A third of the way in, Redfall is characterful and fun and currently a little bit janky

Welcome to Redfall, where the town motto is "Calm seas and sunny skies." Today, the seas are unnaturally calm. It's quietly horrific, actually. Go down to the dock and the ocean is frozen mid-tsunami - a giant sculpted wave caught in all its Hokusai curves and froth, the whole thing locked in space, with the soft matte edges giving it the likeness of old sea glass. There are ships caught forever in its tumble and swell - small fishers, but also a huge container ship, stopped mid-catastrophe, its cargo stuck in the silent spray.

You see this sea very early on in the game, and it's stayed with me. I should say here, I'm still quite early on in Redfall myself. This isn't a review, even though the embargo is just up. I haven't had time to play enough, and since this is a co-op game at heart - Arkane is calling it an open-world co-op FPS or words to that effect - I really need a good sense of it with other players. But there's more too. I'm playing on an Xbox Series X and the game is rather rough - rough in a way that I wonder if a day one patch might fix. So I'll give you some basic impressions today with the caveat that they may change - change once I've finished the whole game, and also if any patches are released. (Full disclosure - a patch from this afternoon locked me out of the build for a few hours, and while I'm back in I can't yet tell if it's improved much.)

Redfall is a game about a small American sea-side town - a rich one, somewhere Cape Coddish, like Provincetown, perhaps - that has been taken over by vampires. It's like Left 4 Dead in that you go out on missions in heavily tooled-up online squads and smack vampires and other horrors around. But it's also not like Left 4 Dead, because this is Arkane, so there's DNA from immersive sims in here too. You go out on missions around town, completing tasks and unlocking safe houses and other fast travel points as you go. Missions tend to be short and broad, giving you a place to go and people to kill or an object to retrieve, but an enormous amount of leeway in how you do this. Because this is 2023, there is loot, so you're always picking up slightly better weapons and salvaging old ones for cash. Because it's 2023, there are character classes, of which I've been playing only one so far - a British Cryptid hunter who can teleport a bit, fire out an electrical javelin that stuns people, and for a super can plant a big sort of holy ring light in the ground that turns vampires to stone for a few useful seconds and can heal me to boot.

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