Redfall is a silly game about shooting vampires, but also not. Yes, it’s about clearing a town of a supernatural nuisance using flashy powers and souped up weaponry – and there’s much more on how it plays in Aoife’s video below – but, just as with Arkane’s previous series Dishonored, there’s also much more going on beneath the surface.
After time with the game myself, I was surprised to find Redfall’s combat pitted my character against actual living, breathing humans just as often as the undead. Two human factions stand out: true-believer cultists who have thrown their lot in with the vampires as our new gods, and then members of Bellweather, a Blackwater-style private military contractor. These groups help keep combat varied, and offer a somewhat easier experience than the game’s fast-moving recently-deceased. In Redfall, vampires can zoom up and quickly swarm you, and require not just bullets but also a final stake to put back in the grave.
Perhaps more interesting, however, are the reasons why any of these groups are enemies at all – and it’s down to the way Redfall’s world has been brought to life by creator Harvey Smith, designer of Deus Ex and creative director of both Dishonored and its sequel. As a recent story trailer for Redfall makes clear, this game’s brand of bloodsuckers were born from the capitalistic vampirism of Aveum Therapeutics, a money-minded Big Pharma corp left to experiment unchecked. Its schemes gone awry led to the New England town being taken over by actual vampires (as well as those two human factions seeking to profit from the undead’s presence).
“The thematics are that the [richest] 0.1 percent are already vampires,” Smith tells me. “And in this game, they literally become vampires.” Our conversation comes after I’ve played an early mission in the game which culminates at the Addison Mansion, a creepy house previously home to one of Aveum Therapeutics’ founders, 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, there are interesting parallels here to Purdue Pharma.)
“Our fiction was never a disease metaphor. It was always elective.”
“Our fiction was never a disease metaphor,” Smith continues, describing those who either have become vampires or ended up as cultists worshipping 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 you’re probably like, ‘Bring me your neighbour’s kids’. And I bring you my neighbour’s kid [in exchange]. That’s literally our fiction.”
It’s a fiction which reflects the reality in which Redfall was made, Smith suggests, during a tumultuous time in world events which saw great changes in US and UK politics, as well as numerous cases of rich megacorps taking advantage of people as the real world turned to hell. “You’re fighting private military contractors, and people who used to be your dentist or your baker or a cop who have decided to throw in with the new masters,” Smith acknowledges. Meanwhile, the game has players use “public buildings for where you’re fighting back from, like a fire station and the maritime centre” as resistance hubs.
“Twice on this project, Austin has lost power and water,” Smith says, 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 old people, poor people, people at the edge of society, they can die. We keep undermining the infrastructure so the rich have it very good, and everybody else has it worse and worse. It’s terrible. And meanwhile, you have guys yelling on the street, like, ‘go home’ and ‘go back to where you’re from’. I think all of that was in my head.”