Dead Reset review

• Reviews by Pascal Tekaia
• Published:

Plenty of camp horror thrills to be enjoyed again and again in this polished choice-driven FMV thriller

If there’s one word to sum up Wales Interactive’s output over the years, it’s got to be “consistent.” The publisher has chosen a particular avenue for its cadre of interactive games – specifically, full-motion video projects that very much embrace the phrase “gameplay lite” – and has stuck to it time after time. No matter the themes each new release explores or what niche it falls into, players always know just what to expect of the formula. So it’s no surprise that the Dark Rift Horror-developed Dead Reset follows the same pattern – a successful sci-fi thriller well suited to this kind of choice-driven experience while providing some schlocky fun. There are no puzzles to chew on, but fans of Wales Interactive’s oeuvre (at least, those who’ll embrace a bit of gore) should enjoy this creature feature’s bucketful of blood and guts.

You take on the role of Cole Mason, who is rudely awoken by a group of strangers in what appears to be an industrial operating room, only to find he has no idea where he is or how he got there. All he knows is that one of the strangers, who appears to have an itchy trigger finger, has a gun trained on the back of his head, while the others immediately shove him towards a surgical table and implore him to begin operating on the unconscious woman lying atop it. 

Although you are given a few choices here, like whether to even attempt the surgery, refuse, or stall for time, the right way forward is to have Cole make the incision in the woman’s torso – laying bare an alien embedded in her abdomen with its tentacles wrapped around her organs. Removing the creature is what you’ve really been awakened for, and the scenarios that spiral outward from this central moment are what Dead Reset is all about.

No matter what you choose to do here, it doesn’t take long for things to go south, with Cole meeting his demise in a number of possible ways. Perhaps the creature, roused by your poking and prodding, makes a swift lunch of you. Maybe Slade, the trigger-happy ruffian who clearly doesn’t have much of a soft spot for you, gives his index finger free rein to pump you full of lead. It could even be that you try to escape the room or go for Slade’s gun. But they all lead to painful, often bloody deaths for Cole. This is by design, as dying is very much part of the experience. You see, each time it happens, Cole wakes again, back at the beginning of the whole ordeal, with a gun pressed to the back of his skull and an unconscious patient awaiting his scalpel.

It turns out that Dead Reset is as much a time-loop story as a horror yarn. As the title aptly hints at, each time Cole meets a grisly end, he returns to the most recent “checkpoint,” explained in-game as the result of a temporal displacement experiment he was a part of. Whenever that happens, Cole (and you, of course) retains the memories of his previous timelines, while the others around you don’t. As you repeat the process enough times, you’ll eventually learn a bit about the circumstances that landed Cole here and about the strangers surrounding him, but early on you’re as in the dark as he is.

In order to escape this time warp, Cole will need to figure out what’s happening to him and convince the others that he’s experiencing the same events over and over, eventually using his knowledge of the cycle to survive long enough to reach the next reset point. From here, further wrinkles in the central conflict are revealed, the narrative follows new twists, and backstories are peeled away one layer – and one reset – at a time.

It isn’t just a stygian creature threatening your life, either. Man can often be his own cruelest foe, and the antagonists here, at least early on, are the aforementioned Slade, with his penchant for violence, and Magson, the senior scientist in charge of these scientific experiments. Magson’s primary concern is, at all times, the safety and survival of the alien specimen, with all human casualties deemed acceptable losses. But Cole also has some support on his side, namely Fearne, the sister of the alien creature’s initial host, who becomes his potential love interest. Other secondary characters include the engineer Cooper and the psychologist Weir, though, as you might have guessed, a story like this requires its fair share of sacrificial meat, so it’s best not to get too attached to any one individual as some of them won’t be around for long. 

Regardless of how or when they die off, until then the characters are all brought to life by talented actors. Particularly Cole, Fearne, Slade, and Magson, who ate up the bulk of my run’s screen time, are enjoyable to watch, with just the right mix of intensity and camp layered into each performance. Accounting for all possible progression paths in a choice-based FMV game requires its actors to adjust frequently to shifting headspaces, and doubly so with the added element of one of them reliving the same sequences again and again, each time slightly tweaked. And all while having to do so drenched in sweat, covered in blood, or wrestling with Lovecraftian horrors while screaming bloody murder. It’s a good time from start to finish, and the cast sells it well.

