Like all Arkane Studios games that came before it, Redfall's creative use of game mechanics, environmental storytelling, and stylized art is also home to a narrative designed to be compelling and ripe for analysis. 

Where Dishonored examines class division, Deathloop weighs the nature of time, Prey is about choice and consciousness, and Redfall is a horror romp meant to mask a timely metaphor.

At a recent hands-on preview for the upcoming vampire-hunting, open-world first-person shooter, Redfall creative director Harvey Smith noted that horror, in general, can be driven by the frightening social changes of the time.

"We've just been through a period of time where a tiny percentage of people are making record, historic profits, even while rivers are drying up, California is burning and flooding, and there are places in small towns across the U.S. where you can't drink the water anymore," he said. "And it's like, when would this tiny percentage of people that own private jets and islands stop? Because clearly, they're drinking the lifeblood of a mass of people, right?"

Smith's answer to his question essentially plays out in Redfall: They wouldn't.

In reality, that might mean that they just, as Smith puts it, "age out and die as aristocrats without any concern for what the next-generation faces." But in Redfall, that answer takes a twist when Aevum, a wealthy biotech start-up, stumbles into a way to turn clients into vampires, so they can live longer.

"Aevum is a wealthy start-up that moves into the community. It specializes in longevity and health for their wealthy clientele by using the blood of others," Smith said. "And they have all of these people that line up and become a cult for them, 'Please lift me up too.'"

One of the chilling points Smith makes is that in the fiction of Redfall, vampirism is elective, and people are begging for the treatment.

"I literally have to come to you and say, 'Please make me a vampire.' And you might say something like, 'Bring me your neighbors and children.' And if I do that, I'm worthy of consideration. 

"Like, we like to say that the people who are vampires in our game were already vampires. There's definitely a strong subtext here, with an elite preying on everyone else. Technology generates massive amounts of money, robbing from other media. The people that own the Internet backbone and the streaming services make massive money. Musicians struggle, while the people that run the infrastructure for it, like the apps and such, make bank."

Of course, like all of Arkane's games, the subtext is only there for those interested in examining it. It lies under fun action, tight controls, and an intriguing, immersive world.

"We always make games at multiple levels," he said. "Dishonored and Deus Ex both have political subtexts. But at some level, they're just fun action games, right? The average player just likes sneaking and snapping."

The Cast

While 90 minutes inside the fictional Massachusetts island town of Redfall didn't provide a lot of insight into the deeper narrative subtext of the game, it did afford plenty of time to sneak and snap.

Before we dove into the gameplay, we got our first look at the official story trailer, which underscores most of the things that make an Arkane so beloved: Narrative rich environments with lots of environmental storytelling and game mechanics that can be combined creatively, all set in a location with a strong sense of place.

The demo started out allowing players to select from the game's four characters; each bring with them a specific skill set, Smith pointed out. 

Remi De La Rosa is a combat engineer who uses a robot sidekick, named Bribon, that fights alongside her. Her skills include having Bribon draw aggro, access to C4, and the ability to create a rally circle that boosts morale, gets people on their feet, and does a little bit of healing. 

Jacob Boyer is an ex-military turned contract sharpshooter who has a vampiric eye and a spectral raven. He can send out the raven to scout for him, temporarily cloak, and call up a ghostly sniper rifle that does massive damage.

Layla Ellison is a biomedical engineering student who received telekinetic abilities through a science accident. She can create a shield, drop a lift that can propel people three or four floors up, and she has an ex-boyfriend vampire named Jason that she can summon to fight for her—not kidding.

Devinder Crousley is a cryptozoologist and aspiring inventor who arms himself with some of his own creations. He has an arc javelin that he can toss into enemies or the ground, which shoots out electricity. He also has a translocator that he can throw and teleport to, and finally, he has a power called black light, a UV light that can hit a group of people at once.

In Redfall's ecology of damage, vampires can't simply be killed. They need to have their health lowered to the point where you can stake them. This is done through traditional attacks or by burning them with fire, electricity, or UV lights. Some of these attacks petrify a vampire enemy, turning them into stone, and then you can shatter them. Other times you have to knock an enemy down and then literally drive a stake through their heart.

Smith walked us through this as he set the stage for the preview. He also pointed out that the single-player portion of the game, which we played, has a lot of different ways to play. You can wander the island and get lost, hunt down vampire nests to destroy, secure safe houses for future fast travel, or find weird little plotlines and story arcs.

While the game's vampires are certainly the most dangerous things you run into, there are also other threats. For instance, most surviving humans have joined a vampire-worshiping cult or been turned into different threats.

The cults wander the island like a townie militia looking for threats to take out. We ran into humans that were turned into "blood bags," these prone objects that create a radius of red mist that damages you on contact. The only way to destroy them is to petrify them from a distance and then stake them. 

There are also Vampire gods and other high levels of vampires you must contend with during your wanderings. 

Finally, the game has an intriguing system that illustrates how the vampire gods are watching you. The more things you do to draw their attention — like destroying a nest — the more the meter fills until it eventually gets to max.

 "A story starts that has a bunch of red lightning, and a special vampire called the Rook begins to hunt you," Smith said. "And there's a great reward for actually killing the Rook."

We started our hands-on in a chunky portion of Redfall well after the tutorial at a time when our characters have one of each gun and have reached level seven. We were also dropped into the middle of a mission that Smith said was indicative of the kinds of missions you'd find in the campaign.

