15 Best Video Game Acting Performances Of The Decade

The story of Red Dead Redemption 2 was a long and treacherous one, where we trotted our way through the Heartlands with a heft of a gunslinger smoking tobacco, with an easily accessible revolver laying lazily in his holster. This of course was Arthur Morgan, the central protagonist to the prequel, and my top pick for the best acting performance of the decade.

Roger Clark has no The Last of Us moment. No dramatically tragic scenes to be used in an Oscar reel for best performance. Yet come the other side of Red Dead 2’s behemoth of a campaign, and you’ll struggle to rid Clark’s performance from your mind.

Much like Nathan Drake, Morgan found himself on the road to change, but rather than being fearful to move forward, instead he was being pulled back. The dangerous clutch of Dutch Van Der Linde meant that Arthur was always one foot out the door, yet the other loyally remaining.

Roger Clark’s heaving Western drawl assuredly left any players feeling the weariness of a man at the end of his tether. Does he leave those he calls family for the life he never got to live, or stay faithful to those who rely and look up to him, condemning himself to a life of treachery?

Clark bleeds Arthur’s pain, and each new act allows him to embody those levels of kindness or cruelty to an impressive degree. Each new choice becomes one of betrayal: a betrayal of those he loves, and a betrayal of who he is truly meant to be. It’s a certified tear-jerker, and left us with goosebumps all over, even as he silently heads off on one last ride of redemption.