An oppressive, crushing bass fills the soundscape as I step into the vast, luxurious mansion of an influential Hollywood producer. A robot vacuum cleaner repeatedly bangs against the wall, reverberating through the art gallery. A car starts a panicked beeping as I pass it by on the way to a garage storeroom. Dead Take’s impeccable sound work molds your experience with all the tender care of a surgeon’s scalpel – signs of a team that knows how to pull off horror.
It’s a party at the uber-rich Hollywood producer Duke Cain’s mansion, to celebrate the beginning of production of his upcoming project, ‘The Last Voyage’. Invited is the lead star, Vinny Monroe. His friend Chase Lowry, however, knows something about Duke that Vinny doesn’t. Chase shows up at the mansion, only to find the place frighteningly empty despite the strewn confetti. Where is Vinny?
Dead Take functions as a classic horror adventure – you walk around solving puzzles to open up more and more areas to walk around in and solve puzzles in, and so on. The mansion’s penchant for symbols, locked rooms, and item puzzles reminds one of Resident Evil, but fear not – or rather, fear not as much – because there’s no zombies or threatening stalkers to chase you around.
Instead, Dead Take’s horror is rooted in the dark side of Hollywood fame. The axis of the game’s horror is the producer Duke Cain, who easily brings to mind real-life producer and sex offender Harvey Weinstein. Like him, Cain is a man who can make and break careers at a whim. He demands perfection from his artists, he manipulates them like dolls, and he always gets what he wants.
People with that much control are terrifying, and despite Dead Take’s jump scares, it is the menace of Duke Cain that scared me the most. His influence is pervasive – you overhear him in videos, listen to audio messages from him, read his notes, and learn his history. Hollywood, it turns out, can be horror in itself.
Much of Dead Take consists of standard item puzzles, but there’s a special hook to it too: video splicing. Although the term implies you’ll be doing actual splicing of video clips, it actually is depicted as an AI that does everything on its own – as long as you can identify two videos that are compatible with each other for the process.
Ultimately, it’s just another kind of item puzzle, really, except the items are videos. Splicing them results in a new video, which adds to the lore and leads to a firm knocking on the theater door, leading to story progress. The concept proved to be a bit underwhelming, although it did pose some of the trickiest riddles in the game for me.
Although Dead Take is more about its atmosphere and story than anything, it does toss in a film production-inspired puzzle that I enjoyed a lot. I won’t spoil how it goes, but suffice to say, it was the most inspired part of the game to me, and I would hardly mind playing more puzzles of its nature.
Dead Take presents an original theme – and a new genre for Surgent Studios – with surprising assurance. It easily slots into the collection of high-quality horror adventures, even if it loses steam towards the end, where its most interesting threads and implications get tossed aside for a relatively milquetoast conclusion. The parts of this game certainly outshine the sum of them.
It’s not as provocative as might be expected from the topic, but it’s a fine effort from Surgent Studios, with engrossing video acting by all actors involved. I can’t imagine its easy to make several videos of people talking that glue you to the screen, but Surgent Studios certainly has a talent for it.
Dead Take is an easy recommendation for fans of scare-and-puzzle games, including fans of Resident Evil who need a break from being chased by a monstrosity. Here, the monstrosity is cerebral, haunting you with questions of “Did he really?” and “Would he have…?” It might promise more than it delivers, but it’s original enough to be worth experiencing once.
Developer: Surgent Studios
Country of Origin: United Kingdom
Publisher: Pocketpair Publishing
Release Date: July 31, 2025 (PC)
The PC version of the game was played for this review of Dead Take (Steam).
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