Dead Take doesn’t announce itself with cheap shocks. Instead, it creeps in like a bad memory, pulling you through the corridors of an opulent mansion where every locked door feels like it’s hiding something rotten. It’s less about what jumps out at you, and more about what lingers when the screen goes black.
From its opening frames, Dead Take signals a different kind of horror. This is less a sprint through monsters and more a slow walk into moral quicksand. It’s a first-person, FMV-driven psychological thriller about ambition, manipulation, and the way an industry can turn people into raw material. You play Chase Lowry (Neil Newbon), an actor following the trail of his missing friend, Vinny Monroe (Ben Starr), inside the silent mansion of a powerful Hollywood producer. There’s no combat here and precious little hand-holding, just a maze of puzzles, screens, and an awful lot of things you can’t unknow once you’ve seen them.
The single-location setup does the heavy lifting. The house is lavish, sterile, and empty; your only contact with its owner, Duke Cain, comes as disembodied messages and the artifacts he’s left behind. The silence is suffocating, not because anything is chasing you, but because every drawer or projector you touch might peel back another layer of somebody’s performance—on screen and off it. The emptiness matters: you’re never measuring people in the room, only the versions of themselves they’ve recorded for others to see. That distance is the point, and it’s where the game’s nastiest questions live. Cain’s voice, while uncredited in-game but widely identified as creative director Abubakar Salim, adds a smug, omnipresent chill as he needles you from afar.
FMV can be a gimmick, but here it’s the backbone. Newbon’s Chase anchors the story with a weary, probing presence; most of his “acting” is in how you, as Chase, watch others. Starr’s Vinny is the live wire: charming on the surface, then fraying in front of the lens as opportunities curdle into coercion. Watching him unravel, in screen tests, interviews, and clipped “notes”, is more disturbing than any loud sting.
The supporting roster sells the conceit that this is a Hollywood ecosystem chewing people up. Jane Perry turns up as Lia Cane, icily professional and impossible to read, while Alanah Pearce’s Victoria Case is a cooler, more vulnerable counterpoint. There are also cameos from well known figure heads in the gaming industry, such as Laura Bailey, Sam Lake, and Matthew Mercer, each slotted in as faces you “know” from elsewhere, which the game smartly uses to poke at your own parasocial expectations. That extra-textual recognition isn’t a distraction; it’s the horror. Fame is a mask, and Dead Take keeps asking why we’re so eager to trust it.
Crucially, you’re not reading micro-tells across a dinner table; you’re parsing them through an edit suite. The most chilling moments are small—breaths held too long, a line delivered just a bit too clean, an apology that lands like a threat. You are constantly wondering if you can trust anything you see on the screen.
Moment to moment, this is an exploratory puzzle game. You sweep rooms for scrawled numbers, rummage through props and contracts, and, most importantly, collect USB sticks to feed the theatre’s workstation. There an AI-assisted editor lets you splice together found footage – auditions, interviews, B-roll – into “new” cuts that surface codes, unlock doors, and nudge the story forward. It’s elegantly literal: the same manipulations that shape careers and headlines are the tools you wield to progress.
I just wish this feature was utilised to greater effect. You are very limited to what you can actually splice, with the only correct combinations pushing the narrative forward. It would have been great if you could splice other pieces of footage together to get bonus insight into the goings on of Dead Take. Discovering the correct splices usually follows with a knocking on the theater door, which is initially scary, until the fifth time it happens where something magically appears to progress the story. It’s never explicitly explained whether something super natural is going on or if Chase has lost it. Maybe that’s the point though.
And yes, there are jump scares; loud, sometimes very loud. They get you early and occasionally overstay their welcome later, becoming very predictable and way less scary. The scare design is effective in the moment; the audio balance, less so.
Underneath the genre trappings, Dead Take is a character study about what people will trade for a shot at being seen. Vinny wants the role. Chase wants the truth. The house wants them both. The way you assemble clips to get what you need is the subtext made mechanical: stories are built, not found, and the builder always leaves fingerprints. When the game lets you sit with that, when you realize a cruel outburst or a teary confession is both “real” and carefully staged, it becomes properly unsettling.
The industry satire isn’t subtle. It doesn’t have to be. Power flows through gatekeepers; “notes” are weapons; NDAs feel like spells. There’s a particularly sharp sequence where a creative pitch is reduced to a brand deck, and the footage you’re splicing is less a “scene” than a negotiation over who’s allowed to exist inside it. The critique lands because the performances do. The FMV isn’t a novelty, it’s the only way to make these cuts hurt.
Credit to the art and sound teams for making a still, empty mansion feel predatory. The lighting carves the house into little stages – the piano room, projection suite, gallery – while long corridors amplify your doubt. The score is sparing, letting the granular foley work of keys, paper, a projector stuttering to life do the creeping. There’s restraint here. The game wants you leaning forward to hear, not flinching at every corner.
It’s also keenly paced for a shorter experience. I finished it in around three hours, but you can expect about four to five hours on a first run, depending on how often you get lost in the edit bay. That length feels right for the structure: long enough to build a rhythm of explore-watch-splice, short enough that the central metaphor doesn’t wear thin. If anything drags, it’s those occasional lock-and-key detours or an over-eager sting. The loop settles into a satisfying pattern: sweep a wing of the house, find a clue, sit down with the footage, and make a truth you can use.
