#Redfall screenshot tv#

One mission sent my co-op partner and I into the house of the Hollow Man, the progenitor of the vampire plague and the annoying voice yelling out of TV speakers and radios for the first half of your journey. There are brief moments where the narrative and the environmental design coalesce and give you the kind of strange and haunting spaces that Arkane is known for. I'm so sorry your aunt got turned into a vampire, just let me petrify her with a UV gun and loot the rare shotgun off her ashes and then I'll gladly console you!

It's like if you dropped a plucky Overwatch hero into Netflix's Midnight Mass. Reading these notes and letters while combing through the town for loot and XP as your character quips about how adept they are confuses Redfall's tone. But Redfall's dramatic text logs and side quests are about the horror of the townspeople's friends and family being turned into semi-immortal monsters. If this had the zany tone of Borderlands where blowing up stupid enemies was the entire point, I wouldn't mind. The town is littered with so many gas tanks, oil spills, and propane tanks that I'm not sure the vampires are its biggest problem. But it wasn't long before I started to notice how much this town feels like a hokey theme park next to Arkane's other immersive sim worlds.Įvery human enemy in Redfall has helpfully gathered around the most explosive object they could find. It's the kind of neighborhood I would have loved to trick-or-treat in as a kid, the perfect cozy little town to set a vampire story in.

The town of Redfall may be one of the emptiest open worlds (opens in new tab) I've ever seen, but it does have exquisite autumnal vibes. Conversations with them have the emotional complexity of an MMO quest: 'My family is dead and I want you to go retrieve my daughter's stuffed animal.' Redfall pretends that you're 'biting back' against the vampires to save the people, but you're actually just being given a to-do list of tasks that force you to explore every section of the map. Many of these characters have names and yet none of them have much to say or seem to recognize you. The game properly begins after you clear out the local fire station and join a group of survivors who hope to rebuild what they can and escape. The town of Redfall may be one of the emptiest open worlds I've ever seen. You can crouch and sneak by them, but you'll eventually learn how little of a threat human enemies pose, and how much of Redfall's level design is made to be trampled over with a team of four. You pass by landlocked ships guarded by cultists who are never really given a strong narrative reason for being here in the first place. This eerie and visually striking opening sequence ends once you pick up a gun and venture out into Redfall's bland open world. I broke a window and stepped out onto the deck to see an entire wall of water curled over the boat. There are bodies laying around the cabin and letters that clue you in on where to go next. After choosing one of four heroes, you wake up in the boat you were meant to escape on before the vampire gods peeled back the ocean surrounding Redfall. Redfall doesn't start with an assassination or a time loop, but its quiet first few minutes fit neatly into Arkane's history of evocative intros.

Redfall screenshot