While Not a Huge Leap in the Genre, ‘Dead Take’ Is Still a Memorable Experience [Review]

As someone who studied screenwriting in undergrad, I’ve always been drawn in by tales about the filmmaking process. No matter what the medium, seeing characters struggle with every aspect of the movie industry is like catnip to me, allowing you to dive into characters by seeing the art they create. Dead Take, the sophomore game from Surgent Studios, takes that theme and combines it with a first-person psychological horror game that feels like one part Layers of Fear, one part Immortality.

As actor Chase Lowry, you enter the mansion of enigmatic producer Duke Cain in the search for your friend Vinny Monroe. There’s remnants of a party you know Vinny was attending, but the house seems hauntingly empty, creating an eerie atmosphere as you slowly explore the abandoned house. Throughout the four hour game, you’ll learn about the new project Cain was working on, a film that both Chase and Vinny were auditioning for. It’s a great setup that allows you to uncover all the messy drama that happened behind the scenes during pre-production, and all the lives affected by the traumatized creative lead at the center of it all.

There’s two different modes of gameplay that Dead Take has. Most of the game will have you exploring the mansion and solving puzzles, collecting items and figuring out riddles to slowly unlock the many rooms and discover their sinister secrets. The other part of the game involves watching live-action footage that you acquire and splicing them together using a program called SPLAICE. Narrative is effectively delivered through both portions of the game, always providing you with some tantalizing bit of information as your reward for progress.

Going into this game, the big hook for me was the FMV footage, and it delivers for the most part. The actors involved, including Baulder’s Gate 3’s Neil Newbon and Clair Obscur’s Ben Starr as Chase and Vinny respectively, all do a stellar job, with raw performances that enhance the great writing. Since they both auditioned for the same role, the game cleverly reuses the same scene for them to contrast their characters by demonstrating how they both interpret it. These two do most of the heavy lifting, but there are some great smaller roles that shine in their short screentime. Jane Perry as Duke Cain’s wife is particularly memorable, with a chilling performance that digs deepest into the trauma that Cain has gone through and inflicts on those around him. As a Remedy superfan, it was also a treat to see a small cameo from Sam Lake, even if it didn’t amount to much. For a story that’s so heavily focused on the craft of acting, having the live actors on screen lends the game an authentic feel, driving the point home in a way that wouldn’t be possible with traditional video game graphics.

The actual SPLAICE mechanic is an interesting one, but slightly underbaked. As you explore, you’ll find USBs with the footage that you watch, and occasionally you can combine clips into something new. Sometimes, it’s intuitive, while other times it feels a bit like trial and error. For example, you may take the separate auditions of the male and female leads and combine it into a version that contains both their performances, subtly changing the emotional tenor of the scene. Other times it’s taking two different scenes that have similar themes and combining them into something completely new. It’s a clever way to at least nod to the concept of film editing, but isn’t as successful as it could be, still feeling a bit more random than it should to be completely satisfying. Even if the splicing doesn’t always feel intuitive, the reward of more great FMV footage was always a worthwhile treat.

The puzzles around the mansion are definitely more intellectually stimulating, ranging from fairly simple item placing to clever brain teasers. You’ll need to have a great awareness of your environment, as many of the items and clues are hidden pretty well. While I did end up walking past clues a few times because I missed the little interaction indicator, I appreciate when a game’s puzzles force me to have a more intimate relationship with the spaces I’m inhabiting.

The best puzzles in Dead Take are the ones that lean into the filmmaking themes that set it apart from other games. My favorite involved being in a room with a trio of mannequins and a set of script pages, then being asked to recreate the shot described in the screenplay by moving the camera, posing the mannequins, and swapping around the props. It’s a fun process to go through that forces you to be detail-oriented while also giving you a small glimpse into the actual creative work that the narrative orbits around. Not all the puzzles are this in-depth or thematic, sometimes just asking you to find items and place them in the right order based on a nearby note, but there’s more hits than misses throughout.

Exploring the mansion is fun, as you gain access to more areas as you solve things. It’s not the most elaborate location in the world, but there’s just enough personality to get the job done. Environmental storytelling does a good job of providing nuance to the characters, subtly hinting at their histories without fully explaining them. There’s some dream logic going on with the ways things appear and disappear as you make progress, adding surreality to an otherwise grounded story. It’s never really clear if it’s supposed to be something supernatural, or just Chase beginning to mentally unravel, so sometimes it does feel like just a convenient way to deliver a new item to the player rather than an element that feels natural for the story. The more grounded elements of the sinister ego of Duke Cain are far more effective at creeping you out, and I feel like the game might be stronger if it stuck to focusing on that instead of leaning into the surreal.

There’s great little short stories told around the production of the film that show a deep understanding about the dark side of the industry. Surgent Studios founder Abubakar Salim is an actor, and it’s clear that there’s an authenticity to the events presented here, even if they are darker and more disturbing than what he may have experienced. At its core it’s about a traumatized man who hurts people in his pursuit of uncompromising art, but the excellent performances and writing make it feel like more than a retread of the well-worn tropes. I do wish we got more of a sense of the type of art Duke Cain produced, as the snippets of his latest film don’t really give me a sense of his body of work, or why so many people think he’s such a genius. You hear his commanding voice off screen in footage or in voicemails on your phone, but I would like to see more of his art to get a sense of why so many actors still wanted to work with him in light of his abusive and demanding behavior.

The announcement of Dead Take was a surprise, as the last we had heard about the studio was that their debut release from last year, Tales of Kenzera: Zau, underperformed leading to layoffs. Their new game feels like a smartly scoped response, allowing them to produce something quickly that could hopefully help them recover. You can kind of see the lower budget throughout, as the game looks good, but in the generic Unreal Engine way that you see with many of these first-person psychological horror games. The use of FMV also saved them from having to create characters models and animations, leaving the only human figures in the actual levels reused mannequins that can remain static. Because of this lack of any other characters in the mansion, there’s a lack of actual tension in the game, despite the disturbing nature of the story. I’m always a fan of a properly scoped game, but it does affect the experience at times, and there were a few weird bugs that I ran into here and there.

Dead Take is both a love letter to the film industry and an indictment of its darker tendencies, showing a world of traumatized artists that treat each other inhumanely in search of something real. It’s a strong narrative statement that’s backed up by incredible live action performances that bring the material to life in ways rarely seen in video games. As much as I liked many of the puzzles, I wish they stuck to the theme more often to complement the narrative. The splicing mechanic feels like it’s so close to something unique, but it still works as a vehicle to give you some busy work to unlock the excellent FMV. It might not be a huge step forward in the genre, but it’s memorable enough that it’s worth checking out.

Review code provided by publisher.

Dead Take is available now on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store.

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