Dead Take feels more like an artist’s point of view of the unsaid traumas and private despair that plague the lives of actors than a horror adventure game. It is still very much a video game driven by rewarding puzzle mechanics, but the meat of the experience is the insight it gives of what it can feel like to be an actor. It’s altogether more disturbing than spooky, and although certain supernatural elements do dampen the puzzle box nature and horror of the overall game, Dead Take is still a powerful, emotion-driven descent into one man’s psyche.
Experienced entirely in first-person, Dead Take has you play as an actor named Chase who breaks into and explores the seemingly abandoned mansion of Cain, a famous Hollywood producer. There are signs of a party, but all the lights are off and an eerie stillness hangs over the darkened hallways and strangely shaped rooms. Chase is looking for his friend, Vinny, another actor, who successfully landed the role of Willie in an upcoming movie–a role that Chase had also been gunning for. As you guide Chase through the mansion, you’ll slowly uncover what transpired behind the scenes during the movie’s pre-production, learning how so many people’s lives were destroyed in service to the damaged and traumatized ego of one man.
It’s a haunting tale brought to life by full-motion video (FMV) recordings of powerhouse actors in the industry. Neil Newbon gives Chase an almost psychopathic desperation to his need to land the role of Willie, while Ben Starr hides Vinny’s nepotism behind charismatic suave and charm to produce a completely different type of creepiness. The unnerving and disgusting battle behind the scenes to determine the leading lady opposite Willie and cover up a “problematic” woman for a more “agreeable” one is explored through the fantastic (and subsequently, deeply uncomfortable to watch) performances of Alanah Pearce and Laura Bailey. And at one point, Jane Perry delivers a performance of Cain’s wife so powerful and deeply chilling, I doubt I’ll ever forget it.
It’s all so authentic, and therein lies Dead Take’s best quality. Though it’s a fictional story, developer Surgent Studios describes Dead Take as a reactionary experience to real-world events, rumors, and practices in the film and video game industry. And I believe that. The performances in the FMV recordings feel so personal, so real, that I have to believe that many of the actors were influenced by lived experience or stories told to them as firsthand accounts. So even though Dead Take isn’t all that scary in the more traditional sense–you can typically see a jump scare coming so they’re not all that shocking, for instance–and the dark hallways of the mansion become familiar quite quickly, the game is still a phenomenal horror experience. The reliance on footage of real people living genuine-looking pain forces you to confront the disturbing realization that there’s a semblance of truth informing the performances of these stories.
As Chase, you uncover these FMV recordings piecemeal. Most of the mansion is locked at the start, and it’s clear that the architect behind it must be the same guy who designed the Raccoon City Police Station from Resident Evil 2 because the entire space feels like a reverse escape room. You must solve puzzles to find a way to go deeper. Doors are marked with symbols like a shield or mouse, and the only way to unlock them is to find the corresponding key. The piano is adorned with strange symbols that hint at the order in which you must press its keys. The code for a keypad is the date that a painting was made, and environmental clues hint as to where the painting was moved after it was taken off the wall. The game is five hours of scouring desk drawers, paging through documents, and collecting clues.
The puzzles have a bit of a balancing issue. Most are intellectually fulfilling, rewarding good puzzle-solving habits and taking the time to pay attention to your environment and the objects in your inventory that you’ve collected. There are a few that are laughably easy, however, and also a couple that were so obtuse and frustrating to understand that if I didn’t get help, I wouldn’t have figured them out. Even once I knew the solution, I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to get to that solution beyond guessing or simply trying every item in my inventory on every part of the environment until the right answer presented itself. The one or two puzzles that fall into that last camp destroy the game’s pacing and slow progression to an irritating halt, but they’re graciously rare and it’s one of those things where your mileage could vary.
For your efforts in solving the puzzles and getting further and further into the mansion, you’ll find USB drives that have the FMV recordings on them. On their own, each one offers a slice of the life of a person connected to the movie project. It could be a segment of an interview, a table read, or a video voicemail. Chase has access to a program that can splice two recordings together, which reveals greater insights. For example, an interview between two characters can be spliced together, revealing that each character’s answers during the interview can actually work as responses to another, like the two are having a conversation. In this instance, Chase actually gets more of both individual interviews, like each character is egging on the other in a heated conversation. In another example, Chase can splice together an audition tape of one actor with another to see their table read and reveal the true nature of their relationship.
Splicing clips together is the primary way of progression. Chase is usually rewarded with an item that is needed to go further into the mansion and find more USB drives with each successful splice. It’s a cool mechanic, albeit one that feels underutilized. In these moments, Dead Take makes a supernatural turn–splicing the right clips together causes strange knocking on the door to the theater where you watch the FMV recordings, and upon opening the door, something has magically appeared. Leaving the area and coming back causes the apparition to disappear. It’s never abundantly clear if something genuinely supernatural is happening or if it’s all a figment of Chase’s imagination, but the surreal nature feels more magical than mental. It doesn’t outright ruin the game, but it cheapens the horror of the experience a bit.
The FMV splicing and viewing mechanics are at their best in the very few moments where doing either reveals a clue to progress, not an item. One of my favorite “ah-ha” moments was when I found Vinny’s phone and remembered that an earlier recording I watched revealed Vinny begrudgingly saying the password to unlock his phone. I raced back to the theater, played the clip again, wrote down the numbers, and then unlocked the phone, learning the code to a keypad by perusing some old messages between Vinny and Cain. I wish there had been more examples of this, where the recordings revealed information that could provide tangible results beyond an item I needed magically appearing. It would have aided in making Dead Take’s reverse escape room-like nature feel even more like a series of puzzles that needed to be slowly decoded, and grounded the horror in terrifying realism, not surrealism.
The surrealistic nature of Dead Take reaches a fever pitch in the game’s final half hour, and it loses me a bit there. Overall, however, this is a great game, and I would have loved to chase down more USB drives and watch many more FMV recordings–these performances left me rapt and I was always eager to search out more. But even beyond this gameplay loop, Chase’s efforts to delve deeper into a bizarre mansion and splice together corrupted recordings of people is rewardingly symbolic in a narrative sense. You’re going into a person’s twisted and guarded psyche and unearthing the painful truths hidden within to not only beat a video game, but also witness, as Cain so often puts it, “something real.” Those truths are sickening and scary and it propels the experience of Dead Take into one of the most harrowing I’ve experienced this year. These are not five hours I’ll easily forget.
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