Arkane's vampire thriller is confused and deeply compromised, but has moments of real charm.
I'm a fan of Chickering's safe house. I'm glad I unlocked it. The fast travel is convenient, but it's also just a fun place to hang out. I'm not sure about the floor-to-ceiling stars and stripes on a wall, but the flag certainly became less creepy as I got closer and discovered that what I had taken to be a series of bullet holes in the center of it actually turned into an array of Christmas lights once the textures were filled in. Elsewhere, large refrigerators, medical kits and ammunition, sleeping bags covered in the strange spray of discarded playing cards. Throw in a beanbag and a copy of Rumors and I never want to leave.
But those refrigerators. The large metal sink. Please wait! What was this place before?! A doctor's office? A morgue? In fact, the answer was on a dresser, under some beautiful honeycomb shelves. Pastry trays, all empty, and cake tins with the glass lids that make them look like bell jars. This was a pastry shop! A glance at the hand-drawn map on another wall almost confirmed this. I was in the middle of what had once been a small shopping area, with shops on either side and a brewery for the neighbors. As I walked outside, I saw a space where tables and chairs had once been and a sign still hanging: Fruit Fly Smoothie Bar! Mmmm! And also Bah, obv. Because it's Roodval.
I've been thinking about this smoothie bar a lot in recent days, the smoothie bar that was subsequently toppled as a temporary shelter during a vampire apocalypse. A lot of this confusing game about a small town overrun by blood-sucking horrors is wrapped up in the layers I found here in this smoothie bar, I think. There's the ammunition and the medical kits, but also the dual nature of the bar itself: the sense that it could initially be a cozy, family-run pastry shop, followed by the revelation that, no, it's almost certainly a boring smoothie joint with influencers. with dejected people, no doubt drinking activated walnut water and taking pictures of their frappes for Insta. Those honeycomb planks suddenly made a lot more sense, I can tell you. And the name - Fruitfly - is perfect. 'Fruit'! Hmmm! Oh, and 'Fly'.
Redfall has me in knots. I'm contractually obligated to tell you about all the things that don't work, all the little problems that come with slightly bigger problems, to make a game that probably shouldn't exist in this state. Redfall is by no means unplayable, it's just a bit of a mess, technically and, I think, design-wise. Reviews are low, user reviews are much lower. Phil from Xbox just apologized for the whole thing. And yet, as I go about the day and my alarm beeps and I think, oh, time for more Redfall! If that happens, I don't mind at all. I don't roll my eyes or cringe. I'm happy to return to this place and that has to count for something.
It's not - it's a weird thing to get through - it's not because of what we would traditionally call the "game" part. Redfall's problems come in layers, in scales and geometries, but a lot of it centers on the fact that it's a fast-paced co-op shooter.
There are technical things wrong with the game, from slow loading textures and the stuttering frame rate to the fact that yesterday I tried to use my super in a tight spot and ended up freezing in space with no super and no way to use a gun anymore - so I was in an even tighter position. The standard controls are both slow and shaky, making aiming very awkward. This means that the first few hours with Redfall consist of going online and finding suggestions – there are many and they often conflict with each other – on how to adjust the scope of the options to make the game a little to feel better. Games really live in their controls, and shooters doubly so. Redfall, even when I've messed around with the settings a bit, never really feels that fun to control. Aiming remains a chore no matter what I do, and even using the crosshairs to select objects in the world can be tedious. Casing sometimes works and sometimes not. Ladders can - occasionally, and this may have already been fixed - leave you sitting on them while evil darts in and laughs at you. Sad to be you, ladder boy!
The bad guys are also a problem. Standard non-beastly grunts called cultists come in packs, but are all hampered by strange, often mindless AI. When I first started playing, I noticed that it took forever for me to see an intruder on their property, even though they seemed to be just trying to spot intruders. They also crowded into doorways, eager to be the first in, so everyone ended up getting stuck. They often used the wrong weapons for the distances involved, so they shot at close range and the shotgun at range. I'll be honest: I think they're still doing some of these things after a recent patch, but I'm not sure, and that's because I don't pay attention to them anymore. Gunfights with standard enemies are something I breeze through without thinking too much. They're annoying to fight, but I don't notice how annoying they are anymore. It's like discovering a stubborn knot in your laces when you try to take off your shoes: the next few minutes won't be fun, but let's move on, okay?
Vampires are a little better, partly because their visual design makes them stand out, these large, long-limbed aliens. They float off the ground, which is just wonderfully weird and creepy, and while cultists kind of fumble around trying to figure out whether to take cover or charge, vampires often sprint straight at you, the cardio hounds of the undead. Vampires must be defeated and then deployed or they will be revived. They come in different styles with different skills, which makes goal setting somewhat of a necessary tactic. Once dead (is that the right term for vampires?), they often leave behind small piles of ash in which you can search for special prey. Yet, beneath the creepy exterior, I am often aware that not much is happening there.
