Video Game / Redfall

If I had to be stuck on an island full of vampires, I’m glad it’s with y’all.

Redfall is a Survival Horror First-Person Shooter video game developed by Arkane Austin, published by Bethesda Softworks, and released on May 2, 2023 for Xbox Series X|S and Windows.

The game is set in a fictional New England town under siege by an army of vampires. Players control one of four surviving humans with unique supernatural powers as they attempt to fight off both the vampires and a dangerous cult of humans in order to escape the town of Redfall.

Previews: Announcement trailer, Gameplay reveal trailer, “Welcome to Redfall” trailer, Behind the Scenes preview, Official trailer, Gameplay Deep-Dive, Layla hero trailer, Jacob hero trailer, Remi hero trailer, Devinder hero trailer

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Redfall includes examples of the following tropes:

• Abnormal Ammo: Stake Launchers are weapons (seemingly pneumatic construction tools) that have been modified to launch stakes, meaning that they can kill Vampires without the need to get in close for a finisher. Functionally they're equivalent to Rail Guns and are incredibly powerful but with slow reload and very limited ammo. They also use various long, sharp objects as ammo, including sharpened wood poles, kitchen knives, drill bits, and barbecue forks.
• Absurdly High Level Cap: The game's level cap is 40. For comparison, a 100% playthrough of the game in which you do every mission and sidequest will probably get you to around level 23-24.
• Animal Motifs:
  • The Hollow Man's symbol is a butterfly. It turns out he kept butterflies in his mansion greenhouse, and used a needle decorated as a butterfly to draw blood from his daughter to treat his own early-onset dementia, doing this so frequently he ultimately killed her by accident.
  • Bellwether's symbol is that of a ram, as their name is a biblical reference to a ram with a bell around its neck used by shepherds to lead their flock.
• Artificial Stupidity: One of the game's biggest criticisms is the extremely poor, easy-to-exploit AI. For example:
  • Regular Vampires, which rely on melee attacks, have very poor pathing and no method of getting around physical obstacles at close range. As long as a player can position some sort of piece of terrain between themselves and a vampire, the vampire will end up getting stuck and become an easy target for ranged attacks. And even when you can't do that, their attacks can be easily avoided by just walking backwards and slightly to the side. Patch 1.1 made their lunge attacks much harder to dodge by simply strafing, but you can still run them in circles around a medium object (i.e. a car or boulder) to prevent them from lunging.
  • Other vampires, like Rooks, can be defeated simply by standing on an elevated position, as Rooks cannot jump or attack at range so they will just stand under the player, moving around aimlessly while waiting to get shot. This was addressed in patches by giving Rook the same teleport the regular vampires have and increasing his melee range, though there are still a few exploit spots (such as a high window in the lighthouse museum you first fight him) that are safe from him.
  • Finally, Cultist AI isn't much better either, with them being very slow to react to the player's presence even if the player is standing right in front of them.
• Beef Gate: After the first few levels, mini-boss attacks deal enough damage even on Normal difficulty to kill you in one hit unless you have a Blood Remnant equipped to increase your health, so you're expected to do the "A Grave Matter" early main quest to unlock Blood Remnants before tackling the Underbosses.
• Bilingual Bonus: A lot of Remi's dialogue is in untranslated Spanish. Even Bribon's name is a Spanish term that means "vagabond" or "rascal."
• Cain and Abel:
  • Bill, the survivor on the radio trying to rally the other survivors, will repeatedly mention his brother Bob who sold him out and joined the cultists. Bob can be found later on in one of the final missions as a Ms Whisper cultist leader. He seems to either summon or transform into a Shroud when you kill him.
  • Dr. Hunt mentions having a brother who was well-meaning but always a bit odd, who fell in with the cultists and ultimately murdered Dr. Hunt's wife and kidnapped his son to be fed to the vampires.
• Creepy Crows: Befitting the eeriness of his powers, Jacob's 'deadeye' grants him a psychic connection to a mysterious spectral crow, which he can see through to scope out enemies from afar or order it to attack them directly.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: Fairly standard for the genre. White is normal, green has one bonus attribute, blue has two bonus attributes, purple has better stats and two stronger bonus attributes, and gold is the best, being unique variants with their own name and description and 3 unique bonus attributes.
• Cult: Each of the Vampire Gods has a cult of human worshippers dedicated to them.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: Bloody Tom's got about triple the amount of health as the other Vampire Gods (who already have about a dozen times the amount of health of a regular vampire). However, he's also the only Vampire God who fights you solo instead of also summoning vampire shades to swarm you.
