What makes Redfall different to other Arkane games? It’s all comes down to trust

One of my favourite ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ moments in games comes in Final Fantasy 10, just after you defeat a big machine on a lake of ice near one of the title’s multiple temples. Your party jumps onto snowmobiles – two people per vehicle – and heads towards Macalania Temple to continue its journey. You follow main character Tidus for this part of the game, but who accompanies him on the sled can vary. It can be more or less any of the characters in the game, and who joins you depends entirely on some in-game criteria.

The game calls this ‘affection’. If Tidus uses a healing item, or healing magic, on another member of the cast, the hidden stat goes up. If he intercepts an attack aimed at them, it goes up. If he talks to a character first when they’re all spread out in an area, it goes up. At no point are you told about this, and at no point does it really matter. But, play your cards right, and you’ll see get a small interaction with another character that serves to deepen your understanding of them, or provide another sliver of context on the world.

I am obsessed with things like this in games. Alex once referred to himself as a ‘lore goblin’ for Elden Ring, and the phrase stuck with me. That’s what moments like this do to me. Seeing Rikku nuzzle her head into Tidus in a show of deep affection you don’t really see in the game – all because I’ve trusted/interacted with her the most up to this point? It’s a small but meaningful reward, and something uniquely enriching when it comes to player agency.

So, what the hell does all this have to do with Redfall? In a short pre-amble before a hands-on preview, Arkane Austin’s studio director Harvey Smith told the collected media that Redfall has a ‘trust’ mechanic. There are four main characters in the game – Jacob, Remi De La Rosa, Devinder ‘Dev’ Crousley, and Layla Ellison – and you can only play as one. The game (as I mention in my proper preview) is largely geared towards being a co-op multiplayer experience, where up to four players take on the role of each hero as you poke the edges of the sandbox.

But, Smith did note that Redfall has also been designed to work as a single-player “classic” Arkane game, too – where AI will fill the boots of the other characters that aren’t being embodied by your co-op pals. Here, interacting with them will have boons – the more the characters come to trust you, and the more you explore this doomed little seaside town with them, they will open up to you.

As well as new dialogue lines that flesh out backstories and character, gaining the trust your fellow survivors has more… tangible consequences, too. It could mean they save your life in an encounter with a particularly vicious vampire that’s set upon you out of nowhere. It means they might be more inclined to use special abilities around you, meaning that you don’t need to pump more of your limited ammo supply into the undead right this second.

I didn’t see too much of this in action during the preview I played, because the slice of game on offer didn’t lend itself to this mechanic, but the idea of it has stayed in my mind since the session. Arkane is great at narrative – whether you’re playing Dishonored, Deathloop, or Prey, each of the studio’s games has gifted us incredible characters that are well-written, well-acted and well-realised. Knowing that, if I choose to play as the crow-haunted sniper loner Jacob, I can still learn much more information about the intriguing Layla… just by playing.

This is a first for Arkane. NPCs are one thing, but actual characters that dive into the action with you and establish proper relationships… that’s something I want. It feels like a natural evolution from the hate-fuelled back-and-forth Colt had with Julianna in Deathloop, albeit without all the tension and Whedon-esque constant quipping. It’s another way in which Arkane is stacking its skills into all the right places – drawing on its top-in-class world-building and writing to make the vampire fantasy on offer in Redfall even more attractive.

Redfall launches on May 2 for PC, Xbox, and Game Pass.