Redfall is a silly game about shooting vampires, but it’s not. Yes, it’s about ridding a town of a supernatural nuisance using flashy powers and souped-up armor – and there’s more to how it plays out in Aoife’s video below – but, like the previous series of Arkane Dishonored, there’s a lot more going on beneath the surface.
After spending time with the game itself, I was surprised to find that Redfall’s combat pitted my character against actual life, breathing people as often as the undead. Two groups of people stand out: true-believer cults who cast their lot with vampires as our new gods, and then members of Bellweather, a Blackwater-style private military contractor. These factions help keep the combat varied, and offer a slightly smoother experience than the fast-paced game of late. In Redfall, vampires can zoom up and swarm you quickly, and require not only bullets but also a final stake to return to the grave.
Perhaps more interesting, however, are the reasons why any of these groups are enemies – and it’s because of the way Redfall’s world is brought to life by creator Harvey Smith, Deus Ex designer and creative director of Dishonored and its sequel. . As a recent story trailer for Redfall makes clear, this game’s brand of bloodsuckers was born out of the capitalist vampirism of Aveum Therapeutics, a money-minded Big Pharma corp left to experiment without check. Its schemes gone awry lead to the town of New England being taken over by actual vampires (as well as two human groups looking to profit from the presence of the undead).
“The themes are the [richest] 0.1 percent are already vampires,” Smith told me. “And in this game, they literally become vampires.” Our conversation came after I played an early mission in the game that ends at the Addison Mansion, a creepy house that used to be home. one of the founders of Aveum Therapeutics, whose DNA experimentation led him to believe he was some kind of god. (If you’ve seen the brilliant mini-series Dopesick , which focuses on the real-life exploits of the Sackler family, has interesting parallels here with Purdue Pharma.)
“Our fiction is never a metaphor for pain. It is always elective.”
“Our fiction is never a metaphor for disease,” Smith continues, describing those who become vampires or end up as cults that worship them. “It was always elective, it’s not like a zombie outbreak where I accidentally gave you vampirism. You have to decide. So, [Smith points at me] if you’re a vampire, and I want to be a vampire, I’m probably begging you. And it’s probably like, ‘Bring me your neighbour’s children’. And I bring you my neighbor’s son [in exchange]. That’s literally our fiction.”
It’s a fiction that reflects the reality in which Redfall was made, Smith suggests, during a turbulent time in world events that saw major political changes in the US and UK, as well as numerous cases of wealthy megacorps people are taken advantage of as the real world turns. in hell. “You’re fighting private military contractors, and people who used to be your dentist or your baker or a police officer who decided to hang out with the new masters,” Smith acknowledges. Meanwhile, the game has players use “public buildings where you fight, like a fire station and the maritime center” as fight hubs.
“Twice on this project, Austin lost power and water,” says Smith, reflecting on his life back at Arkane Studios in Texas. “We had no power for 10 days and had to boil our water. Another time recently we lost power for four days. People died. No power for five or 10 days means the elderly, the poor, people on the margins of society, they can die. We keep destroying the infrastructure so the rich are doing so well, and everyone else is worse off. It’s scary. And meanwhile, you have men screaming in the street , like, ‘go home’ and ‘go back to where you came from’. I think all of that was in my head.”
Smith recalls completing work on Dishonored 2 at Arkane Lyon and living in Europe at a time when the UK voted for Brexit, before the US voted for Donald Trump. “I woke up in the middle of the night,” Smith said of the US election, “I was on Twitter and I was just watching my friends like, ‘What’s going on?’ There was just this crestfallen, smashing, kind of reaction. And that’s when I felt: ‘This signals the beginning of something really wild.’ It’s populism. It’s like echoes of earlier times in history.” And while all this goes on in the background, he continues, many “horror show” incidents have occurred involving pharmaceutical companies.
“I have a lot on my mind. But I make video games. So what do I do?”
Smith listed scandals such as the Theranos blood testing tool made by former entrepreneur and now-convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, the conviction of “Pharma bro” Martin Shkreli that raised the price of essential drug, and the downfall of the billionaire Sackler family who made a fortune “on the back of the oxycontin epidemic”. “It’s been on my mind a lot,” Smith continued, taking a breath. “But I make video games. So what do I do?”
Well, one option is to show the world a video game about vampires, to show people how messed up everything is.
“The question is, does that just annoy people who don’t care?” replied Smith. “Or you don’t want that? Is it really interesting, for the people who want it? Because at the end of the day, you’re the vampire you’re shooting. Is it the worst of both worlds? It worked out with Dishonored and Deus Ex, but obviously sometimes can’t be done.”
The game’s cast reflects Redfall’s desire to present characters with meaningful backstories, and portray a group of survivors who may have a real reason to fight. There’s Layla, a debt-ridden medical student who volunteers for an Aveum clinical trial gone wrong. She has an umbrella-like shield that can be upgraded to absorb damage, the ability to lift herself up for short periods of time to access hard-to-reach places, and can call her “himbo ex-boyfriend Jason ” – a vampire – who will come to help.
There is also Jacob, a former member of Bellweather who is now separated from the group. He now has a vampire eye, for some reason, which allows him to scout with a ghostly crow. He also has a high-tech invisibility cloak and a souped-up sniper rifle. Remi is part of a search-and-rescue squad and plays a tech specialist, with a robot that can lure and aggro enemies. The last of the quartet is Devinder, a YouTube influencer who believes in the supernatural, who sees the rise of vampires as an opportunity. He has a blacklight device to stun vampires, an arc javelin to zap them, and a translocator to warp areas similar to Corvo’s Blink.
The game has changed quite a bit over the years, Smith says, but despite everything that’s happened in the world since its inception, Redfall remains the massive game he always intended to make. “So is Deus Ex which is a fun action game, atmospheric and cyberpunk – but the very concept of Cyberpunk is political,” he said. “The aristocrats who make money during the plague are not honored. You can play this game as a fun scary action game where Laila says, ‘I wish they canceled my student loan! Boom!’ But if you read it deeper, the founders of Aveum therapeutics are already vampires. Monsters are always metaphors.
“Most of the time, it’s a scary action game,” Smith concluded. “And it’s a deep dive into a New England town that we’re building and the lives of the people there. You can infer from the environmental storytelling who lived there and what life was like, before the hot start came in. that and started gentrifying the area and warping. reality around them – figuratively and literally. Mostly, that’s what the game is about.”
As part of the same conversation, Smith revealed to Eurogamer that Arkane is working on a U-turn on Redfall’s single-player always-online restriction, which you can read about here.
