Dead Take

About Dead Take

Dead Take is a first-person psychological horror game by Surgent Studios, the team behind Tales of Kenzera: Zau, published by Pocketpair Publishing and released for Windows on 31 July 2025. It is directed by the actor Abubakar Salim and grew out of the pressure actors feel trying to make it in the industry.

You play Chase Lowry, an actor short of work. His friend and rival Vinny Monroe has stopped answering his phone, and Chase arrives at night at the mansion where Vinny was last seen, the site of a glamorous party the evening before. The house is oddly quiet. The cast includes Neil Newbon as Chase and Ben Starr as Vinny.

The mansion holds an abandoned film set, a broken home cinema, secret rooms and locked doors. As you search, you find USB drives and memory cards with corrupted video files, and some of them can be spliced together to show what happened within these walls. The footage slowly reveals a side of show business only spoken of in whispers: cruelty, gossip, auditions gone wrong and a shadowy figure with the power to make or break a career.

It suits players who like a story-driven psychological horror game with puzzles and no combat, such as Layers of Fear, and anyone curious about horror built on found footage and performance.

How to play Dead Take

1. Buy it on Steam or the Epic Games Store for Windows.
2. Enter the mansion and search its rooms for clues to where Vinny went.
3. Collect the USB drives and memory cards hidden around the house.
4. Splice the corrupted video clips together to reveal what happened.
5. Work your way past locked doors and into secret rooms to go deeper.

Tips

• Pay attention: the store warns that the mansion's secrets take all your ingenuity.
• Watch each recovered clip closely, since the footage holds the story and the clues.
• Play with headphones; the game is fully voiced in English.

Questions