🐭I wrote an overwhelmingly negative review of Redfall this week, but I did occasionally enjoy my time with it, despite its flaws. One of my favorite moments came fairly early, during the mission where you have to turn off the fake emergency broadcast at Dead Catch Records. My friends and I blasted our way in through the front door, which is how I eventually approached every combat encounter in Redfall as soon as I learned that the AI is a total joke. Before finishing the mission, we did a customary scan for loot - though we’d already started to realize there’s never really anyt🎉hing worth searching for.
My friend found the men’s room near the back of the first floor, and discovered it was the only locked door in the whole place - jackpot. He picked the lock and found a cultist waiting inside, seemingly unarmed. After killing him, my friend realized there was nothing else in there, and that he wanted a lock pick for nothing. Frustrated, he asked me why they would lock a door with nothing behind it, not realizing that the guy in the bathroom was the one who locked ꦰthe door, and he had just killed him while he was taking a shit.
Redfall’s AI is completely braindead, so I’m certain this enemy didn’t run into the bathroom when the shooting started and lock the door to hide, which would be amazing. Rather, I think this is a good example of the way Arkane builds its worlds. I🐲f you pay attention, Redfall is full of little details that make the town feel like a real place. It can be as simple as a guy locking himself in the men’s room to go number two, or a blood trail in a house that leads you down to the basement where the homeowner was killed by a vampire, but all these little things add up to create a word that feels real. That’s something Arkane has always done well, and you can see it all over Redfall.
There’s countless examples I could point to throughout the game, but a lot of it is easy to miss if you aren’t trained to look for it. My friend picked the lock on that bathroom door expecting to find a reward because that’s how video games work, but Arkane takes a lot of time to maintain a sense of logic in its level design. The firehouse that serves as a base of operation in the first half of the game is a great exa🔴mple of this. It’s common for open world games to have a hub like this where you can start quests and trade with NPCs, but the firehouse in unique in that it both looks and feel like a real firehouse, while also having a good flow that doesn’t obstruct players and makes it easy for them to do what they’re there to do. Arkane is great at finding that balance between form and function, and it gives life to all of the environments in Redfall.
It is rare to find enemies placed randomly in the world the way they are in other open-world games. If you pay attention you’ll always find a reason why the cultists are where they are. Sometimes you find them near a crashed ambulance, suggesting that they’re there to loot it, other times there are more elaborate set pieces built around them. Once, I encountered a circle of cultists surrounding a sleeping vampire, with torches and effigies spread around the area. They were clearly conducting some kind of ritꦦual, and a nearby lore dropped confirmed t💟heir plans to meet here. This wasn’t part of a side mission, and you can find encounters like this planted all over Redfall.
It’s a shame that the lack of rewards discourages exploring. Redfall is dense with little story beats and interesting things to see off the beaten path, but there’s never any gameplay incentives to get you to find them. There’s only so many times you can find a secret entrance to a cave and interrupt a cultist meeting happening inside before you rꩲealize there’s no loot to find and you give up on looking at all. The thousands of text drops scattered all around the map are not a replacement for rewards, especially in a game so focused on co-op.
Redfall doesn’t come together, sadly, but I’ܫm glad that Arkane is still injecting its signature world-building through environmental storytelling, even if most people won’t notice it.
