Dead Take Review – The True Horror Was The Institutionalized Power We Met Along The Way

I was drawn to Dead Take on its teased reveal with my love for psychological horror, love of movies, and a cast of some of my favorite actors from various live action, video game, and actual play content. Getting to sit down and play Dead Take, I was taken on a rollercoaster of emotions, tense relationships, and a veritable ‘who’s who’ of warped power dynamics and relationships.

In Dead Take, the player takes on the role of Vinny Monroe, an actor in Hollywood trying to score his dream role but coming up short due to a number of reasons. After not hearing from your friend, Chase Lowry, who attended a party in the home of renowned producer Duke Cain, you go to investigate.

Arriving at the mansion in the Hollywood Hills, you find the lights on, but no one is home. Letting yourself in, you begin a strange exploration of the house where you’ll get to solve puzzles, witness audition footage and screen tests for Cain’s latest film, The Last Voyage, and learn what it takes to make it in this warped version of the industry.

If you’re interested in knowing a bit more about the kind of horror experience you’re in store for, expect eerie rooms of the house and a few jump scares crossing thresholds or when completing puzzles.

Exploring The Mansion

This mansion covers three floors of locked rooms and progressive exploration. From the get-go, though, you can explore most of the rooms, interact with some strange objects and letters, and even pick up a few progressive puzzle pieces.

You’ll walk and run, but the game doesn’t let you do more than that as you’re forced to sit with your own thoughts amid tense audio and the sound of your own echoing footsteps. The game will do a lot more to set you on an unsettling edge, teasing you that something might be about to happen, far more than it ever actually scares as you’re moving through this space.

It’s in progressing through the puzzles of the game that you’ll uncover more puzzle pieces, leading to more parts of the mansion, and to fill in the grander story. It felt a lot like playing a classic Resident Evil title, but more of the mansion exploration and less active antagonists.

Some Puzzles Were Highlights, Others Were Too Simple

Puzzles were one of the two core aspects of Dead Take to engage in. From the moment you start the game, it’s about figuring out how to get in. You can do this by programming a Fob with a certain frequency based on a sticky note in a drawer and the numbers on the front plate of the house.

There were some really entertaining puzzles, like getting to walk by a grand piano with all kinds of cultish and demonic symbols on it or needing to develop film correctly by bathing it in different chemical solutions.

My favorite puzzle of the game involved stepping into a set with mannequins posed around a table. I had to read pages of the script, including notes from the director, in order to determine the ‘correct’ setting for the scene. Make sure all of the actors were in place, they had the correct props, and that the camera was angled correctly.

Unfortunately, there were also a few puzzles that really let me down. I was excited to make it to the pool house and begin picking up different weapons with snake motifs: a Snake Sword, Dagger, Sickle, etc. As I was hypothesizing where they could go or what they could do, I happened across a plaque with four places to put them and a very clear description of what cardinal direction each should point in.

It was less of a puzzle and more like English comprehension.

The other major aspect in gameplay, and one that lends to the deeper part of the story, is in collecting footage to watch, and Splaicing that footage. Splaicing is an ‘AI’ driven editing tool that lets you combine two pieces of footage together automagically.

For the narrative, this meant you could see one scene where Alanah Pearce’s Victoria Cross is running her sides of a pivotal scene in the movie, and a second scene of Ben Starr’s Chase Lowry doing the same, and combine them to get the full scene’s context.

You’ll watch footage and combine it for new footage to advance the greater plot of the game.

You can also get a variety of behind-the-scenes footage that honestly doesn’t make sense based on the clips you provide the machine, but is interesting nonetheless. It might be Travis Willingham’s Harry Dufresne, who plays the captain and love rival in The Last Voyage, candidly telling Vinny that just because he feels a role should be his… doesn’t mean it should, and he shouldn’t be so quick to use his connections, as it might backfire.

Surface Story Didn’t Do Much, But The Deeper Narrative Was Fascinating

The surface story didn’t do too much for me, it was never entirely clear why Vinny was in that mansion, what had happened to the party members, or why there were terrifying mannequins that were lurking around. Honestly, by the end of it, I wasn’t exactly sure what kind of adventure Vinny had been on.

The aspect of the game that fascinated me was the deeper story. About the kind of man Duke Cain was — Producer, Husband, and Father — and how each of the actors in the story used their own power and were abused by each other’s power.

In talking with Narrative Director Abubakar Salim he told me that Video Games were the place to tell this story because it allowed him to present a situation and have others interpret

Seeing these audition tapes, learning about the Cain family history through notes around the house, and learning about how everyone was pining to be part of The Last Voyage and were cutthroat to earn their place was an interesting reflection on aspects of the movie industry, but also many creative careers.

Playing as Vinny I could feel his pain for not making the cut and losing the role of the lead man to Chase, but we also got to see how Chase reacted when screening Vinny’s phone call, tossing him to the side as an actor without a job.

It shows that even when the entire system is working against you, and is trying to churn you up and spit you out, that if it’s something you love, and you feel you were born to do you’ll continue to lay everything on the line and even cross some lines to get to where you feel you ‘deserve’ to be.

The more I thought about what Vinny was putting himself through, the more I understood and related. Obviously not to the level of horror, but I can understand taking something you love doing and wanting to push to make a larger name for yourself in that field. For me, my ambition and drive have me sitting here and writing this review, but even in the game review and journalism space, I’ve heard all kinds of stories of abuse of power from those running the companies, to individual writers seeking to propel themselves to spite all others.

How this journey can relate to your own personal story of development, or in what you’ve seen of major industries, or closer to home,e can really enhance how deep this story is.

Dead Take Review | Final Thoughts

Dead Take was a game that I went into expecting a few good puzzles and a cheap jumpscare or two. In that sense, the game perfectly delivered on my expectations. It did bring something extremely unique to the table in the live action sequences, delivering different sides of a story or a whole picture, letting the player mull over what they’ve seen and then rediscover it in an altered framework.

The surface story of Vinny in the mansion and his adventures throughout were entertaining gameplay wise, but didn’t make as much sense from a narrative perspective. The grander story that it revealed of each of the main characters was one that was truly fascinating to me and will sit with me for a long while to come.

Dead Take was reviewed on PC via Steam with a copy provided by the Developer over the course of 5 hours of gameplay – all screenshots were taken during the process of review.