Game review: Red Dead Redemption *****

The leading edge of interactive media has a new face. It is filthy, crudely scarred, and belongs to John Marston, the protagonist of Red Dead Redemption, the sprawling and sublime new western from Rockstar Games.

Blackmailed in 1911 by unscrupulous federal agents into hunting down his former comrades in Dutch van Der Linde's notorious gang, Marston straddles more than the border between Mexico and the United States. He also stands between the Old West and modernity - between the celebration of the individual and the collective requirements of organized society - as he tries to salvage a family life from the smoldering legacy of his criminal past.

Along the way, he and his creators conjure such a convincing, cohesive and enthralling reimagination of the real world that it sets a new standard for sophistication and ambition in electronic gaming.

The world of Red Dead Redemption is a violent, unvarnished, cruel world of sexism and bigotry, yet one that abounds with individual acts of kindness and compassion. Like our own, this is a complex world of ethical range and subtlety where it's not always clear what the right thing is. This is a world where revenge often tastes not sweet but bitter. (If all this reminds you of Sam Peckinpah, and in particular of The Wild Bunch, that is no coincidence.)

One of the buzzwords in the game industry these days is immersion. Rockstar scoffs at that. Red Dead Redemption, released Tuesday for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles, does not merely immerse you in its fiction. Rather, it submerges you, grabbing you by the neck and forcing you down, down, down until you simply have no interest in coming up for air.

Rockstar, the video game industry, and millions of players have been waiting a decade for this moment. Ever since Grand Theft Auto III redefined single-player gaming in 2001, Rockstar has been known as The Company That Makes GTA, nothing more.

Rockstar has been eager to demonstrate that it can create a blockbuster out of more than the profanity-spewing drug dealers and submachine-gun-toting thugs who populate the world of Grand Theft Auto.

And now it has, though this project involved no small leap of faith (and no small expense: between $80 million and $100 million, according to industry executives).

For a genre that has been so essential to the film business, it may seem surprising that the western has traditionally never lent itself to video games. Then again, western games, like Activision's Gun from 2005, have never sold well because there has never before been a western game that was truly made well.

Beyond its technical achievement and gorgeous landscapes, Red Dead Redemption is perhaps most distinguished by the brilliant voice acting and pungent, pitch-perfect writing we have come to expect from Rockstar.

From snake-oil hucksters to wizened old gunslingers to traumatized rape victims to cynical revolutionaries, Red Dead Redemption teems with characters you may never forget.

In the more than 1,100 articles I have written since 1996, I have never before called anything a tour de force. Yet there is no more succinct and appropriate way to describe Red Dead Redemption.

Rockstar rides again.