Dead Head Fred - hands-on

Features
By published

Death Jr., take a hike - this is what a darkly funny horror-adventure should look like

In the demo, Fred was equipped with his default jar head, as well as a hulking stone idol head (which changed his physique into that of a lumbering gorilla), and a rotting "corpse head" that turned him into a zombie. The stone head was good for pushing heavy objects, smashing through walls and other feats of strength, but the corpse head offered more elegant solutions. It can be filled with just about any liquid (which makes it all big and gross and wobbly), which enables Fred to do things like suck water out of fishtanks or broken pipes to put out fires, or fill it full of gasoline, which turns him into a flamethrower if he spits it out near an open flame. Stand in an updraft, and it'll inflate with air, launching you straight up and enabling you to float to a far-off ledge.

Interestingly, though, it's the plain old default jar head that turned out to be the most effective in clearing out the Bone Thugs that stood between us and all the puzzles. That's partly because the game's brawler-style combat follows a rock-paper-scissors dynamic, where one head type is more powerful against certain types of foes. Wearing the right head will also enable you to counter your enemies' unblockable super moves, resulting in a wickedly brutal fatality - which is a hell of a lot more entertaining to perform than the standard, yanking decapitations Fred executes when he's beaten up a monster enough.

Mikel Reparaz
Mikel Reparaz
After graduating from college in 2000 with a BA in journalism, I worked for five years as a copy editor, page designer and videogame-review columnist at a couple of mid-sized newspapers you've never heard of. My column eventually got me a freelancing gig with GMR magazine, which folded a few months later. I was hired on full-time by GamesRadar in late 2005, and have since been paid actual money to write silly articles about lovable blobs.