Dead Take’s best scares come from real-life performances

Dead Take, the second game from Tales of Kenzera: Zau developer Surgent Studios, is a quiet horror game where the monster is ambition and the lengths a person will go for stardom. Like a lot of horror games, Dead Take relies on jumpscares to get the heart pumping. But playing this game, my deepest, most upsetting scares didn’t come from the startle of a sudden knock but from the performances of the game’s actors.

In Dead Take, you play as Chase Lowry (Neil Newbon), a struggling actor who has come to the creepy mansion of Hollywood producer and kingmaker Duke Cain (Abubakar Salim), to look for his friend, Vinnie Monroe (Ben Starr), another struggling actor. The game mixes the exploration and puzzle solving gameplay of a Resident Evil game with a narrative delivered almost entirely via full motion video cutscenes, or known to us Olds as FMVs. I know FMV games have been around for a while, but this is my first, it felt novel in a way video games hadn’t made me feel in a long time.

As you journey through the mansion, the main thrust of the game is piecing together what happened to your friend Vinny. You do that through finding snippets of videos — interviews, auditions, and video messages — and splicing them together to create wholly new videos through the use of a fancy schmancy AI editor. These new videos reveal plot elements and puzzle solutions which all sound rather like the normal course of a video game until you realize these performers are acting their asses off.

Throughout Dead Take, you watch Vinnie try to secure a role in Duke Cain’s next big picture, something he is hungry to the point of desperation for. When a concerned call from Chase interrupts an audition, and Duke questions Vinnie’s commitment, Vinnie brutally insults Chase.

I like to inhabit the characters I play in video games. After all, they’re mostly blank slates on which you can project your own thoughts and feelings. The character you pilot becomes a proxy for you even when they have their own personalities. I can’t do that in Dead Take.

Watching real, flesh and blood people act is so much more engrossing than hearing them act with the action mapped onto polygonal bodies. I played both Baldur’s Gate III and Final Fantasy XVI, in which Newbon and Starr gave excellent performances. But watching them act, they’re on another level.

_{This is only a sample of what to expect from Starr.}

Starr scared me in this game. A couple of jumpscares got me real good, and even the quiet, unsettling mansion created an atmosphere where I literally jumped at my own shadow, but Ben Starr is the scariest thing in this game. There’s a moment when, during yet another audition take, he starts screaming at his costar like Christian Bale that one time. It was so well done, so reminiscent of all the times I’ve had run-ins with violent, abusive men, that I forgot he was acting.

Not all the performances are bone-chilling depictions of what it’s like selling your soul to become the next big thing. There’s some humor in there too. Sam Lake, known for his work (and dance moves) on Remedy’s Alan Wake series, gives a hilarious appearance playing a washed up director. Because of plot shenanigans, Ben Starr and Neil Newbon are two British men, playing American actors pretending to be southern, and it is quite funny when those three-layers-deep accents occasionally break.

But don’t get me wrong, this game is all about the scares. Without FMVs, Dead Take would be a perfectly fine but forgettable game. Through the use of technology that peaked in the days of the LaserDisc, it’s become one of my favorite horror games ever. I don’t mind horror games, but I don’t seek them out. I’m glad I sought out Dead Take.
_{Dead Take is out now on Steam.}