There’s a New Vampire Game Coming That Has Serious Buffy Energy

Arkane Studios — the people behind Dishonored and Deathloop — have a new game coming out in May, and the comparisons to Buffy are not incidental. Redfall is an open-world vampire shooter set in a small Massachusetts town where a supernatural eclipse has blocked out the sun and left the streets to the bloodsuckers. Ars Technica, who got an early preview, described it as “a compelling mix of Dishonored, Borderlands, and Buffy.”

The premise has the bones of something Sunnydale would recognise: a ragtag team of specialists with distinct abilities, a town overrun by supernatural forces, and the specific pleasure of working out how to stake something efficiently. Your four-person team — Jacob the assassin, Layla the psychic, Devinder the gadget-wielder, and Remy the combat engineer — maps fairly clearly to the Scooby Gang model of complementary strengths covering for individual weaknesses.

The town of Redfall itself is designed with the dread-filled texture of a Stephen King settlement — docks, a downtown, a haunted house — and the vampires that have taken it over are not the standard thin-plot fodder. They have created the eclipse deliberately, built a network of hives across the town, and surrounded themselves with human cultist familiars. The worldbuilding has enough weight to it that wandering feels purposeful rather than empty.

Arkane’s co-director Ricardo Bare told Ars that the decision to build around co-op play came from wanting to capture something specific: “If you look at our creative values that we care about, deep world-building and expressive game mechanics — what if we let you play with a friend?” The answer, in Redfall’s case, is that you get something that plays like a looter-shooter with the soul of an immersive sim.

Whether the game delivers on its preview promise remains to be seen — it launches on Xbox Series S/X and PC on 2 May. But for Buffy fans who have spent twenty-six years wishing someone would make a proper vampire-slaying game with genuine stakes and a team worth caring about, Redfall is at least asking the right questions.