Dead Take is a brand new game from Surgent Studios, the developer of Tales of Kenzera: Zau. Ditching the Metroidvania and hopping into the Horror genre, the adventure covers new grounds, merging 3D exploration of a Hollywood mansion with FMV (Full Motion Video) cutscenes, interweaving an intriguing mystery story. Though it doesn’t quite reach all of its ambitions, it remains a moody and palpable horror experience with some stellar acting from some of the game industry’s best.

You play Chase, a struggling actor trying to make it big. When your industry friend Vinny goes missing, you go on the hunt for him. The last word you received is that he attended a party in LA at the house of an influential and elusive Hollywood producer named Duke Cain. Opening the doors to the mansion and seeing the property entirely abandoned, the only hint of life is the aftermath of the party; confetti littered around the mansion, half-empty champagne flutes and eerie lighting awaiting down each hall. It’s up to you to piece together the events of the party, finding out what happened to Vinny and escaping the haunted mansion with your life.

Duke’s mansion is an incredibly bespoke environment full of intrigue and dread that’ll keep the player invested throughout the game’s four-hour-long runtime. Halls and doors will glow red, inviting both curiosity and anxiety about what awaits on the other side. There’s plenty of striking flavour text in the movie posters of movies Duke worked on around the mansion, all eerie in design. The experience almost plays out like a Resident Evil map, uncovering secret passageways and hidden rooms that are unlocked by, say, solving a puzzle of where VHS cases should be listed and placed on a shelf to unveil a hidden safe behind it.

There are set-piece horror moments in Dead Take that keep you on the edge of your toes. Navigating through a dimly lit film developing room, where you have to navigate a labyrinth of shelves as you move about the development stations. Peppered about the room are mannequins you’re worried will come to life at any moment. The entire experience feels reminiscent of a lower-budget Remedy game, even having the Alan Wake 2-esque flashes of distorted FMV faces that surprise and jumpscare the player. For every small grievance I have with the game, Dead Take does not let up with its atmosphere and always thrills the player.

These scenes serve a lot of functions. They palpably set the tone for what it’s like to be in the audition room for a Duke Cain film, a producer who is an open secret, known to be abusive and hostile, grinding his talent into pulp behind closed doors, but eventually making beautiful films and pieces of art at the end of it. Kind of like an infamous big bad wolf in Hollywood. What these scenes also depict is the talent eager to make it big despite all of this. As Ben Starr and Neil Newbon monologue about how desperately they want a role, how they’d give anything for their shot at success, you’re reminded that it’s likely some of the tough and gruelling experiences they very may well have been through themselves. Neil has certainly been booking some roles in the last fifteen years he’s been in the industry, appearing as a minor character with a few scenes in games like Detroit: Become Human, but it wasn’t until his roles as Astarion in Baldur’s Gate 3 that he became a more household name. So you believe it when Neil, as Chase, stands front and centre on a cinema screen, telling you how much of his soul he had to bear and the sacrifices he had to make to get to where he is. You’re mesmerised and immersed.

Juxtaposing this are interview scenes with Vinny. Where the interviewer is regaling Vinny’s recent success with stardom and how he seemingly came from nowhere and now is in damn near everything. A rich, effective and self-aware nod to how Ben Starr himself is now in a similar position after only a few short years in games. That’s some of what’s best about the game: Vinny and Chase are intriguing, different sides of the same coin. How this dynamic unfolds is a big drive for the experience that I’m confident players will be well satisfied with come its conclusion.

Players can unearth new clips by splicing two clips together. These can provide new context and light on scenes, or even unlock dark and twisted new ones that are built off the back of stock standard ones. This is achieved via interacting with a computer in Duke’s cinema, utilising an AI software known as ‘Splaice’, where you choose two clips on a screen and hope they unearth something new. It’s probably about now that you’re reminded of the fantastic 2022 FMV game Immortality. In both titles, you’re reviewing footage and trying to piece together the story, locating hidden lost footage in the process. Though it’s neater here, Dead Take never really explores the splicing gameplay sufficiently, and therefore, you don’t quite get as much of a satisfying rabbit hole dive of a mystery compared to its likeness.

Other themes and elements found in Dead Take will also remind players of the Sam Barlow-developed hit. Ideas of the toxicity and dangers of Hollywood that come from the powers that be, therefore affecting the impressionable, more junior people, appear in both games. There’s a lot about the cutthroat nature of the film industry as a whole, something that Surgent Studios’ founder and head, Abubakar Salim, has also spent a lot of time in (through their TV and film acting credits), and evidently has a lot of powerful thoughts about. Though I wouldn’t go as far as to call the developer’s latest derivative, as they both serve different enough ideas and functions, its potential hasn’t quite been reached. For one, the game never really fully wraps up other parts of its mystery satisfyingly, and its last act is a little rushed.

Dead Take also stars other actors and people of note: Sam Lake (of Remedy Entertainment and the likeness of Max Payne fame), Travis Willingham, Laura Bailey, Matt Mercer, Alanah Pearce and Jane Perry all appear in-game. I wish I had been warned that some of these appearances go beyond headshot photo props of them and being exposited in notes as to their involvement in the story. What a player needs to do to unlock clips that contain more of this cast is locate all the relevant notes of said character. Not all are given to you by simply following the rails of the game. I realised this far too late when I reached the point of no return and couldn’t explore the mansion at my leisure any longer. Upon completing the game, reloading my last save takes me back to this same spot, meaning I can’t explore this footage without an entire re-run through more or less the whole thing. This leaves other characters in the game unsatisfyingly de-emphasised as part of the story and leaves its bigger picture a little too obscured.

For the few missteps the game takes, I want to stress that this is still a thoroughly enjoyable experience to work through. If a piece of art has themes or ideas I’ve seen before that I’ve liked, then, well, it just means I get another delicious serving of storytelling that I’ve been craving. What’s most impressive is how it feels like a full-circle evolution of earlier FMV titles. 1995’s Phantasmagoria delivered its live-acted world through point-and-click exploration, while Dead Take delights in being an advancement on that technology, delivering scares in a first-person perspective in 3D environments while being interspersed with full-motion video acting.