The town is quaint and adorable smug, with much of its pre-Vampire prosperity permeating broad Ozymandias expanses. The art design is beautiful, with noble clapboard houses topped with sagging roofs, trees shimmering with red and gold leaves long faded into fall colors, and lines of carved pumpkins on sidewalks.

This game is pretty nice, if you ask me, but it’s pretty and ugly at the same time. Because it’s 2023, there are character classes, of which I’ve only played one so far – a British Cryptid fighter who can teleport a bit, fire an electric javelin that stuns people, and for a super some kind of sacred ringlight in the ground that turns vampires to stone for a few useful seconds and can heal me. Since this is 2023, there’s loot, so you’re always picking up slightly better guns and salvaging old ones for cash.

Missions tend to be short and wide, giving you a place to go and people to kill or an object to pick up, but a huge amount of leeway in how you do this. You go on missions across the city, completing tasks and unlocking safe houses and other fast travel points as you go. But it’s not like Left 4 Dead either, because this is Arkane, so there’s DNA from immersive sims in here too. It’s like Left 4 Dead, where you go on missions in heavily armed online squads, beating vampires and other nearby abominations. Redfall is a game about a small American seaside town – a wealthy one, somewhere in Cape Coddish, like Provincetown perhaps – that has been taken over by vampires. (Full disclosure – a patch this afternoon locked me out of the build for a few hours, and while I’m back in I can’t say if it’s improved much.) So I’ll give you some basic impressions today with the caveat that they can change – change when I’ve played through the whole game, and also when patches are released. I’m playing on an Xbox Series X and the game is kind of rough – rough in a way that makes me wonder if a day one patch could fix this. I haven’t had enough time to play enough, and since this is essentially a co-op game – Arkane calls it an open-world co-op FPS or words to that effect – I really need a good feel for it with other players.

This is not a review, even though the embargo has just taken effect. I should say here, I’m still pretty early on in Redfall myself. You see this sea very early in the game and it has stuck with me. Availability: Out on PC and Xbox, and via Game Pass, on May 2.There are ships forever trapped in its tumbling and swell – small fishermen, but also a huge container ship that has stalled in the middle of a catastrophe, its cargo stranded in the silent haze. Head to the dock and the ocean is frozen halfway through the tsunami – a giant sculpted wave captured in all its Hokusai curves and foam, the whole trapped in space, with the soft, frosted edges giving it the likeness of ancient sea glass. Welcome to Redfall, where the town motto is ‘calm seas and sunny skies’.

Welcome to dead house rl stine