• Dirty Coward:
  • The vampire underboss Curator Gould will flee to the museum's roof after you damage them enough.
  • If you shoot your way into the Bloody Tom cult's headquarters, Coselle the leader of Bloody Tom's cult will lock herself in a closet and leave the crane control that opens the door to Bloody Tom's dimension on her desk. When you arrive in her office she'll beg you to just take the controller and leave her alone. If you infiltrate the cult and go through with their ritual instead, Bloody Tom's Bellkeeper will have you kill her as your final test, likely sensing she's an opportunist rather than a fanatical believer.
• Elite Mooks:
  • There are 3 different types of "Special" vampires; Anglers which can turn invisible and also pull you towards them with a psychic tether for an unblockable bite attack, Siphons which can drain your health from afar as long as they have line-of-sight on you, and Shrouds which reduce your vision range to a dozen meters or so and also throw homing energy balls. All 3 have about 3 times the health of a regular vampire. Vampires including Special vampires also randomly can have various buffs, such as a rotating energy shield that projects them, the ability to buff all allies around them with shields, or electrified attacks.
  • Cultists may randomly spawn as an elite version with special attributes (such as instantly summoning/transforming into a vampire upon being killed), though they still go down just as fast as the regular ones. These are given a special name such as Cultist Mistborn, Cultist Bloodskin, Cultist Reaper, etc.
  • Downplayed with Bellwether; they have slightly more health (about 20%) compared to cultists to reflect the fact they're professional warfighters rather than rogue civilians (which does let them barely survive some One-Hit Kill attacks such as a fully upgraded Raven strike), their Engineers can deploy Cobra turrets to assist in combat, and they have dedicated snipers that are often better positioned than cultists armed with sniper rifles, but they're still killed quite easily.
• Enemy Summoner: Cultists with bullhorns will summon reinforcements if they spot you, and the roof-lurking vampire Watchers will summon more vampires if they spot you with their searchlight eyes (which also fire laser beams).
• Evil vs. Evil: Bellwether has the exact same goal as the protagonists; locate and eliminate the Vampire Gods. However, they're Sociopathic Soldiers with orders to Leave No Witnesses, making them as much of a threat to the townspeople as the vampires and cultists.
• Expy: Bellwether Security is a fairly blatant stand-in for the real-world PMC formerly known as Blackwater.
• Eye Scream: Jacob's 'deadeye' was implanted into him by the Vampire God Miss Whisper after he had the original torn out when his team was massacred by vampires, leaving him almost dead from the encounter. It's implied that he might actually be somewhat dead and kept alive by the mysterious artefact, which also allows him to tap into otherworldly powers.
• Fiery Cover Up: Bellwether Security is in Redfall to destroy all evidence linking Aevum Pharmaceuticals and Elias Kurtz to the vampire outbreak, and Leave No Witnesses. This puts them in opposition to both the vampires/cultists and the human survivors.
• Flare Gun: One of the weapon types is a flare gun; it comes in two varieties, a single shot one or a double-barrel one that does half damage per shot. It's most effect against vampires, since it staggers and stuns them and fire can kill them without needing to use a stake.
• Giant Mook: The Rook is a big, beefy Lightning Bruiser vampire who gets sent in to punish you if you've annoyed the Vampire Gods enough with your actions (such as completing objectives, killing Special Vampires, or setting off car alarms). He's fast and relentless, hits hard, and has roughly 5 times the durability of a normal vampire. You also have to contend with random lightning strikes while fighting him, and since he can attack you anywhere on the map you may also have to deal with cultists or regular vampires being drawn into the fight as well. On the plus side, he's guaranteed to drop an Unrivaled (Legendary) tier weapon upon being killed.
• Global Currency: The assorted valuables and amenities (such as whiskey or toilet paper) that you can collect laying around the town are all instantly converted into "support", which you use to purchase items back at the safe houses.
• Hitbox Dissonance: The hitbox of walls tends to be several inches past the actual visual object. It's not unusual to line up a sniper shot around a corner or over a low barrier, only for the bullet to smack into an invisible wall right in front of you.
• Hostage Situation: The Night Manager underboss has a handful of civilian hostages tied up in the basement of his gas station with him, surrounded by barrels filled with gasoline. One stray bullet miss during your boss fight with him and the hostages are apt to go up in flames.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: Besides using medkits, you can also heal a small amount of health by gobbling down the assorted food and drink items laying around. Layla has a perk that increases the healing she receives from food items.
