With Redfall, Arkane mishandles Stephen King’s legacy — and its own

polygon.com:

Redfall stands in the towering, Count Orlok-shaped shadow of more than a century of popular vampire fiction — especially, because of its small-town setting, Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot and the heavily King-indebted TV series, Midnight Mass. It’s also the most recent game to come from Arkane Studios, a developer whose portfolio includes the Dishonored series, Prey, and Deathloop. It’s a storied lineage to live up to — one whose heights Redfall consistently fails to reach.

In Redfall, players work to take back an island overrun by vampires, driving bullets and stakes through the hearts of bloodthirsty monsters and their human worshipers while trying to uncover how they rose to power in the first place. The game’s narrative is unevenly delivered, presented mostly through brief, stilted, pre-mission cutscenes and bits of in-universe text that can be easily missed while chatting with a co-op partner or avoiding a cultist’s gunfire. Its roots in King’s novel, Arkane’s immersive sim philosophy, and vampire fiction in general are buried beneath layers of distraction, but they do exist. Unfortunately, the signs of that inspiration don’t so much rise dramatically from the ground as wiggle a finger from the dirt.

Like Dishonored, Redfall is about fighting a scrappy kind of revolution, a handful of holdouts to totalitarian rule using their guile to knock out the structures supporting their oppression. As in Salem’s Lot, a small-town setting allows Redfall to create a microcosm of society — American society, in both cases — and position its vampires as a powerful elite whose malignant influence takes hold of a population too naïve or frightened to resist.

In Dishonored — and, to a lesser extent, 2021’s Deathloop — assassins fought