@caseydilla's review of Dead Take
★★★½
Alyn from House of the Dragon has been cookin! Directing two games in the space of three years while also filming two seasons of a massive HBO show is a pretty sick feat, even if both of them are pretty thoroughly average experiences. I'd give the edge to this one though, because although Tales of Kenzera: Zau was a refreshingly personal and specifically cultural take on a Metroidvania that I've never seen before (and likely never will again thanks to that studio's "indefinite hiatus"), it was still a fairly superficial one that beyond its fully-voiced Swahili dub track had little notable about it. Dead Take is instead a first-person horror exploration game that takes quite a bit of inspiration from Silent Hill/Resident Evil but hues closer to something like Outlast or Blue Prince in the way you interact with it. And it's pretty good at that! Some of the puzzles are obvious and uninspired (if you were worried there wouldn't be a developing-a-roll-of-film-in-a-darkroom puzzle you can release that bated breath) but the fact the game never has a waypoint marker and instead relies on vague cryptic text messages and an "I need X tool to get into X item, which reveals X story beat" gameplay loop to nudge you forward keeps it from being too straightforward an affair. It's not as much a straight horror despite a couple jumpscares as it is meant to evoke a sense of unease, the empty dread of a dream unfulfilled. The execution works enough for me here that the incredibly obvious ending manages to arrive unimpeded by bullshit that makes me want to stop playing, á la the aforementioned Blue Prince. That being said though, despite there being a Steam Deck-specific compatibility option in the settings, this game looks and runs like shit on a Steam Deck. Everything is blurry, all text on objects (not when you press the button to read them) is illegible, everything is constantly sparkling due to an anti-aliasing solution that seems to be doing nothing, and a particular scene during the climax ran at a crisp 19fps. The brief moments where it runs at 60 make it clear this game probably looks fantastic on a better machine to the point that I can't recommend playing it on Deck if you have the option. Also not for nothing and to the surprise of nobody, Ben Starr is a fucking rockstar and should be in literally everything from now on. Move over Troy Baker amirite
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