Dead Take

"Feed me something real."

My signature always mentions that I love video games, so why not actually review one? Especially when it features two of my favorite voice actors in the business.

In Dead Take, you play as Chase, a struggling actor, as he searches for his friend (and Hollywood nepo baby turned Golden Boy) Vinny. Vinny was last seen at a party at legendary producer/director/writer/kingmaker Duke Cain's mansion. Despite his own lack of an invite, Chase heads there anyway to go and look for him, only to find the place deserted.

There's evidence of a party, sure, and there's even evidence that Vinny had indeed attended. But nothing is as it seems, and things quickly slide into psychological horror as you explore the mansion grounds.

Gameplay itself consists of two parts. Most of the time, it's a first-person walking simulator with some escape room elements. The mansion was fun to explore. It was large enough to feel spacious, but also small enough that I didn't get lost. Areas were gated off in a way that I always knew where I was supposed to go and had a sense of progression as I went along.

The puzzles were fairly simple, but still satisfying to solve. Many of them follow the same pattern of thinking. I did take a few notes, mainly to help me remember numbers, but it's not necessary by any means.

Everything looked pretty too, even if there is definitely that semi-sterile Unreal Engine vibe to everything. It almost worked in the game's favor, though. The atmosphere while exploring is wonderfully creepy and tense. It's a horror game that managed to scare me.

There are jump scares. The first one literally made me jump out of my chair and scream. They got a little bit more predictable after that, but that helped the tension. I knew that something was going to happen as soon as I turned my back to interact with an object, but I still had to turn my back anyways.

The second part of the gameplay involves USB sticks that you find while exploring. Each USB has one or more video clips on it, which you can watch and potentially splice together to create new clips. The clips are audition tapes, interviews, video messages... moments in time that illuminate the relationships between characters and hint towards what exactly happened at the Cain mansion.

This was really the selling point for me. The clips are FMV, otherwise known as Full Motion Video. Basically, it's live action instead of anything animated. We get to actually see the cast, and the performances are absolutely magnificent across the board.

Neil Newbon (Astarion in Baldur's Gate 3) and Ben Starr (Verso in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33) are Chase and Vinny, and they get the most screentime. I already love Newbon and would very happily watch him read the phonebook, but Starr put in a magnetic performance as well.

The two men are a study in contrasts, and their performances are a treat to compare to each other. Honestly, it's just a lot of fun to see voice actors give a full body performance.

I also need to highlight Jane Perry, who plays the former Mrs. Cain. I'll be thinking about her "Look at that! One. Take." clip for a long time.

Unfortunately, the process of splicing clips together was basically just trial and error. I wound up simply trying every possible combination as opposed to being able to make any kind of intuitive connection.

There were some nice quality of life features, though, like different icons depending on if a clip had been viewed before or if it was the result of a splice. It made it easy to track what I still needed to watch.

The game is pretty short. My runtime clocked in at 3.5 hours, and I was fairly diligent about exploring and trying to find all of the optional lore. I missed one item, although I'm pretty sure I know where it is. I also didn't get stuck on any of the puzzles. The longest I spent on one was about ten minutes, and that was mostly because there was a lot of stuff to read.

I would have been very happy to have another hour or two. Not necessarily filled with puzzles and exploration, but of lore and documents and videos. More than anything else, I wanted more video clips. There's roughly fifteen in the whole game, which is far less than I was expecting. Most characters only show up in one or two of them.

I just wanted more, especially since the story ends very abruptly. There was momentum like we were building to something, but then the story's legs were just cut off from underneath it. I didn't expect to get any clear answers – that's just not the genre – but things were left more vague than open to interpretation.

Sure, I can guess at what actually happened, but so many ideas were brought up only to have no payoff. I'm going to playthrough again in a week or two once I get a bit of distance, so maybe I'll pick up on details that I missed.

Random Thoughts

I played on my PC with a mouse and keyboard.

Be prepared to fiddle with your graphic settings a lot. I had a lot of issues with screen tearing and just general optimization, and I have a relatively powerful machine.

There are a lot of tiny details that made me smile. My favorite is how different words will appear in the Pause menu depending on which option you have highlighted.

Somehow, this is the second game this week I played featuring very creepy mannequins.

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An Honest Fangirl loves video games, horror movies, and superheroes, and occasionally manages to put words together in a coherent and pleasing manner.