Dead Reset

Genre:	Horror, Science Fiction
Presentation:	Full motion video
Theme:	Escape, Time travel, Aliens
Perspective:	First-Person
Graphic Style:	Live action
Gameplay:	Interactive movie, Survival, Choices matter
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Low

The developers have also dialed into a sweet spot when it comes to the sets used for filming. The industrial locations we find ourselves in are a good visual match for the game’s ambiguous sci-fi setting. It’s clear that the production team made clever use of an available warehouse, dressing it up with lots of exposed wiring, plastic sheeting, and various HVAC pipes and hoses. It’s a purposely rather grimy and un-pretty setting, nudging it into the “truckers in space” territory of sci-fi classics like Alien, not least because our protagonists are being stalked through its hallways and rooms by an unstoppable menace.

While it’s easy to see through its DIY nature, that’s not to say the project looks cheap or flimsy. Smart lighting choices keep things looking fresh and interesting – some locations are lit all in red, drenching them in a sense of danger, while at other times the only major light source on-screen will be a hand-held torch Cole is carrying. Each of the game’s seven chapters explores a different area of the research base, including the initial lab, a series of ventilation ducts, and even the makeshift storage-room-turned-morgue that now serves as the creature’s feeding grounds, though we only ever see what the narrative’s predetermined on-rails progression reveals to us.

It’s worth noting that you should expect a bit of gratuitous blood to splatter the lens as you play. While that’s not likely to give seasoned horror pros any difficulties, there are a handful of rather realistic depictions of surgical procedures and disfigurements, starting with Cole’s first assignment upon awakening and later graduating to things like needing to manually reach in and pluck an eyeball from a human corpse to operate an optical scanner. There are also plenty of disembowelments, slashed throats, and torn limbs – in short, carnage. Consider this a content warning for those who are a little sensitive when it comes to more explicitly gruesome scenes.

Along with the on-screen viscera, the soundtrack does quite a bit of heavy lifting when it comes to maintaining the right atmosphere. There’s little in the way of actual music, but rather a reliance on environmental ambiance and suspenseful soundscapes. There’s nothing like the camera slowly moving down a darkened hallway accompanied by echoing industrial noise all around you – the station settling, perhaps a distant metallic scrape, the broken silence at all times pregnant with impending danger. Of course, when that beast – once the size of a grapefruit, now a hulking mass of shambling muscle – finally does lunge at you, the music suitably ramps up to harsh industrial riffs and disharmonious synthesizers suddenly battering your senses.

There isn’t much actual gameplay involved in the experience, however. Without exception, you are reduced to being a passive observer, stopping to pick one of two binary options between scenes. Want to stay in cover while a monstrous freak is prowling nearby or risk discovery by darting out for a nearby weapon? Do you attempt to force open a security door to escape captivity or bow to the will of your captors? It isn’t always easy to intuit what a particular choice will result in, and often there doesn’t seem to be either a “safe” or “risky” option, but rather two choices that could end up with equally dicey outcomes. 

On the plus side, it’s refreshing how even previously lived moments will vary in nuanced ways the more Cole dies and resets, cutting down on what could otherwise be quite a large amount of repetition caused by the time-travel conceit. By the time the credits rolled, I had watched just shy of 200 scenes (of over 300 total – and, yes, there is a tracker for that, too), clocking in at around three hours, with quite a bit of content still remaining locked away for replay.

Still, you will eventually be funneled to one of four unique endings. You’ll have been making choices throughout and raising or lowering the survivors’ trust of you (tracked in the game’s menu), presumably affecting which scenes are triggered along the way. But there don’t seem to be “kill everyone” or “save ’em all” paths; who lives and dies appears to be mostly predetermined until the end. The finales themselves seem more like four slightly distinct outcomes based on your final set of choices.

I did attempt a second playthrough, but this resets your file to the very beginning. There is no way to skip ahead in the timeline to access new routes, so if you want a whole different outcome, you’ll need to play the entire game all over again, and I found skipping cinematics to be more disorienting, presenting me with choices I had to make without any (recent) context. By the end of my first chapter replay, I had managed to spectacularly fail my only objective: to make it through without any of my previous casualties. People still died no matter what I tried, so I decided to cut my losses for now, until enough time has passed that I’m ready for a whole new complete replay.

Final Verdict

Even for a single playthrough, this game hits the sweet spot of creepy atmosphere and schlocky thrills; a worthwhile B-movie creature feature with plenty of blood and K-Y Jelly-coated rubber suits and puppets. The time travel angle means death is not only forgiving but quite expected, so it’s a shame there is no handy decision hub or chapter select feature available for completionists. Even so, with its smart use of budget and talented cast, Dead Reset is a worthwhile, entertaining entry for sci-fi horror fans in the choice-driven FMV subgenre.

Pascal played Dead Reset on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.