redemption II, I also spent some time showing everybody my latest programming project: a UAP detector running on a Raspberry Pi.

I’ve been working on it throughout the previous week, developing the camera interfaces, detection features and web-based controls. It’s been an incredibly enjoyable project, particularly experimenting with the different ways of recording and displaying footage.

We had a look at the live camera views, the configuration options and some of the recordings it had been producing. The system can detect events, record time-lapse videos and provide information through its web interface, and I’ve been working on various settings to make everything easier to manage.

One of the most interesting features has been the camera itself, which can detect light beyond the normal visible range. That produces some rather unusual colours in the footage, including trees appearing pink.

The time-lapse recording has been absolutely fantastic, and I’ve been sharing various videos captured from my window over on Discord. I was hoping to have version 1.0 ready the following week, after taking a bit of a break from programming over the weekend.

Throughout the evening, chat was also providing its usual assortment of entertainment and distractions.

JD’s title as the Turnip King continued to feature in conversation, while ASmith501 remained the subject of the ongoing plum-related jokes. There was another community Hunger Games, which Mr Smith managed to win after I was eliminated, much to the amusement of everybody involved.

We also had some jukebox requests, including “Plum Hunters Song” and “Mustard Bath Sandwich.” Those provided a bit of additional entertainment while we were travelling around the countryside and getting on with the missions.

Somehow, the conversation also wandered into games involving cheese.

We discussed various cheese-themed games before Gary suggested the possibility of creating a fantasy role-playing game featuring cheese knights, cheese mages, archers and other characters. He even asked for the idea to be remembered, so perhaps that’s something we’ll have to investigate another day.

There was also a fair amount of discussion about other games, gaming platforms and digital ownership, including whether purchasing games digitally is necessarily a good idea when access to them depends on the companies providing the services.

Eventually, it was time to return to camp, which is never one of my favourite destinations.

The problem with camp is that Arthur insists on moving around at an incredibly slow pace. We can travel around the countryside at a reasonable speed, but the moment we enter camp, everything slows to a crawl.

I find it incredibly frustrating, so I generally try to spend as little time there as possible.

Unfortunately, our next mission required us to return and speak with Dutch.

That brought us to the final mission of the evening, Horsemen, Apocalypses.

We began by meeting Dutch, who I’m becoming increasingly convinced we should simply shoot and get it over with, because he’s a horrible human being.

He was discussing further plans involving Saint Denis and a possible trolley-station robbery, but before we could get much further, the camp came under attack.

The O’Driscolls had arrived, and the assault began with the particularly unpleasant sight of Kieran’s headless body being delivered back to the gang.

What followed was a substantial gunfight as we attempted to defend the camp against the attackers.

Initially, we found ourselves on the upper level of the building, where we had a reasonably good position overlooking the area. We could see the enemies approaching and were managing to take them out with relative ease.

Unfortunately, Dutch decided that we should retreat back inside the house.

I wasn’t entirely sure why he wanted us to abandon such a useful position, especially when we were doing reasonably well from where we were standing.

To make matters more confusing, he then decided that we needed to go back outside again and continue the fight.

He also wanted everybody else brought into the house, which I thought was a particularly questionable idea. If the attackers had decided to firebomb the building while everybody was contained inside, that could have ended rather badly.

Thankfully, they didn’t do that, and we eventually made our way back outside to continue defending the camp.

There were still plenty of enemies attacking us, and we had to work our way around the building while helping the other members of the gang. I also had a few moments of confusion with the cover controls, with chat helping to remind me which button we needed to use.

As the battle progressed, we discovered that another member of the gang had got herself into trouble away from the main building.

I couldn’t immediately remember her name, but it was Sadie Adler, and we were instructed to go and assist her.

We headed over to see what was happening, only to discover that she had already dealt with the two enemies who were attacking her.

Apparently, she didn’t particularly need our assistance after all.

We joined up with Sadie and continued moving around the camp, taking out the remaining attackers until the O’Driscoll assault was finally brought to an end.

The gang had survived, although the loss of Kieran made it a rather grim conclusion to the evening’s missions.

With the immediate danger over, Dutch was already thinking about what we should be doing next. There were still plans involving Saint Denis, and it was becoming increasingly obvious that our current camp might not remain a particularly safe place to stay.

We had another look at the map and checked our progress, discovering that we were still in Chapter Four, with overall completion sitting at approximately 48%.

I wondered whether the next major mission, possibly involving the trolley station, might finally push us towards the next chapter of the story.

However, after everything we’d been through, I decided that we’d completed enough missions for one evening.

We saved the game and left Arthur at camp, still wearing his questionable haircut and with plenty more trouble waiting for him.

Next week, we’ll continue exploring the storyline around Saint Denis, investigate whatever Dutch has planned for us and perhaps finally return to the barber to see whether we can do something about Arthur’s appearance.

After wrapping up the gameplay, we had a look at the upcoming streaming schedule, including The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered the following evening, along with the other games and activities planned for the week.

We then brought Red Dead Redemption II to a close and took everybody over to profshikari for a raid, giving the community somewhere else to continue the evening.

So, we’d completed the introductory American Fathers mission, finished three substantial story missions, won a considerable amount of money gambling, robbed a paddle steamer, recovered documents from an oil facility and survived a major attack on our camp.

We’d also discovered that our preferred approach to stealth still works reasonably well, provided we’re prepared to shoot everybody who notices us.

Not a bad evening’s work, really.

Although I still think we need to do something about that haircut.

🎬 Watch the Episode

If you missed the livestream, you can catch the entire adventure in Red Dead Redemption II Episode 22 on YouTube.

From the lengthy visit to the barber and the paddle steamer robbery to our questionable stealth tactics and the attack on camp, it’s all there.

You can also follow the story from the beginning through the Red Dead Redemption II Series Playlist.

If you enjoy the episode, please consider leaving a like, sharing your thoughts in the comments and subscribing to my YouTube channel for more gameplay videos and livestreams.

🔴 Join the Adventure Live

There’s always something happening during our livestreams, whether we’re trying to complete the next mission, exploring somewhere we’re probably not supposed to be or getting distracted by something interesting along the way.

Come and join us live on Twitch or YouTube. You can get involved in chat, help us work through the games and enjoy the community activities that regularly take place alongside the gameplay.

And, of course, you can help us decide whether Arthur’s next haircut is actually an improvement.

🧭 Community & Links

Our adventures don’t have to finish when the stream ends. There’s plenty happening throughout the community, from gaming discussions and music to projects like my Raspberry Pi UAP detector.

Live — Come along for the next stream and see what happens when we return to the game:

Twitch | YouTube

Community — Keep the conversation going, share your interests and see the latest project updates:

Discord

Socials — Follow what I’m sharing between livestreams and keep up with the latest videos and updates:

TikTok | Bluesky | Instagram | Facebook | Threads | X

Music — If you’ve enjoyed the music featured around the channel, you can listen to more of my releases here:

Spotify | Apple Music

Support — If you’d like to help support the channel and the content I create, these are the places to visit:

Fourthwall | Teespring | Streamlabs

More — Gaming is only part of what I do, and you can explore my other projects and services here:

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🌅 Three Missions Completed, One Haircut to Fix

That’s where we leave Arthur Morgan for another week. We’ve made some worthwhile progress, although the attack on camp has certainly made the gang’s situation more complicated.

Next time, we’ll see what Dutch has planned in Saint Denis, whether we’re finally approaching the next chapter and possibly investigate the character customisation options again.

Thank you to everybody who joined us live, contributed to chat and kept us entertained throughout the evening.

Until next time, take care, and I’ll see you on the next stream.

— Dr Ravenholm