Dead Reset Review – Gripping, Thrilling, and Simple

Dead Reset is the latest and 17th FMV game from Wales Interactive, a studio that has done just FMV titles, but it’s a well the studio draws from, more than it does from making more roguelike deckbuilders, survival FPS games, 2.5D auto-attack survival games, and VR titles, to name just a few of the ways the studio bounces around.

Not only is Dead Reset not the studio’s first time making an FMV game, but it’s also not the first time it’s done a horror-flavored FMV game. This is all to say that I have to believe Wales Interactive knows a thing or two about developing and executing on full-motion-video, or FMV, narratives. Or, that they’ve proven 16 times over now, they can make one successful enough to make another.

I haven’t played their other FMV games, but I can believe that what was learned from them is what informs the best parts of Dead Reset. It’s a tightly paced story with strong performances that keep you locked into playing to find out what happens next. Scenes are tense, emotionally charged, and there’s enough atmosphere created through strong lighting and sound choices to carry the parts that aren’t as strong, like the over-the-top gore and messy creature design that hams everything up, or how, even if the actors are doing their best with the writing, the words they're told to say make them sound like a bad caricature.

When I checked out the first chapter of Dead Reset in my preview, I came away disappointed, though that was mostly due to my own expectations not being met. I was hoping it would be more of a layered horror story, but it seemed more interested in trying to do a fun creature-feature to play through with a bowl of popcorn at your side. I’m all for that experience too, and when I had still only played the first chapter, I was hopeful Dead Reset would get better as it went along.

Unfortunately, now that I’ve seen every chapter multiple times, I feel let down again, knowing that Dead Reset doesn’t have the juice to be entertaining the whole way through.

What I mean by ‘the whole way through’ is getting to each of the four endings, because otherwise you can mop it up in less than three hours, and feel totally fine with whatever version of the story you got (unless you got the worst one). Play through it just the once, and you’ll probably walk away perfectly whelmed and reasonably entertained. It’s when you ‘reset’ your experience that suddenly, the plot beats I liked the first time around didn’t hit as hard, even with a new context between each character as I tried to make different choices each time. It quickly started to feel more like checking scenes off for the sole purpose of saying you’ve seen them and whatever alternatives they offer. 

Some basics about Dead Reset. You play as Cole Mason, a former surgeon who can remember how to perform surgery, but not anything about what happened to him before a security guard named Slade picks him up and tosses him in front of a patient who has a ‘foreign mass’ in her lower abdomen. There are six core characters: Cole, Fearne, Weir, Cooper, Slade, and Magson. 

The mass is a creature that eats anything with a pulse and looks like someone made a mop out of intestines. It changes forms, but it unfortunately never really looks scary or even interesting, to be frank. In every form, it looks like a blob of flesh put together from the scrap pile of a prop studio’s prosthetics section. It’s even telling that you so rarely get a solid, long look at the creature, with most of the shots featuring it only showing a half-view, or a dimmed view while the lights only partially illuminate it. Almost like the production team knew it wasn’t worth highlighting.

While the creature isn’t interesting, what’s at least a little more fun to think about is the ability, or curse, depending on how you see it, that Cole bears. He's stuck in a time loop, with his starting point being determined by a power surge connected to a time machine chair that the Magson character has built, and his reset point being any time he dies. With each new power surge, his starting point moves forward in time, which is how you progress through the story.

There’s a menu that tracks how many of its 339 scenes you’ve witnessed, how many times you’ve died across all your playthroughs, how many of the endings you’ve found, and how many decisions you’ve made. There’s another that claims to track your relationships with the other characters, though it never seemed to give me any more information beyond who was still alive among the five characters you meet alongside Cole.

There’s also a page that tracks different ‘tasks’ or objectives you can try to complete based on what paths you’ve taken. It’s all very bare bones and is only a little helpful for anyone wanting to do some achievement hunting.

Speaking of the choices you make, you can either have them countdown, or you can set it to 'Streamer Mode,' which pauses the action and lets you take however long you like to decide. Some of the choices, you realize, are meaningless. Plenty of them just pad out the experience so that Cole has the necessary information to move forward. Once you've played through to the end once, it's easy to spot which do and don't matter, another element that adds to the tedium of playing it a second, third, and fourth time to see all the endings.

Though I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that there is a meta-layer of fun to be had for veteran horror fans. If you're someone who loves the horror genre and has seen all of its sides, from the most intense to the most laid-back, comedy-focused stories and everything in between, then you can have a good time doing what I did on my first playthrough. Basically, with every choice I ran through all the horror and narrative tropes the genre carries in my head, and decided based on what I've always believed characters in other horrors should have done, instead of making bad, emotional decisions. It was as if I had a 'How It Should Have Ended' storyboard running through my head in real-time for Dead Reset. It was fun, and more than a little funny, how often it worked. Randy Meeks would've probably mopped up the whole game without dying unnecessarily once.

Ultimately, I'm walking away from my time with Dead Reset more disappointed than when I previewed it. At least then I had hope, because I hadn't played the full game. The naked truth of it is that despite good performances from the whole cast, some wonderful lighting and sound design work, well-paced scenes that kept the story moving with strong emotional beats at the wheel, it doesn't hold up on multiple replays.

It's not helped by the fact that when it's not dimly lit with the darkness of a secret research station (and even sometimes when it is), the set looks like it came out of a forgettable Doctor Who episode, while the creature looks like a mish-mash of rejected creature designs that came together the way it did because they ran out of time to do any better. The rest of its gore and prosthetic work subtract from the experience rather than add to it, cutting the intensity too much compared to how straight and serious the rest of the story is played. If there were more jokes made, then maybe it would've made sense. Instead, it just makes you laugh when you're supposed to be scared.

PS5 version tested. Review code provided by the publisher.

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6.0

WCCFTECH RATING

Dead Reset

Dead Reset is worth experiencing for its performances, its tense atmosphere built on strong lighting and sound design choices, and a well-paced story that makes you want to keep finding out what will happen next, but its entertainment value wanes after you've hit the credits. It's less enticing on replays or 'resets,' and its worst attributes don't help carry the experience beyond a single play through.

Pros

• Strong performances from the cast
• Tense atmosphere built by good lighting and sound design choices
• Gripping scenes that make you want to keep playing and find out what happens next

Cons

• Hammed-up gore that cuts the intensity too much
• Poor creature design that really brings down the whole experience as a creature-feature horror story
• Writing that constantly failed the strong work the actors were putting in by making everyone sound like a caricature
• Bare-bones menu that doesn't provide meaningful insights into your playthroughs
• Its strongest story beats wane after the first playthrough, even if they play out differently under new circumstances

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