Dead Take's luxurious Hollywood mansion is dark and disordered. The labyrinthine layout is inhospitable yet inviting, holding secrets I want to know – need to know. I find a flash drive and take it to the basement's cinema room. Neil Newbon, the actor behind Baldur's Gate 3's Astarion and now Dead Take's curious actor Chase Lowry, dominates the wall-sized screen, reading lines for an audition. There's an enthralling combination of talent, ability, and desperation.
It's enough to make me forget the terror of the hallways I had to traverse to reach this moment, but then it abruptly ends and I'm back in the room, a thumping knock at the door demanding I answer as my instincts plead uselessly with me to ignore it. But as terrifying a predicament I now find myself in, I can't stop thinking about what I just saw on the screen.
Dead Take is a fascinating, if somewhat familiar, horror game. Playing in first-person perspective, you take on the role of Chase, who is searching for his friend Vinny Monroe (played by Ben Starr of Final Fantasy 16 fame). It doesn't take long to suspect foul play, as the mansion is seemingly abandoned and in a state of disarray. The delicious sense of mystery and eye-shutting fear is up there with the likes of Outlast and Amnesia.
Take a bow
Dead Take exposes the true price of fame, and it's an uncomfortably brilliant experience.
Dead Take goes beyond the other games I mentioned in one core area: performance. I don't just mean the packed cast of Laura Bailey, Sam Lake, Matthew Mercer, Alanah Pearce, Jane Perry, Travis Willingham and Alix Wilton Reagan, as well as the aforementioned Starr and Newbon. No, it's the quality of the performances on offer that elevates Dead Take beyond other first-person horror titles.
Part of this is in the live-action element of Dead Take, where cast members appear in-game via recordings of auditions, interviews and so on. Without giving any spoilers away, these segments may seem one-dimensional at first, but there's a nuance to the performances that's made apparent as you progress the story and revisit these scenes from new perspectives.
One such example is a Vinny Monroe (Starr) interview where he is seemingly a friendly and respectful soul when talking about a director whose presence looms large over Dead Take. However, we see a darker side to Vinny upon a revisit of the footage, now recontextualized, and the apparent sweetness of his words turns toxic, revealing Starr's acting to be deeper and even more impressive than you may initially realize. It's no surprise that Ben Starr gives an excellent performance of course – just look at his work as Clive Rosfield in FF16 – but Dead Take makes a clear point of how much depth is on show from him here.
Thrill of the Chase
Without diminishing the contributions of anyone else to Dead Take, it's Newbon who stood out to me. Although we play as his character Chase, we only really see him in the in-game recording files, and each one is a moreish morsel of an overall sumptuous meal. The Resident Evil and Xenoblade Chronicles 3 actor portrays a thespian in search of his big break, and this is communicated through expertly agonized eyes in his audition tape sequence.
Newbon relishes the opportunity to flex. In one scene, Chase shifts from a meek, hopeful, wannabe star consumed by a severe yearning to an intense force of nature unleashing an animalistic stare into the camera, burning himself into the super 8 lens of my mind.
The key difference between Newbon's presence in Dead Take and the many other games he's worked on is that it feels more physical, more personal, because we see him clearer than ever. This isn't a CGI creation brought to life by his movement and voice – not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. He's unencumbered by the technology required to make games like Resident Evil Village, instead facing the camera and giving us everything he has directly. It's magnificent.
While we've no shortage of wonderful Neil Newbon performances, seeing him in live action brings another level to his work. He's exceptional when providing voice and motion-capture performances, and we can see his likeness in games like Detroit: Become Human, but it's clear he's an actor who deserves to be on-camera more, with his performance in Dead Take showing precisely why.
By removing the technological toys that helped give us Baldur's Gate 3's Astarion and Resident Evil Village's Heisenberg - two exceptional characters - Dead Take has given us as the audience a full-powered Neil Newbon performance, and it's one I'll never forget.
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