• King Mook:
  • Underbosses and other mini-boss named vampires are just versions of standard regular or Special vampires with much more health and higher damage (with the standard vampire bosses having about three times normal health, while the Special vampire bosses either have about 20%-25% more health (Underbosses), 50% more health (Heartwood Fiends), or double health (Bellkeeper, Blackwood Sisters)). They may also have a random buff just like any other vampire.
  • A named Rook called The Skinner will spawn in Twintree Wellness Center after you complete the "The Key to Wellness" mission, and will probably be waiting for you as soon as you exit Ms. Whisper's dimension, just when you thought the quest was over. He's very tanky, with double the durability of a regular Rook (even the Totality, another named Rook that appears in the Final Boss fight, isn't anywhere as tough), but lacks the lightning storm attack the regular Rooks use.
• Laser Sight: Bellwether's dedicated snipers have laser sights on their sniper rifles, which clues you in that they're aiming at you. Cultists armed with sniper rifles don't have a laser sight, which actually can make them much more dangerous as they can snipe you without you being able to tell their location.
• Le Parkour: Par for the course for an Arkane game the environments have a decent amount of verticality and climbing objects, mantling, and jumping between platforms plays a sizeable role in navigating the environment. Mantling to a higher location to get through a window or balcony door will save you quite a few lockpicks when trying to get inside abandoned houses. Layla and Devinder also have traversal abilities (a psychic trampoline for the former and a throwable teleportation beacon for the latter) that allow them to reach out-of-the-way areas without parkouring.
• Level Scaling: Enemy level scales up along with your character, so you need to keep the level of your weapons and Blood Remnant up-to-date to ensure you deal enough damage and have enough hit points to survive attacks. Weapons generally start to be ineffective once they're about 3-4 levels below your current level.
• Literal Metaphor:
  • Sharpshooting sniper Jacob, whose skills revolved around landing multiple precise shots, has a literal 'dead eye' that gifts him otherworldly powers and enhances his aim.
  • In Devinder's hero trailer, he recounts how he got caught in the vampire apocalypse at a book signing, explaining to the others that he became a cryptozoologist because he wants to let others see The Unmasked World, to "see their eyes light up like a kid on their birthday". Cue the entire crowd of 'fans' gaining Glowing Eyes of Doom.
• Mêlée à Trois: The different enemy factions will fight each other as well as the player's team. Redfall Commons features the Hollow Man's cultists and vampires battling Bellwether, while Burial Point is a 3-way fight between Bloody Tom's cultists, Ms. Whisper's cultists, and Bellwether. Vampires also fight Bellwether but will ignore the in-fighting between the two different cultist groups.
• Mind over Matter: As shown in the previews, player character Layla has telekinetic abilities that she can use to block bullets, push enemies back, and launch herself and other players into the air. Her hero trailer has her imply the company Aevum were responsible for "gifting" her with them, as she already possessed them upon her first encounter with vampires, but was too shocked by being attacked by actual monsters to save Jason with them.
• The Night That Never Ends: As the announcement trailer ends and the sun rises, a mysterious figure watches over the heroes just before a mysterious shadow obscures the sun. The game starts with this happening, allowing the vampires to roam in the daytime thanks to the lack of UV rays. Devinder compares it to a typical British day, an area of the world somewhat infamous for being cloudy/smoggy and lacking direct sunlight.
• Non-Player Companion: Every hero except Devinder has a companion associated with them; Remi's robot Bribon is the strongest example as he acts as an actual NPC in the game world.
  • Engineer Remi has a robotic companion called Bribon that follows her throughout the game and aids her in combat. He's equipped with a low-power, single-shot gun, and can also distract enemies in combat (though they tend to focus on Remi). Remi can also order Bribon to go into distraction mode for several seconds, which causes enemies to focus on him instead of her.
  • Jacob's raven can be summoned to mark enemies or (with upgrades) attack them. It will also occasionally comment on the situations Jacob finds himself in.
  • Layla can summon her vampire ex-boyfriend Jason to help in combat (he apparently underwent the same medical experimentation that she did, which is why he didn't go completely psycho after becoming a vampire).
