Dead Seater is a Freeware Retraux Horror video game made by Zeekerss on Unity and available for free on Steam and Itch.io. The game uses third-person fixed camera angles, similar to the original Alone in the Dark games.
Players take the role of Jesse, a lonely man who has built a grand house in the forest for his family to admire. Jesse's father is coming tonight and Jesse must prepare the house for his arrival.
Dead Seater contains examples of:
- Absurdly Spacious Sewer: The basement of Jesse's house is enormous, and apparently includes an underground factory and even apparently a section of the municipal sewer system. Jesse even notes he forgot how big the basement was.
- Berserk Button: The MBs are triggered by light. If you switch on the lights or shine your flashlight on them, they'll awaken and chase you down.
- Darkness Equals Death: When chasing you, the DSP will cause some of the lights in the house to burst, making navigation considerably more difficult and thus making it much harder to evade it. Inverted with the MBs, which are dormant until triggered by light, so you need to avoid turning on the lights when they're around.
- Dragged Off to Hell: A giant red hand seems to do this to Jesse at the end of the game.
- Hero Antagonist: Interacting with the empty chair in the front row of the basement stage reveals that the DSP that has been attacking Jesse throughout the entire game is actually the reanimated corpse of his mother, trying to stop her son from killing any more people.
- Invincible Boogeyman: You have no means to fight the DSP and MBs, so all you can do is run away from them until they tire out.
- Neck Snap: This is how Jesse is killed if he is caught by the DSP.
- Perpetual-Motion Monster: Averted with the DSP and the MBs. If you can evade them for long enough, they'll get tired and either shut down (in the case of the MBs) or go away until the next encounter (in the case of the DSP).
- Serial Killer: Jesse is revealed to have "Dead Seated" his family, friends, and neighbors in a secret room in the basement of his house, all so he won't be alone.
- Split-Personality Takeover: The ending monologue implies that Jesse's alternate personality is responsible for building the basement and gathering all the "Dead Seaters" while Jesse was asleep. When Jesse found out what was going on, he boarded up the house and ran, and his split personality "forced him into the creek". You've been playing as the murderous split personality the whole time.
- Stylistic Suck: As a deliberate design choice, most of the game's difficulty comes from the interface rather than the game itself. The fixed camera angles and third person perspective make navigation disorienting during frantic chases, and the mono audio sound means you can't pinpoint the direction the DSP is coming from by its footsteps.
- Villain Protagonist: Jesse has killed his family and friends and kidnapped his father, keeping him in the back of the van until the house is prepared for him to join them.