Like I said, none of these things make the game unplayable. It amounts to a shooter where combat is far from the most fun part of the mix, and that's despite the loot - a decent range of weapon types, but nothing too charismatic - and a handful of interesting classes to choose from. (The lessons will be a reason to come back once the game is done, btw. I played as the teleporting, vampire-freezing cryptic hunter, but the others seem fun too, including the robo-friend and the person who can summon an umbrella and a spectral cage. What I really like about combat here is when a mission has sent you out of a safe house or your headquarters into the country, the area you're targeting, and maybe you zoom in a little with your sniper scope and spot the spot. . main villain gatherings, and you think about what you're going to do to get through it all.
These moments are weird, though, because they remind me that Redfall doesn't really know what it is. Arkane made its name with immersive sims, and some of that DNA has been retained. There are lots of beautifully written notes and books and articles and all that jazz to read. Levels give you a wide variety of ways to approach them. (If you can get to work through a door or through an air vent: welcome! You're in an immersive sim!) But it's also a fast-paced co-op shooter, and I'm not sure I've ever trained on how to shoot one. Play an immersive speed simulation online with friends.
It wouldn't matter much, but I don't think Redfall has completely solved this either. Most missions with other players end in enjoyable chaos, but there's always a sense that there's a richer way to play this, but it just doesn't quite get there. Redfall feels like a game that wants you to play it the way carefully choreographed game demos play out in front of large audiences at major trade shows. Ubi demos! Let's wander through The Division for ten minutes, with everyone achieving their goals! But I don't think many people in the real world play co-op shooters that way, outside of something very sporty like Rainbow Six, and so Redfall's delicate, immersive sim elements can't always capture the chaos of real life and groups people survive. tools. -up friends who just want a night out with something to shoot between nacho fillings.
And so this is a co-op shooter, I've had the most consistent fun playing the single player. I get to make plans, do things at my own pace, read the notes scattered everywhere and think about the fiction behind the missions. Sure, boss battles that are clearly designed for multiplayer become a bit of a roadblock, but they're generally cheap. But how strange: my best moments in Redfall were all solo.
It's a shame to have to go through all those problems. Because deep down, I enjoyed my time here, and I want to try to understand why. I'm trying to remember: if what I felt about a video game was the result of some kind of equation where I simply plugged objective numbers into it - controls, AI, texture loading, "durability" - and then just processed the output, I would don't do that. should play one of them in the first place. If the value of a game were just math based on a set of micro-skills, they wouldn't need players at all. By most metrics, Redfall still needs a lot of work. And yet I feel very happy about it.
Much of this is due to the world. Redfall's two open world areas offer the kind of New England town I'd love to explore in real life. There are also several layers in this place, the fruit and the fruit fly. It is beautiful, Redfall, with its wooden houses, the flaming autumn red and gold of the trees, the rickety noble spire of a church or the looming volume of a grain silo. There is a covered bridge! There is a beautifully preserved cinema! The second junction area is a maritime museum! All of these places are wonderful to find, even before missions are thrown through them. But they also have a dual nature: something Arkane is so good at. Because while Redfall is beautiful, there are every signs that, long before the vampires arrived, this town was thirty-two, complacent and too rich for most people, a place of one percenters and awkward euphemisms. Redfall is like one of those beautiful fake neighborhoods that Ina Garten and her billionaire friends visit every summer to play town: I run the cafe, you run the candy store. See you later on the beach for a bowl of expensive white stuff with rosemary in it.
This makes poking around in the game itself a bit of a puzzle, a bit of a joke to figure out and enjoy. And that's before you take in the many environments, the mountains and farmlands and jagged little cliff walks. That's before you also take into account the rituals, the safe houses you have to unlock, the neighborhoods you have to clear of vampires by raiding the nests, the various big bosses you have to go after in multi-part quests.
What should we think of this? Years ago, there was another games writer who I met occasionally at events who would tell me that he reread Ray Bradbury's The October Country every year just to get that smoky, eerie feeling, the sweet rural melancholy that sounded out. of range, living in London and not near pine trees and owning an iPhone. I can see Redfall becoming something like that for me: an annual holiday in the vibrant depths of summer that takes me to a faraway place where it's always almost Halloween.
And Bradbury is indeed doubly relevant here. I wish I could remember where I read this, but the best thing I ever saw about Bradbury was a sentence about how his imagination was always overrated. Its spaceships and gripping horrors never really stopped. But his work sings because of its memory, the act of seeing and remembering that brought his best books into focus through the power of pure, sad nostalgia.
Redfall has it: the imagination is fine in some places, a little shaky in others. But as an act of seeing, an act of remembering, I have found it truly generous. Here is a city, down to the warp and weft. Down to the roots and details. And as such, Arkane has created something that I appreciate.
