The name makes me laugh because I always think of the movie Drop Dead Fred. I know, not the best movie, and I've forgot every moment of the plot, but the name makes me laugh. Anyways, Dead Head Fred is a third person adventure game coming to the PSP, which features a detective looking to find his missing head in a story that mixes film noir with horror.

As Fred, the player ends up losing their head (literally!) and it is off to the races to recover it from a hideous corporation that has taken Fred's head for one reason or another. Luckily for Fred, he has the ability to swap heads, which enable him to use various powers and abilities to help him accomplish his task of retrieving his original head.

The first thing that stood out to me was Dead Head Fred's complete lack of a HUD. As the player runs about solving the various puzzles, there is never a moment where the screen is wasted with endless graphs and other information. Nope, when Dead Head Fred is running, the game itself is all the player will see. The lack of a HUD doesn't mean there won't be information popping up, however, as the player's health will still be shown in the top left corner, and whenever the player switches heads by pressing on the direction pad. So, say the player wants to equip the shrunken head, well, all they would have to do is press on the directional pad and a little image shows itself to show what head is attached to each directional pad. Basically, there is a HUD, but it is hidden from the player and only reveals itself when need be.

Though combat was present – involving such moves as the player using their stone head to bash enemies, stunning creatures with gas, and grappling onto an enemy to perform a quick time button press to make Fred perform some gruesome attack such as ripping the head off a zombie – the main concept behind Dead Head Fred seemed to be solving various environmental puzzles by determining which head was the best for what situation. The stone head, for example, is the only head that can breath properly underwater, so the player must equip that particular head when they jump into a body of water so that they don't drown and can then walk under water, attached to the bottom of the surface. Other head puzzles include using the corpse head to suck up liquids and extinguish a fire that is blocking the player's progression, using the shrunken head to miniaturize and walk through areas available only to tiny players, and sucking gas with another head to allow the player to float up to a surface they wouldn't be able to otherwise reach.

The graphics weren't the best as they were quite jaggy, but the game is still in its preview stages and not running at full capacity yet. The character model of Fred fared a little better, but not by much. The enemy character models looked about as well as Fred's, which as I said, wasn't the hottest.

Dead Head Fred is a single player only game and doesn't look to include one bit of multiplayer. Spread out over eight large levels, Dead Head Fred intends to tell a fantastical film noir meets horror story when it is eventually released on the PSP. The game might not be a visual stunner at the current point in the developmental process, but the unique sense of storytelling should help it overcome some of that.