Dead Take Review
Neil Newbon and Ben Starr lead Dead Take, a tale about abuse of power in Hollywood and creative obsession.
Dead Take. Surgent Studios / Pocketpair Publishing
Surgent Studios' sophomore title takes an unexpected direction as a follow-up to their first, Metroidvania *Tales of Kenzera: Zau—*their latest, Dead Take, is a psychological horror game. It’s wonderful that the studio has chosen to go in a completely different direction, but it doesn’t fully acquit itself in this new genre with the game’s execution. Dead Take blends first-person exploration and full-motion video to tell its story. Sometimes it’s genuinely unsettling, but the game suffers from an over-reliance on jump scares in its horror. Dead Take carries a message about the cost of creative obsession and the nature of Hollywood, both themes that are well-trodden ground in other works. If not for the strong, emotionally raw performances at the core of the game, it would be easy to dismiss the game’s message as cliché.
In the game, struggling actor Chase Lowry (Neil Newbon) goes searching for his friend, fellow actor Vinny Monroe (Ben Starr), when he doesn’t answer his phone on the night of an exclusive party at visionary director Duke Cain’s opulent mansion. Chase is fearful for reasons not told to us, as if he knows some secret about Cain. When Chase breaks into the mansion, he finds it abandoned, with evidence of a party but no people. As he makes his way deeper into the estate, Chase discovers things about Cain and the cast of his upcoming film, a film Chase desperately wanted to lead. What would someone do to be able to get their shot at success? What do powerful institutional structures do to exacerbate that?
Dead Take. Surgent Studios / Pocketpair Publishing
The story unfolds through a mixture of environmental storytelling, found photos and documents, and FMV sequences featuring a genuinely impressive cast. The mystery quickly spirals into something far more sinister, revealing darkness at the core of the film industry as personified by Duke Cain and his influence. Via found documents and footage, you see parts of the narrative through different characters’ experiences—how they suffer abuse and manipulation, the power dynamics of institutional power.
Players will spend most of their time exploring Cain’s mansion in first-person. The gameplay loop consists of solving puzzles that ultimately lead to finding USB thumb drives with media and then watching the clips in the mansion’s home cinema, after which the game rewards players with a key item that opens up new areas of the house. Some of the puzzles are entirely too easy, anticlimactically spelling out in text in the same room exactly how to solve them. “This is where each piece goes.” I felt compelled to search everywhere, because the reading materials I’d find were some of the best bits of the game—the emails, photos, script pages that revealed the other characters’ stories.
The FMV clips that you watch in the mansion’s cinema are both a highlight and a detriment to the game. The performances are excellent. Ben Starr and Neil Newbon are great as the leads, particularly when we get to peek under their characters’ facades. Jane Perry is superb in her all-too-brief role as Cain’s beleaguered wife, Lia. Paradoxically, it feels like there was simultaneously too little and too much video: I wanted to see more from the actors, but the way that the clips feel detached from the rest of the action makes them too much of a distraction. Repeatedly returning to the theater to sit and watch the clips hurt the game’s pacing. Everything stops so I could go do that.
Some of the video discovery is driven by a nonsensical “Splaice” (pronounced “splice”) technology that automagically combines two video clips together to make new clips. Most of the time, players combine two clips to reveal a completely unrelated clip featuring a different character. A couple of particular instances, however, showcase how the concept is a wasted opportunity. In two instances, the feature transforms two characters’ one-sided performances into two sides of an intercut conversation. I would have liked to see more of that.
Dead Take. Surgent Studios / Pocketpair Publishing
Visually, the game looks very good, despite the lowered graphical settings on my Steam Deck to make the game perform at above 30 fps. There’s a lot of attention to detail in the mansion that helps tell a story through its environment. My only issue is that the home feels a little sterile, despite the protagonist entering it in the aftermath of what was supposed to be a wild party. The scattered wine glasses, bottles, and black garbage bags aren’t quite enough. A few props in the game also feel half-finished. For example, if I can pick up a magazine to read it and the game lets me rotate the object to examine it from other angles, the covers shouldn’t be blank. The house is creepy to explore, thanks in large part to a terrific ambient soundscape that helps sell the location’s oppressive atmosphere. This does far more heavy lifting than the game’s graphics.
I should note that Dead Take is too reliant on jump scares, which undermine the rest of the game’s horror. The developers should instead focus on the setting’s atmosphere, the psychological tension, and the terrifying parts of human nature that exacerbate the issues at the center of the game, rather than flashing images of a distorted character screaming to elicit a cheap scare and undercut an often wonderful sense of dread.
Dead Take. Surgent Studios / Pocketpair Publishing
Along these lines, the metaphorical horror is sometimes subtle, but most often not. Part of the problem is that some of the supernatural touches that are insinuated and sometimes drive the action feel half-baked, and it would have been far more effective to remove those from the game. A Faustian bargain pyramid scheme, where Dr. Faustus becomes the devil himself to seduce others with his own bargain, would be far scarier if there were no devil in the first place. A recent trailer for the Jordan Peele-produced film Him, ostensibly about similar topics, bears the line, “What are you willing to sacrifice?”
Dead Take deals with heavy subject matter that’s relevant today—institutional power and corruption, abuse of that power and victimization, and obsession. The game focuses on these in the context of Hollywood, but these things are also prevalent in other cross-sections of society, making it easy to connect with the material. It’s laudable to bring topics like this to the foreground, even if the presentation lacks subtlety. Yet, however admirable it is that the game broaches these topics, it’s far from the first work of entertainment to dip its toe into this pond self-reflexively, and far from the best to do it. David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon. Netflix show Brand New Cherry Flavor. The films of Ti West. We can look back to John Schlesinger’s Day of the Locust, Robert Altman’s The Player, or even earlier to 1950 with Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. Dead Take joins these works without having much new to add to the conversation.
Dead Take. Surgent Studios / Pocketpair Publishing
Despite some of my criticisms, Dead Take is still interesting, especially as a game from a studio departing from the style of its previous well-received title. I enjoy seeing artists take unexpected departures from their earlier work. There’s good reason to believe Surgent Studios could make a far stronger horror game in the future if they learn some lessons here and iterate on their craft. The game is worth playing for its performances and the unsettling moments it creates with its atmosphere, even when it sometimes ruins them with jump scares.
Dead Take is available now on Steam.
Overall Score: 6/10
Played on: Steam Deck