In the House of Echoes mission, you're tasked with investigating one of the Aevum founders, Peter Addison, and trying to unearth information about the vampire god called the Hollow Man. 

The Hollow Man is one of four vampire gods mentioned at the event. The others were Bloody Tom, Ms. Whisper, and the Black Sun. Fortunately, we didn't encounter them during our play session.

Hands-on

Life in Redfall started for us as sniper Boyer and his mystic crow in a safe house packed with places to spend cash, look over maps, chat with other survivors, and — perhaps most importantly — pick up ammo for all of the weapons. You can equip three but carry many more. Loaded down with ammo and weapons, Boyer went outside and launched his crow to scout the way ahead. When it comes across enemies, they're outlined in red for a time. All of the character's abilities can be improved as they level up. In the case of Boyer's crow, it can eventually be trained to spot and attack enemies.

The weapons come in several categories, including basic guns that fire bullets, weapons that shoot out deadly stakes, and UV beam weapons. The maps are also packed with ways to interact with the environment, and by interact, I mean typically explode, set on fire, or electrocute things.

While single encounters never leave you feeling like you have to count your shots, it's easy to run out, forcing a quick trip to a safe house where you can replenish in seconds.  

The town of Redfall feels sizable, especially when free roaming inevitably leads to a potentially deadly encounter, a mystery to solve, or a mission to pick up.

Like any good open-world game, it's easy to get distracted in Redfall, even if you're trying to make a beeline to a point on the map tied to the mission. In Boyer's case, he stumbled across a house packed with vampires next to a second home ready to be unlocked as a safe house. The encounter, filled with creeping along rooflines, sniping the undead through windows, and eventually taking down the final creature, sucked up a third of the time allotted for the play session. Still, it also offered insight into how much the game feels like most of the Arkane Studios' titles that came before it. Redfall is a tightly crafted game that leaves just enough wiggle room for players to make their own paths and find their own way to victory or untimely death. 

Clearing out the safe house next door was much faster but felt a bit like a puzzle. Boyer had to sort through how to get into a garage rigged with traps, so he could turn on the power to nearby UV lamps and eventually bust into the basement and claim the place. It didn't require much combat, but it did need a touch of outside-the-box thinking.

Finally, he made his way across part of the island to the mansion that is home to this particular step in an ongoing mission. Without giving away any of the story, the mission was rich in combat and story, puzzles and intrigue. And ultimately, it ended with a feeling of accomplishment and a desire to continue unraveling the doomed island's secrets and its many vampires.

There's something equally satisfying with mowing down cult followers and baking and staking the vampires they worship. In our time with the game, we rarely felt overwhelmed, but when we did, it was usually tied to ammo management or bad tactical decisions.

An hour and a half with a game as robust as Redfall isn't much, but it's enough to give you a sense that this will fit neatly among the other beloved works of Arkane.

Left 4 Bled

When Redfall was first announced, and in occasional waves since, people have been trying to link the gameplay and story of the Arkane game to the four-player co-op zombie shooter Left 4 Dead.

Clearly, Redfall isn't Left 4 Dead or anything like it. Playing solo, it's hard to understand where the comparison came from. But that might not be the case once you drop four players into a game.

"It will be something different in co-op, you'll see," Smith said. "But it's the same content. It's the same story missions and all of that.

"It's almost impossible to convince people or to explain to them exactly what a game is until they can play it," Smith said. "Even videos, you know, people are like, 'Is this just Left 4 Dead, or whatever?' It has nothing to do with Left 4 Dead. This is like an Arcane game where you can hack turrets and pick locks and find multiple pathways into things. It's narrative-rich, where there's environmental storytelling everywhere, and there's a campaign. You can skip some missions or not do some missions, or you can do them in a different order. And then on top of that, you can add another person, and then another person, and then another person, and it becomes less and less like our traditional experience and more and more just like a party game where everybody's going crazy."

Fortunately, Smith said, he and the team at Arkane have grown accustomed to fans jumping to conclusions and drawing comparisons when a new title is first announced.

"Even when we were making Dishonored, people were like, 'It seems like a BioShock clone' or whatever. It was just like, hang on. It's always been true for us. When Ricardo and I worked on the original Deus Ex, people would say this isn't an RPG. In an RPG, you have to have a party, and there are elves."

Smith likens this issue to trying to talk about music or "dance about architecture."

"It's very hard to explain to people, and then they put their hands on it, and they instantly get it," he said.

What's interesting here is that Redfall and its makers are promising what sounds increasingly like two games in one. There's the single-player experience that will play very much like what people expect from an Arkane game, and then there is the co-op, which will move further and further away from that approach the more people are added to the team.

"When you go to play single-player, it will definitely feel like it's on a Venn diagram of Arkane games: Deathloop, Prey, Dishonored, and Redfall will definitely be in there," Smith said. "Will this still feel like an immersive sim when four players co-op? I think the answer to that is no. It will feel like something else. There are trade-offs."

The hands-on time with Redfall's single-player mode proved that Smith is correct: This is an Arkane game with something else waiting in the wings once friends pile into your group.

What coop play delivers has yet to be seen, but it promises to be fun.

Redfall hits Xbox Series X|S and PC on May 2. You can pre-purchase or wishlist the game on Epic Games Store right here.