I’m perched atop a cliff, overlooking the autumnal New England idyll of Burial Point—the larger of Redfall’s two regions. It’s dusk, and the sky’s turning from a toasty orange to an ominous red. The lights of the town’s Ferris Wheel glimmer in the distance, and small villages of pristine white-slatted houses idle in the valley. It all looks inviting, cosy even, until you get a scope out and observe the disconcerting details: crows circling around a darkened house, shrouds of deadly red mist clinging to the ground in patches, gangly humanoid figures floating in the air and—weirdest of alll—all the water from the harbour’s been drained, and carved into a vast tidal wall encircling the whole region, like a world-ending tsunami stuck in its cresting moment, threatening to break and submerge everything before me.It’s a hell of a sight—quaint and menacing, sweet and spooky—which perfectly sums up the unique atmospheric balance Arkane has struck with Redfall. It may not be the biggest open world seen in a first-person shooter, but it’s definitely one of the most imaginative, taking cues from that Far Cry template of clearing bases and recapturing regions, but imbuing it with the world-building, atmosphere, and weird creativity that Arkane has delivered us through games like Dishonored, Prey, and Deathloop.

Redfall’s open world is fairly formulaic when you strip its gameplay loop down to the basics, but it’s the detail and originality layered over the top of that formula that makes it feel fresh (something that the underrated Ghostwire: Tokyo did in its own way).ALSO READ: GTA 6 Should Learn From The Missions In The PS2 GTA Trilogy

You play as one of four pickable heroes, find yourself stuck within Redfall’s vampirically induced water-wall, and are trying to figure out what the hell is going on. You’ll soon find yourself working from an abandoned fire station with a small group of survivors, which will be your base of operations as you grab main missions from the briefing table. You then load up on munitions, check out the fancy moves you want to aspire towards in your skill tree, and head out into a world that oscillates between a dusky ecliptic daytime and pleasingly spooky nighttime (seriously, no game captures the saturated, slightly campy feel of Halloween quite like Redfall).The thrust of Redfall’s story is that a small circle of power-hungry people working under the auspices of medicine and wellness tap into an unfathomable power that turns them into super-vamps, and much of the region into regular vamps; oh, and they eclipsed the sun too and blocked everyone in the region using a water-wall that I never really got to the bottom of understanding. Redfall’s story isn’t the star here by any means, and the human characters you hang out with in the bases will do little to indulge your narrative curiosity. The playable heroes only have a few surface-level snippets of their own dialogue, and it’s a little odd that the only characters to get any notable development in the game are the villains, each of whom is maniacally obsessed around a particular gimmick.But the main story has never been the main attraction in Arkane games—it’s always been more about the weird things you discover through a combination of play and exploration in a strange and unique game world. Crucially, Redfall does still let you do that, and there’s a lot of weird stuff to find out there in the fairgrounds and forests of Redfall. Even on a purely visual level, the combination of art style and almost neon-vibrant lighting in the world makes it a compelling place to be in; it really is a picture postcard of spookiness, and that can ramp up legitimate horror in some of the vamp-infested houses and otherworldly realms.

The open world—Arkane’s first, I might add—is rich enough that if you head off in a random direction, you’re bound to find interesting stories and occurrences out there. Crows circling a house usually indicates it’s a vampire hideout, and the game’s great at switching up the ambience when you go indoors, suddenly switching from open-world exploration into what feels like a Giallo horror movie.The tonal shift between inside and outside, as well as the great level designs of some of the buildings—each of which has multiple entry points from skylights above, secret passages below, front, back, you-name-it—really doesn’t make it feel just like a typical open-world game that prioritises outdoor locations; Arkane’s knack for excellent levels that encourage different approaches is still very much intact within the broader setting.ALSO READ: Wolfenstein 2's Secret Missions Made Old Levels Feel New Again You’ll be exploring two separate open-world maps in Redfall, both of which are split into several neighbourhoods. Each of these contains a Safehouse, which provides you side-missions that eventually culminate in a battle against the neighbourhood’s underboss. In true Arkane style, you can approach these encounters in whatever way you like—be that charging in with Leila’s psychic shield that explodes on enemies when discharged, or sneaking around in Justin’s invisibility cloak. I played through the game as Davinder, and tolerated his infuriatingly toffish and off-kilter British accent so that I could use his translocator, which lets him teleport to perchy places up on high. There is no right way to approach these encounters, and my personal approach was usually teleporting myself to some adjacent rooftop, or lobbing the translocator through some slats in the building where the underboss was hiding, calmly shooting them in the head with the devastating Stake Launcher, then translocating out of there unseen.

On both of the game’s distinct open-world maps, you’ll need to defeat a certain number of these underbosses in order to unlock the interdimensional doors taking you to the Big Bosses of each region. Oh yeah, that’s another thing: as well as the densely designed bases, mansions, and homesteads of the mortal realm, you’ll also be dipping into the vampires’ psychic reality from time to time—a surreal alternative dimension where the vamps reside and get their power from.This is where the game’s co-op shooter sensibilities feel a little at odds with the Arkane’s more open-ended philosophy. Sometimes ‘Vampire Nests’ pop up on the map, creating a circle that slowly expands over time, increasing the power of all vamps within it. To destroy these, you need to find the door to the psychic world in these areas, then do a linear semi-randomised gauntlet run to destroy a giant heart and close the nest. Sure, these areas look the part, but with their enemy modifiers and what seems like a few different level elements randomly spliced together each time, it feels like a shallow attempt to pad out co-op play—kinda superfluous when there’s already perfectly compelling co-op stuff to do out in the overworld.Likewise, the Big Bosses skip over that immersive sim goodness of letting you defeat them how you like, or using weird roundabout methods, and are instead simplistic and stagey showdowns against foes with limited movesets who I found way too easy to cheese and outwit.

