Dead Head Fred (デッドヘッドフレッド ～首なし探偵の悪夢～?) is a horror-themed action-adventure video game for the PlayStation Portable, developed by Vicious Cycle Software and published by D3 Publisher. It was released in North America on August 28, 2007 and is powered by Vicious Cycle's proprietary Vicious Engine. It features a premise that is a combination of 1940s-style noir and contemporary horror, dubbed "twisted noir" by the design team.
The game is a single-player experience whose title character, Fred Neuman, is a private investigator with the ability to switch heads. Fred has recently been murdered and decapitated, and has few memories of the events leading to his death. The plot follows Fred as he pieces together the clues of his murder and tries to get revenge on the man who killed him. Unlike many action game heroes, Fred has no conventional weapons—he relies solely on the powers available to him from the severed heads of fallen enemies.
The game received generally positive reviews, with reviewers mentioning its dark humor and noir-inspired motif as high points. It received criticism for its controls and lack of combat depth. In 2008, it won the Writers Guild of America's first-ever award for video game writing.
Read more about Dead Head Fred: Gameplay, Promotion and Release, Reception
Famous quotes containing the words dead, head and/or fred:
“Panoramas are not what they used to be.
Claude has been dead a long time
And apostrophes are forbidden on the funicular.
Marx has ruined Nature,
For the moment.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“His eyelids droop, his head falls low,
His old eyes cloud with dreams;
The sun upon all things that grow
Falls in sleepy streams.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“For me, it’s enough! They’ve been here long enough—maybe too long. It’s a funny thing, though. All these years Fred was too busy to have much time for the kids, now he’s the one who’s depressed because they’re leaving. He’s really having trouble letting go. He wants to gather them around and keep them right here in this house.”
—Anonymous Parent. As quoted in Women of a Certain Age, by Lillian B. Rubin, ch. 2 (1979)