As an avid fan of horror in all its forms, I’ve become accustomed to all the wonderful special effects modern movies use to make viewers scream. There was a time though when practical effects were all filmmakers had to work with, and by using them made some truly creative and wonderful movies. Now in video games this isn’t really a conversation we usually need to have, but today thanks to Dead Reset we do. This FMV horror game is full of slimy monsters and fake blood, and horror fans will bloody love it.
Protagonist Cole Mason is having a pretty terrible day, as he wakes up in a mysterious facility with no memory. He’s told he’s a surgeon, and is asked/forced to perform surgery on a woman with some sort of massive lump in her stomach. With no choice but to comply Cole cuts open this poor person and discovers a whole mess of tentacles inside her (no not like that). He’s told he needs to cut them to remove the parasite and save the patient, and then he’s murdered by a wobbly little monster alongside everyone else in the room. It’s a good job Dead Reset is a time-loop game, or this would be a short review.
Mere seconds after his grizzly demise Cole wakes up on the floor of the facility again and realises something is not right. As is the case in every piece of media about looping time, nobody believes what Cole is saying, and you have to make loads of different decisions that lead to death over and over again. It’s a really clever way for the developers to be able to reuse scenes while adding new elements as you progress, and especially in this FMV format dying is a lot of fun.
There’s a lot to learn about the world of Dead Reset from these early attempts at surviving in Cole’s horrific situation. By choosing different conversation options you’ll have different characters open up, like the woman in charge who clearly cares more about her experiments than the lives of anyone else or the slightly useless psychiatrist who keeps insisting you’re disassociating. The variety in the cast is great, both in terms of their characters and the quality of the acting which is much higher than most FMV games.
Unlike most games involving time loops, in Dead Reset you don’t actually start over from the beginning when you die. Instead you’ll end up with anchor points that basically serve as checkpoints, which ensures you aren’t just clicking through the same dialogue options and listening to the same lines over and over. This also means the story gets to develop more over time, and you can choose who you want to trust.
In terms of your control over Dead Reset, your role is exclusively that of choosing between options at various points in the story. When these lead you down a deadly path you’ll usually at least learn something new, but some choices simply serve to improve your relationships with the various characters. You can check how much everyone likes you at the push of a button, and depending on who you get along with you’ll end up at one of the four different endings of the game.
It’s well worth playing through Dead Reset multiple times, because there are plenty of scenes to see and the endings are pretty wildly different. The game only takes a couple of hours to playthrough even on your first run too, so it’s not a huge time commitment to see everything it has to offer.
The very best aspect of Dead Reset is absolutely the sci-fi horror setting, which features all those dingy metal corridors and sinister future tech you know and love. The design of the monster is fantastic too, with multiple different puppets and costumes that were clearly lovingly crafted by a fan of the genre. If your idea of a perfect Friday night includes buckets of fake blood and crawling blobs of biomatter then Dead Reset is the game for you.
As much as I loved my time with Dead Reset, it does have a few small issues that hold it back from the top shelf of FMV goodness. It doesn’t really feel like you get to make decisions that often, and the descriptions of the choices occasionally don’t provide nearly enough context. One scene in particular had me betray my closest ally and best friend entirely by accident, which isn’t exactly ideal. I must admit I also missed some of the silly over the top acting of other FMV games too, and I understand why Dead Reset doesn’t feature this but it’s still a shame.
Dead Reset is a delightfully gruesome sci-fi experience, with an engaging narrative and impressive acting. With multiple endings it’s well worth playing through multiple times too, as there are plenty of twists and turns you’ll miss in a single playthrough. It may be a little lacking in some of its choices and in overall campiness, but Dead Reset will be seriously appreciated by horror sickos like me.