For me, Redfall is at its best when you amble around its spookily stylised world, and allow yourself to happen upon things—whether that’s a burning cultist effigy deep in the woods, or an eerily lit house where you snoop around and discover that the family residing there had an illicit arrangement with a local prowling vampire. I’ve witnessed plenty of shootouts between the different AI factions too, and once saw a unit of mercs nearly wipe out a band of Hollow Man cultists, before a pair of vampires swooped in and tore shit up. With the vamps pretty well damaged by the end, I went in, drove stakes through the pair of them, and helped myself to the spoils.There are a fair few varieties of vamp in Redfall. Your standard ones are speedy, strafe left, right, and teleport around you (also, they may be the first FPS enemy I’ve encountered that actually ducks and weaves beneath your shots, which makes them nice and tricksy). You have your exploding squishy Bloodbags, and super-vamps like the Siphon and Shroud, which limits your visibility with a dark mist then takes shots at you from outside of it.The most stylish of the vamps you encounter is no doubt the Rook, which appears when you’ve angered the Vampire Gods by generally kicking too much ass out in the world. Once the anger bar fills up, the sky turns red, and lightning starts striking with increasing frequency all around, before the Rook gets summoned with one of the strikes. It’s an awesome concept, but the thing is that on both the Dusk and Midnight difficulties, even these built-up daunting encounters are too easy and over way too fast to justify their excellent presentation. The same applies across the vamp spectrum, from regular battles in the world to the bosses; once you get into a groove with your abilities, you become kind of unstoppable, and in co-op that’s only likely to be exacerbated, despite whatever scaling Arkane implements. It makes me long for the fully flexible difficulty options of Dishonored 2.

As for the combat itself, the four characters’ skills are much less stealth-oriented than in Arkane’s previous work. There are no flashy stealth takedowns here, no laying of deliciously devious traps or hacking hostile turrets to fight for you (though you can one-shot clunk unaware enemies on the back of the head with your gun). There is an enemy awareness system here, but the AI doesn’t get particularly flustered when you use the translocator to teleport yourself around them, and will usually turn to face you even after you’ve beamed yourself to a completely different angle. You can still sneak through areas and complete missions unnoticed (I even managed to evade every single vampire on one of those Vampire Nest runs), but there’s not quite as much scope for dirty tricks and really messing around with the systems here.There’s a bit of tension here between Arkane’s trademark playful superpower-shooter stuff where you could veritably toy with your enemies like in Dishonored, and a more straightforward Borderlands-style looter shooter. I didn’t love the floating numbers coming off enemies (which you can and should turn off), for example, or the loot system where you regularly find yourself upgrading weapons based on incrementally increasing levels and numbers. The guns, meanwhile, are your standard pistols, assault rifles, and shotguns, with a couple of vamp-specific ones thrown in, such as the devastating Stake Launcher, and a UV beam that petrifies vampires, letting you follow up and shatter them to pieces.Notably, there are no explosive weapons in the game apart from one character who gets a C4 skill. I suspect that’s to encourage you to tactically blast the various vehicles, oil slicks, and electric generators conveniently dotted around many of the areas, and the fact that the air around gunfights you get into often crackles with fire and electricity is evidence enough that this design choice worked out for Arkane.

I do think that while the skill tree is a bit thinner in a single-player context than Arkane fans are used to, it’s designed to shine in co-op play. The translocator, for instance, isn’t just something you use once, but effectively creates a portal between where you threw it from and to, meaning that while it’s there your allies can use it too. Dev’s electric pulse spear, meanwhile, which zaps enemies in an area around it, can double up as a healing beacon with the right abilities. Once you start synergising those skills with other players, I imagine Redfall will create some unique tactical teamwork opportunities, and we’ll start seeing some pretty snazzy Redfall co-op gameplays videos cropping up soon.There’s no question that Redfall dilutes that immersive sim purity from Arkane’s earlier games to accommodate the more marketable fantasy of hunting down vampires with a group of pals. More than any of the studio’s previous games, Redfall leans towards being an out-and-out shooter, but to its credit still manages to still hold onto those auteurial Arkane touches like mechanical playfulness, inventive worldbuilding, and the joy of exploring an original and super-stylish game world. It pains me to fall back on a cliche, but goddamit Redfall might just be a game with -- ergh -- a little something for everyone (assuming ‘everyone’ is made up of fans of Arkane/immersive sims, Far Cry, and Borderlands).

Redfall is a game where you can wander off by yourself into the woods at night to investigate every room of a creepy New England manor, piecing together the horror that struck there by reading notes and meticulously scouring the environment; it’s also a game where you can link up with two superpowered friends to launch a full-frontal assault on a bunch of cultists worshipping a tree vampire, or fight a giant giga-vampire in another dimension. The fact that it can offer these distinct experiences in a way that ranges from compelling, to competent, to ‘OK, but awesome with friends’ is an achievement in itself.In short, Redfall is a really good kind of weird.NEXT: Redfall's '30 FPS At Launch, 60 FPS Later' Gambit Is Kinda Absurd