The opening — 1899, a blizzard, the Van der Linde gang retreating from Blackwater. Arthur Morgan is not introduced as a mystery. He is introduced as someone who has been doing what he does for long enough that it has become the shape of him, the only life he knows how to live. The stars looking different is the game's first image of what the violence costs in the places where it cannot be cleaned off — not guilt exactly, but the specific alteration of perception that comes from having done things that change how you see the world.

Red Dead Redemption 2 will spend seventy hours asking what Arthur does with that alteration. The answer begins here, in the snow, with the gang moving and the sky watching and everything that follows already in motion.