INT. MANSION – NIGHT, Chase Lowry’s very bad night makes for an excellent point-and-click Hollywood horror adventure
My favorite character in Surgent Studios’ horror point-and-click-and-cringe-and-writhe adventure is the mansion of megalomaniacal writer/producer/director Duke Cain. After stepping off of the street and through the threshold, the modern open concept living room shows the aftermath of a party, but even before you turn your head to examine the space more closely, you can’t help but feel like something terrible is vibrating at the periphery. The next five or so hours you spend turning every stone and probing every nook reveals a slaughterhouse of both body and soul. The building itself, cloaked in shame-concealing shadow, morphs around you, alive and unreasonable. Sometimes, it’s just the way a pair of doorknobs look like leering eyes as you approach from a distance. Sometimes literally the layout changes, a door that wasn’t there before now is. On at least one occasion, the room you walked into is not the same room you’ll struggle desperately to leave.
Cain’s Mansion in Dead Take is a distant cousin of Spencer’s Mansion from Resident Evil. It’s certainly, mostly, a place a real living weirdo might live in. But it’s also a kaleidoscope of doors marked with strange seals and corresponding keys, each locked room a dungeon tailor-made to keep a specific piece of humanity trapped in it. Esoteric statues missing pieces that can only be found by solving abstract puzzles to reveal doorways separating you from another layer of darkness. But in the kayfabe of Resident Evil, the Spencer Mansion is designed to be elaborate and confusing in order to hide the sinister workings going on in the laboratory below. It’s hard to know why Cain’s Mansion is the way it is. On one hand, some of its rooms are the kind of voyeuristic playgrounds perfect to create blackmail for the perceived enemies of a terrible man like Duke. On the other hand, whenever things dip into the surreal, like switching a lightbulb in a room that also switches the entire layout of the room, I’m reminded that the eyes I’m viewing all this with belong to Dead Take’s least reliable narrator.
You, as Chase Lowry, break into Duke Cain’s place uninvited and on a solemn mission to save their friend Vinny from what feels immediately like a very bad situation the latter has gotten themself into during a spontaneous freak off Cain has thrown. They were both up for the same lead role in Cain’s latest film, The Last Voyage, and Vinny ended up with the role, but Chase isn’t upset about that. Maybe. Maybe he and Vinny aren’t even really friends, as some clips found around the mansion of Vinny’s script reads and interviews suggest that he is far more willing to ignore Chase’s calls and pretend they don’t know each other if it means getting the part. Chase is at the end of his rope, the industry has been crushing him for years and he’s one heavy push away from becoming another stain under its boot. The pressure to get this role has made him question everything. Vinny is a snake that will discard him for the simple chance to sniff Cain’s air, but could he guarantee he wouldn’t do the same? When exploring the mansion, I opened a door to Cain’s private theatre. I loaded a clip in the back room, went back to the front to watch it. Got up to go back to the rear room but wait, I don’t think I closed that door. And who’s knocking on it? And who turned that music on upstairs? And wait… did that mannequin move?
Chase can’t be relied on to understand the facts of what’s occurring around him. He’s operating on feeling. And I can relate. So many of my most defining memories have no finer details. Instead, a song might trigger a tightness in my chest or a smell might bring comfort. I don’t know why. My brain has worked to protect me from “why” for a long time now.
My second favorite character in Dead Take is its myriad of feelings, a teeming mass of them that pulse throughout, punching irregular little holes through the firmament. Those holes are sometimes in the shape of a gripping performance by its ensemble cast lead by industry heavyweights like Neil Newborn and Ben Starr fitting snugly into their American accents. Jane Perry, Laura Bailey, and Alanah Pierce add their own little stitches of doom to the greater tapestry of bad things happening to people who were good once, and could maybe be again if given the chance.
It’s still hard, some days after seeing Dead Take to its end, to say if I find the story itself good or interesting. It’s ultimately pretty simple and doesn’t deviate away from any other stories about the dark side of Hollywood in any remarkable ways. But it is diced into pieces, purposefully obfuscated and confusingly spun the moment you’re navigating waters that seem like they could be deeper than they are. I still splashed around in them frantically watching Vinny change between raging lunatic and gentle hero while leaving his co-star Victoria in nervous tears during a line read. The cast’s performances, no doubt inspired by real life personal and public anecdotes, carried that kind of drowning weight.
In between these bursts of chaos and sorrow, I traveled through the gaping mansion with a constant feeling of dread. Sounds come and go, be it the distorted cries coming from a baby monitor in a distant room, the warble of a glitched video clip that becomes a recurring background leitmotif in places where there’s no screen or speaker around, or some other discomforting disruption. The place itself is pretty easy to navigate, and you spend too much time retracing your steps to try to find a door for a key or if something changed across the house because you flipped a switch in a newly unlocked room. Even this creates useful and frustrating tension. I didn’t like how much backtracking I was doing mostly because I felt like I was doing busy work but also because I was very eager to not know the new ways this spooky place was changing to greet me every step of my journey.
Though rare, Dead Take even let me feel a little smart and triumphant while solving the puzzles that existed to both be narrative revelations and barriers to progress. They’re mostly clever, but easy, especially if you’re the sort to remember context clues left around in the environment, or tactile callbacks to details that didn’t seem important at the time. A small handful are dreadful, obtuse pace-killers that I’m still not sure how the answers I straight up guessed would have made any sense otherwise. I also enjoyed seeking out and reading all of the small notes, newspaper clippings, shot lists, screenplay notes, etc. lying around, all of which coloring in each character and event just a little bit more.
This includes the thumb drives containing all of the videos where most of the performances are found, scattered among the abode and vital to the delivery and discovery of the story. Each clip is important on its own, but when edited together using the help of an AI-powered device, these clips reveal new secrets. Two separate media interviews from Vinny and Lia are transformed into a back and forth dialogue between the two, with added footage that may or may not be “real,” but definitely feels like something I wasn’t supposed to have seen. This sleuthing system evokes the deduction process in a game like Immortality, but stops short of the freedom and agency Half Mermaid’s masterpiece delivered. That said, taking these scrapped pieces of footage, the so-called dead takes, and using generative AI to mash them into a gestalt that does more harm than good is a valuable, unsubtle message that didn’t fall on deaf ears here.
Dead Take does a much better job at being unnerving and uncomfortable than it does being scary, the latter relying largely on Alan Wake 2-style jump scares where a tortured face reminds you of their pain very loudly and very suddenly. Its true success as a horror game is in the absolutely desolate vibes it creates for most of the five hours it will take to finish it, and how those vibes smother the other more familiar genre ingredients to create a special plate that will make you sick, and make you hunger for more.
Score: 8
A PC code was provided by the publisher for this review.
