Dead Format Review – Filled with creativity and stunning visuals, but falls short of greatness

Dead Format has the most insanely intriguing premise I’ve seen come out of a horror game in a long while. You take cursed, supernatural VHS tapes, each representing a different genre of film, and dive into them Inception-style to explore their every nook and cranny? And you do this within the framework of a survival horror game? Yes, please. Into my veins, please. That was my initial reaction to the game, but now that I’ve finished it, all I’ve got for you is a popular Star Wars meme: “We were on the verge of greatness. We were this close.” Which sums up how I feel about Dead Format – a neat idea with some genuinely good bits, but it somehow never comes together into a satisfying whole due to a number of somewhat frustrating design decisions.

Remember, this is a stealth mission

First things first, though: how does the game work? Well, a bit like Silent Hill 4. Your apartment is your primary safe zone – the main hub where you can sort through your items or save your progress. Then you insert a tape of your choice into your VHS player and venture out into the corresponding cinema-world, facing whatever terrors – or puzzles – you find within.

Which is all fine and good, but I immediately need to bring something fairly important to your attention. When I first got into Dead Format, I expected a relatively traditional survival horror title with ammo management, puzzles and exploration. You know, the usual. But here’s the thing: this is actually, for the most part, a prominently stealth-focused experience in the vein of Alien: Isolation where you have to constantly deal with a persistent – and unkillable – stalker that will give you an instant Game Over if she catches you. The stalker doesn’t appear until the third VHS world you explore, mind you, but once she’s introduced, she will become a constant presence that you’ll almost never be free from, even if you revisit earlier VHS worlds that used to be initially safe. Because she’s just going to start spawning everywhere, all the time. It was a bit of an unexpected genre shift, not gonna lie.

Familiar territory

Mechanically, Dead Format’s stalker is almost identical to how the Xenomorph operates in Alien: Isolation. By default, she’s shuffling around inside the walls, and occasionally climbs out through one of the countless large monitors peppered across the levels – when this happens, the accompanying sound effect is almost unmistakable, so you’ll know exactly when she’s been triggered. You hide under desks, duck behind cover, throw noisemaker traps to distract her, or use a powerful weapon to temporarily fend her off until she gets bored and climbs back into her “vent” for a while, giving you some breathing room to explore and solve puzzles. Rinse and repeat. The system works reasonably well, and is much more lenient than something like Hollow Cocoon, where the stalker would always be close by and never leave the player alone. And while I did initially find the introduction of this creature to be a source of frustration, I sort of warmed up to it over time – while not nearly as terrifying as the Xenomorph, it still managed to inject a welcome amount of tension into the game. Palms were sweaty, Mom’s spaghetti.

It's worth noting that Dead Format is also an absolute visual treat: the aesthetics of each VHS world and the overall atmosphere of the game are spot on. If you’re into Gothic architecture or grimy, metallic factories with oversized fans and fog machines spewing mist into blue-tinted beams of light, you’re going to have a very intimate relationship with your screenshot button. I also enjoyed the throwbacks to specific cinematic styles and movies – one of my all-time favorites, The Fly, gets a VERY obvious nod, for example. Furthermore, the game pulls off a few surprisingly effective scares in the vein of Silent Hill 4, with your supposed safe zone, the apartment, becoming gradually corrupted over the course of the adventure. I honestly wished this aspect of the game was a bit more fleshed out – you know, to make players feel unsafe even when they’re “back home”, so to speak. I’ve always loved it when a game kicks up its own established rules to pull the rug from under the player.

Imperfect format

So, what exactly irritated me about the game? Well, maybe I’m getting old, but the lack of certain QoL features ended up hurting the experience for me. For starters, there is no handy-dandy map, so you’ll need to make a mental note of each VHS world’s layout, including important spots where key items have to be used. Things can get a little confusing, especially if you’re playing the game across multiple sessions; almost every time I got stuck, it wasn’t because the puzzles themselves were too difficult (they’re really not), but because I’d simply forgotten where everything was located across the three fairly sizeable VHS worlds. Which, of course, often led to me wandering around the world, feeling like I’m just wasting my time. If the game had a map that marked the most important puzzle locations, I think the overall experience would’ve been significantly smoother.

The protagonist’s walk speed is another issue I couldn’t really get over. You may be wondering why this is even an issue when the game features a sprint button – well, because said sprint button is generally useless, and most of the time, you’re just punished for using it. The stalker in Dead Format is extremely sensitive to sound, possibly even more so than Alien: Isolation’s Xenomorph, so if you get impatient and start running for even a nanosecond, it’s going to immediately climb out of its hidey hole and begin looking for you, which means the game grinds to a complete halt while you sit under a table and wait for the thing to go away. Generally speaking, I was really hoping the game would be a touch less stealth-oriented, despite being a person who tends to enjoy these types of titles. Once in a blue moon, you do encounter regular enemies that need to be taken out with conventional weapons, but this is more like the exception than the rule – make no mistake, the vast majority of the experience is still about playing hide-and-seek with the stalker.

Issue numero tres: progress can only ever be saved at your apartment – unlike in Alien: Isolation, where you have access to multiple save terminals scattered around the levels, Dead Format only gives you one singular save point for the entirety of the game, located within your bedroom. There are no soft checkpoints, either, so if the stalker catches you while you’re out there exploring, and you haven’t been back to your apartment in a while, you can kiss your progress goodbye. Again, the protagonist’s aforementioned walk speed makes this issue more severe than it needs to be; every time you die, you can’t just quickly hurry back to where you left off. No, you need to go sloooowwly to avoid alerting the stalker, and do everything all over again. It was driving me insane after a while.

Final thoughts

I find myself in a difficult situation when trying to rate Dead Format. I really, really wanted to love it, and I genuinely wish I could sing its praises, because it’s blatantly obvious how much work went into the project: from the various short films created specifically for the game, to the three distinct VHS worlds with their unique identities, there’s a lot to like here. My problem is mostly the fact that a handful of player-unfriendly design decisions seriously hold the project back, and the game sort of ends up shooting itself in the foot as a result. The lack of a map that would help with navigation, the protagonist’s infuriatingly slow movement speed and the almost exclusive focus on hide-and-seek gameplay with an overly relentless stalker all add up to a less than pleasant experience. I don’t think this is a bad game, but when asked whether or not I would recommend it, I just can’t bring myself to give a resounding yes.