Headless and Deadless
The idea behind Dead Head Fred is that you play as a formerly living private investigator named Fred. Unfortunately, your private investigations got you into a heap of trouble with the wrong people (which explains the dead part), but fortunately some crazy doctor found your body and brought you back to life. Back to unfortunately, he couldn't find all of your parts (specifically, your head), but has ginned up some replacements that are, in the doctor's words, "just as good as your original parts, better than in some ways." Surprisingly, this crackpot doctor is absolutely correct... to a degree.
The head that Fred sports from the beginning of the game is a jar containing Fred's brain and eyeballs. Aside from the immediate comedic value, this head also comes with its own special properties, most notable of which is a stealth field that can conceal Fred for a short period of time. As you progress through the game, Fred finds additional heads that he can swap out at will. Some heads, like the stone idol head, provide Fred with greater strength for smashing obstacles while other heads provide more novel solutions. The corpse head is sort of an empty vessel that Fred can fill up with different fluids by sucking them out of their containers, so it does triple duty as a flamethrower when filled with gas/oil, a fire extinguisher when filled with water or a hot air balloon when filled with buoyant air. The zombie head (which is actually quite different from the corpse head, despite their apparent similarity) equips Fred with razor-sharp skeleton hands that slice enemies to ribbons.
Fresh-squeezed Worms
Aside from the myriad uses of Fred's heads, he's also got some other tricks he can turn to in times of need. Specifically, Fred can brew a variety of juices that replenish his health out of disgusting worms that he occasionally runs across while trying to get revenge on his murderers. Of course, Fred doesn't have to mash the worms into juice, he could also use them to go fishing. The fish Fred catches can then be sold to some fish vendor guy that will trade the fish for items... like, um, worm juice. We're not totally clear on the roundabout worm/fish/juice trade, but it's kind of ancillary to the whole Dead Head Fred experience anyway.
Fred himself is voiced by John C. McGinley who you might remember as the taller of the two Bobs from the movie Office Space. His performance is excellent and the dry sarcasm rasps from your PSP like sandpaper (which is a good thing for dry sarcasm). Of course, he's also got quite the potty mouth (dropping an f-bomb within the first couple minutes of the game), so this portable title is definitely not for the kids. Still, for those of us that can handle a little salty language, Dead Head Fred serves up some seriously funny dialog.
Dropping in late August, we eagerly anticipate some more hands-on time with Dead Head Fred in the near future. Watch for further coverage of this little gem as we roll up on its release.
