In a game all about vampire slaying it’s pretty important that killing your blood-feasting foes feels like an event in and of itself. That’s exactly what Arkane Austin has done with Redfall; much like how assassination-sim Dishonored had gloriously bloody backstab animations, Redfall revels in the act of plunging a wooden stake through a vampire’s heart. There’s weight in the blow as you knock your foe backwards and slam them into the floor, pushing a boot into a jaw that quickly evaporates into fiery dust. Yeah, killing vampires in Redfall feels good.
At a recent hands-on event I played around 90 minutes of Redfall, which gave me the first taste of something akin to a Far Cry game made by Stephen King. It’s an open-world shooter set in modern day Massachusetts, filled with gothic small-town vibes, fanged horrors, and a buffet of activity types.
That means Prey and Dishonored developer Arkane Austin is operating in uncharted territory. Redfall is very different to the studio’s other games and initially feels a lot more conventional. A freely explored map with safehouses, enemy camps, side errands, and tier-graded loot? Check, check, check, and check. But the more I played, the more I saw of what I’d expect from the historically ambitious developer. The island town of Redfall has clever environment design that’s engineered to compliment your skills. The enemy AI is there to be toyed with, allowing you to bait your foes into traps. And every second room I entered felt staged to tell a story. Redfall definitely is an Arkane game, just not the one I expected.
The demo began mid-way through an investigation into Dr. Addison, a physician-turned-vampire god known as The Hollow Man. I was to search his mansion – a ransacked estate that appeared frozen in time, mid-explosion – in the hope of discovering something that may weaken him. Of course, said mansion was crawling with enemies, both blood suckers and the humans who work in service to them. It was a classic infiltration set-up and has much of what you’d expect of Arkane’s work in this field. Patrolling cultists guarded the perimeter, CCTV camera-like vampires lurked on the building’s roof, and there were multiple entry points to choose from. Inside, the route to my objective was spelled out only with clues, and so exploration and close reading of the space is mandatory.
It soon became clear that to find what I was looking for I needed to replace three characters missing from Addison’s daughter’s doll house. After scouring the house and finding the little figures I needed, I was transported back to a period where the mansion was tidy, un-exploded, and Addison hadn’t gone full vampire mode. In this timeline – which felt like a simpler, less fantastical version of Dishonored 2’s Crack in the Slab in the way it repurposed the location to tell its story – I watched apparitions play out a tragedy between Addison and his daughter. It’s a tale I won’t spoil here, but one that reveals the vampire god’s weakness and presumably will help me burn him out of existence in a later mission.
Of course, Redfall isn’t all about rebuilding creepy doll houses and reliving childrens’ trauma. As mentioned earlier, it’s also very much about sending vampires to hell in very cool ways. Your arsenal comprises a bunch of conventional firearms – shotguns, pistols, assault rifles and the like – as well as a variety of DIY weapons designed specifically for vampire hunting. The selection I’ve used of the former feel heavy and powerful, but even those with the highest stats are unable to truly eliminate a vampire. Bloodsuckers downed by regular guns will reanimate a few moments later and so, in tradition with vampire lore, the only way to properly end them is with a stake driven through their heart. Many guns are equipped with a wooden bayonet for such occasions, but the jury-rigged stake launcher lets you dust vamps from a distance with a single trigger pull. Ammo for the launcher seems much more scarce than regular bullets, though, and so I found myself continually assessing if each fanged target was worth the shot.
Should you be out of stakes, there are other ways to do the job. Fire does the trick, and so exploding hazards or flare guns will turn a vampire into a smouldering barbecue. Electricity also generates heat, and so setting up some kind of a livewire trap will fry them, too. They also hate ultraviolet light (it freezes them into temporary stone statues), so a UV emitter gun is a handy thing to pack – just remember to shatter your targets before the petrification wears off. All these techniques give the sense of vampire hunting being a process, a profession. To be the slayer means learning the tricks of the trade.
Each of Redfall’s four playable protagonists are equipped with unique skills to help with that process. For this session I played as Devinder Crousley, a quippy British cryptozoologist most obviously built around being a modern-day Buffy. His Arc Javelin is an electrified spear that can chain bolts of lightning around a group of enemies, and scoring a perfect throw with it feels immensely satisfying. The Blacklight, meanwhile, floods a wide area with UV light for quick crowd control. They were useful in my single-player demo, but are abilities I’m excited to use as part of a co-op session; I’m interested to see the results of experimentation with a combination of different characters’ skills.
My favourite of Devinder’s gadgets is his Translocator, a frisbee-like device that teleports you to wherever it is thrown. It’s Redfall’s closest answer to Dishonored’s Blink ability and it quickly became my most-used tool, letting me access out-of-reach open windows, flank enemies, appear behind guards for takedowns, and bypass grids of laser trip mines. It also helped just getting around; while Redfall’s map seems much smaller than those in most open world shooters there’s still a lot of ground to cover, and being able to throw the Translocator over houses, streets, and fences was very handy for exploring the town.
As you’d expect from a game in this genre, there’s a whole bunch of things to do beyond the main storyline. There are multiple safehouses to unlock, each of which becomes an ammunition stockpile and fast-travel location. There are activities which help pull neighbourhoods back from full vampire infestation, such as wiping out cultist rallies or preventing a powerful creature emerging from its blood amber cocoon. Then there are errand-like side quests that appear to be peppered with Arkane Easter eggs, such as one where you head off to find whisky and cigars.
But the best side activities are the strangest ones, at least from the small sample I’ve seen so far. Vampire Nests transport you into a twisted psychic realm where you must destroy a room-sized heart and then claim as much treasure as possible before the entire place collapses around you like some kind of blood splattered game show. Back in the town, you’re frequently reminded that ‘The Vampire Gods Are Watching You’, and if you cause too much trouble they’ll send an Incredible Hulk-like freak to beat seven bells out of you in a battle played out beneath a wild electrical storm. The repeating nature of open-world tasks feels completely at odds with Arkane’s typically hand-crafted approach, but it’s in these two activities that I saw a glimmer of how the studio is rethinking the building blocks of the genre to make them feel more systemic or novel.
The other area in which traditional open-world shooter design is at odds with Arkane’s legacy is stealth. To be clear: stealth is a component of Redfall, but it adheres to a very different rulebook than that used by Dishonored. Sneaking flows between regular bursts of violent, chaotic conflict. And that’s okay. Dishonored was Arkane’s interpretation of pure stealth classics like Thief, but the studio’s touchstones for Redfall are very different. Before my demo began, co-director Harvey Smith namechecked Far Cry 2 and STALKER as influences; two shooters from an experimental period years before the likes of Gearbox and Ubisoft established the largely unwavering open-world FPS formula. If Arkane Austin can bring its own version of the kind of innovation those games did back in the late 2000s, then Redfall could well inject a static genre with some long-overdue excitement.
Matt Purslow is IGN's UK News and Features Editor.