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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.
