Dead Format Review

Let it die.

I’ve never been a particularly nostalgic person, at least not for artistic mediums and media types. While I’ve been prone to longing for, or at the very least appreciating, specific design philosophies that have largely gone the way of the dodo, I don’t have any specific desire to house or make use of old technology. The classic systems and technology I grew up on, such as SNES and VHS players, don’t hold any power over me insofar as I largely see them as simple delivery systems for the actual art — video games and film, respectively.

Katanalevy’s Dead Format explicitly hearkens back to the time of VHS, taking place in the 1990’s. The player character is searching for their missing brother, rummaging through his apartment to find a new format and series of films (referred to as “Video Ghastlies”) which must then be played in order to open doors to the worlds shown in said films for the player to explore. While the titular “dead format” works as the mechanism for the delivering these worlds, I find that the reverence and nostalgia is targeted less toward the technology, and more for the types of art they were able to produce. 

Publisher: Oro Interactive

Developer: Katanalevy

Platform: Played on PC

Availability: Released December 10, 2025 on Windows PC.

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Older formats were, in many ways, much more constricting. Artists are ultimately bound by the current tech when creating a film or video game, such as films being exclusively black and white before the color technology was invented. But those bounds also served as guidelines. Rather than the whole universe of creativity being open to the director or creator, the films would necessarily have to work within that technological context; low resolutions, 4:3 aspect ratio, and even limited color all serve to influence the ways in which people made their works. It would change the way in which shots were framed, lit, or even played. 

These creative choices are where Dead Format lays its flowers. It pays very little reverence to the actual technology itself — something that I find is all too frequently done by modern retro enthusiasts — and instead focuses on the art itself. The video vignettes that you find throughout the short runtime are all reminiscent of the period they are emulating, using similar shot styles and visual effects one might find in a real work from the period. There’s a care taken in the fake movies that I truly respect, with the fake films even going so far as to use period appropriate color palettes, costuming, and contrasting. An underrated element to this is just how much adding something like tracking lines and CRT blurriness serves to solidify the eerie atmosphere of those “video ghastlies.”

Dead Format is phenomenally atmospheric.

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Once a video has been placed in the player and viewed, the apartment door will unlock and allow the player to walk through the world depicted in the video. Similar to the videos, the levels are also appropriately representative of the film styles they emulate. The first level, a silent film setting, is rendered in black and white, the 80’s horror flick has high contrast and has a bit of a noisy or fuzzy image.  This is such a great concept in my mind, and it is executed excellently overall from a visual perspective, but falls flat on the gameplay front on the back half of the game, especially.

At some point, an entity that can kill you in only a few hits begins to stalk you through your travels. It's a very similar concept to the excellent Alien: Isolation: there’s an unkillable monster hunting you, so you must hide and outmaneuver them to complete your objectives. While the tension is welcome in some respects, I find you spend too much time simply sitting and hiding. There’s an element of stealth you can rely on, where if you’re quiet enough you may be able to avoid the stalker in a few instances, but the primary method of avoidance are these little alcoves where your character is invincible and undetectable. As a product of the way the game’s save system works, you really don’t want to die, lest you be set back a long way. This leads to most of the final hours being spent sitting and waiting for the monster to pass so you can walk down the hallway, or enter the next room.

The video vignettes that you find throughout the short runtime are all reminiscent of the period they are emulating, using similar shot styles and visual effects one might find in a real work from the period.

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The back half of the game is frankly joyless because of this. Because there are so few ways to mitigate or avoid these scenarios, and because there are specific set areas the stalker appears at, there’s no real tension in the way that there is in a game like Alien: Isolation. There’s no second guessing or panic — once she appears, you know you must return to the alcove and wait. This does detract from your opportunity to appreciate the settings as well. While they are few in number, these levels are clearly crafted with care and love, but it’s hard to appreciate any of that when staring at the bottom of a table.

It’s hard to overstate just how much this singular (but pervasive) aspect brings the rest of the game down. I do understand what they were going for by introducing a stalking element to Dead Format, but the implementation of it steers into ‘boring’ territory.

Verdict

Dead Format is host to excellent ideas. The “haunted VHS” concept of opening up new worlds to explore sounds genuinely exciting in theory. To add to this, Katanalevy has a masterful grasp on the aesthetics of the past, using the constraints of VHS and film to create a genuinely unsettling atmosphere, but the poorly implemented stalker mechanic drags the experience down.

Image Credits: Oro Interactive

Disclosure: We received a free review copy of this product from the publisher.