• Only Six Faces: There are only about 6 different vampire character models (3 male and 3 female), and each of the Special vampire types only have a single character model. This can lead to some odd results, such as characters who are repeated referred to as male being a female Shroud when you fight them. The game possibly tries to lampshade this in an early background note that makes a big deal of referred to a Shroud character with gender non-specific pronouns, possibly implying the Shrouds are meant to be gender non-binary, but that just feels like a Voodoo Shark explanation.
• Our Vampires Are Different: The vampires are all the product of Aevum's genetic research into a specialized source of blood that was meant to make them immortal but instead turned the executives and scientists into vampire gods that have turned everyone in Redfall into bloodsucking monsters. Overall they're a more modern take on vampirism; a vampire bite itself doesn't transfer the condition (you get bitten plenty of times fighting Anglers, and there are plenty of dead civilians laying around town who were killed by vampires and who you don't have to worry about getting up again), rather vampires feed chosen humans their blood, which causes them to be engulfed in a blood amber cocoon in which they slowly transform into a vampire. While they occasionally turn unwilling victims (i.e. Jason and Dr. Hunt's father), for the most part vampire candidates are assholes who sold out in exchange for immortality.
• The Renfield: Each Vampire God has a cult of human followers who serve them in hopes of being rewarded with the addictive "blood trance" as well as the possibility of being made into a vampire. There's also Bellwether Security, who work for Aevum Pharmaceuticals, a company which is run by the Vampire Gods (though their current orders are to kill the Vampire Gods, since in their current state they're considered "evidence" rather than "VIPs").
• Ripped from the Headlines: Aevum's experiments immediately recall 2016 reports that the billionaire Peter Thiel was experimenting with blood transfusions as a way to reverse aging. The implication is that vampires in Redfall were accidentally created when a particular, special woman was used, and used up, for that purpose by Aevum's researchers.
• Sacrificial Lion: Dr. Hunt, one of the 3 main supporting characters in the first half of the game, gets killed at the end of his quest chain after he goes to visit his mother's grave and gets killed by his now-vampirized father.
• Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: In several missions in which you're task with infiltrating a Bellwether stronghold, you can disable the generator powering their UV light perimeter, allowing the vampires to invade and fight the Bellwether defenders to the death and allowing you to pick off the weakened survivors.
• Short-Range Shotgun: The one-hit-kill range of the game's shotguns against human enemies is remarkably short, probably about 15 feet or less. They're more intended for close-range combat against vampires, who tend to be in-your-face due to being melee-focused.
• Shout-Out: You get the achievement "So Anyway, I Started Blasting" for shooting a friendly cultist at the Bladewell Campgrounds during "One of Us".
• Social Media Before Reason: In the reveal trailer, Devinder gets the group spotted by cultists because he was too focused on filming them for a blog and triggered an alarm. The various hero trailers are all him getting a brief overview on his companions' backstories and what they were doing before Redfall turned into a hellhole in the aftermath of the resulting fight, much to their annoyance, pointing out that it might not be the best time whilst they're in the middle of a vampire-infested town.
• Super Prototype: Many of the Unrivaled (Legendary) weapons are Bellwether advanced experimental prototypes that have been sent to Redfall but not in significant enough numbers for the rank-and-file troops to be using them.
• The Team Normal: In contrast to Layla (who was apparently gifted telekinetic abilities through experimentation by Aevum), Jacob (who was an experienced mercenary before getting further empowered by his Deadeye) and Remi (who was likewise shown to be an experienced soldier with enough technical know-how to build and maintain a fully-autonomous robotic companion in Bribon) Devinder seems to be the only one who is neither empowered or experienced in firearms prior to the vampire apocalypse. However, he makes up for this with his understanding of the supernatural and crafting weapons designed specifically to target their weaknesses. Ironically, his occupation prior to the vampire uprising was a cryptozoologist, yet he's arguably the most "normal" human left in Redfall.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: While the game doesn't have bullet drop, bullets do lose power over distance, and do so at different rates depending on what weapon is used. Pistols lose damage over distance quite quickly, assault rifles less so, while sniper rifles remain effective even at very long range. Silencers increase the rate at which this happens even more.
• Vein-o-Vision: Viewing the psychic echoes of vampire gods has the characters displayed as glowing blue silhouettes with blood vessels highlighted.
• Weakened by the Light: Natural against vampires but, with the eclipse, UV lighting is needed. Those exposed long enough will be paralyzed and reduced to ash upon hit.

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