Dead Reset Review (PS5) – Dead On Arrival

Wales Interactive have been developing FMV videogames for a while now, providing interactive experiences containing stories with A or B decisions and branching paths that open up new scenes and encourage multiple playthroughs with varying success. Their latest output Dead Reset crawls with visceral vibes and a homage to the Alien franchise, but will you consider this quasi imitation gutsy or just gross and grotesque?

There are two distinguishable ways to look at Dead Reset as a Wales Interactive product. Either you’ll be stimulated with glee that you can watch an FMV game and select choices with multiple branching paths, or you’ll look at this Alien pretender as a silly B-Movie cringefest that’ll be poorly directed and acted. Admittedly it’s easy to feel and believe both of these thoughts, and truthfully you can sum up this entire horror jaunt as either one or the other, or maybe both-but to truly know we need to use our scalpels and make an incision around its abdominal epidermis-and then submerge our hands into its gooey and icky guts hmm…..delish!

Dead Reset‘s central character is a captive named Cole, who is a detainee deep beneath sea level in a strange and claustrophobic facility, where he is forced to perform open surgery on a woman whose innards hide a malicious secret-she has an alien creature trapped deep inside of her. Another layer to this twisted tale is that Cole is subjected to a death loop, so each time he perishes, he comes back to life-which generates openings for players to try out different story decisions that’ll change the course of the game.

The premise and the uncomfortably graphic scenes in Dead Reset lend a gratifying level of intrigue and novelty that does a serviceable job conveying the dripping sense of dread in all its twisted and disgusting glory. Beyond the surface-layer satisfactions though, Dead Reset fumbles during the long haul.

If you’ve played a Wales Interactive FMV game before, you’ll notice how dire the voice acting is, how choppy the direction and transitions are, and how boring they can be at their worst. Dead Reset regrettably stands on brittle twigs by virtue of the horrific tones of the story, but once you settle in and know where events are leading to, those twigs begin to bend until they snap. You can tell the twigs have snapped when you find yourself completely bored by the claustrophobic setting and wishing it’d just wrap up-and that’s a huge problem for a game that’s only two-two and a half hours in length.

Maybe Dead Reset could be salvaged if it was so bad it’s good, but to qualify within this margin, the characters would need to be so stupid that their brains escaped them like the alien creature from its host, meaning they’d become idiotic and proceed to perform actions that go against the genre of the game for comedic effect. Alas, Dead Reset doesn’t achieve this because every character from and including your interminably present teammates are as stale as they come, maybe not as much as The Complex, but enough to blend into the equally stale environment.

When it comes to selecting the path you want to head down, the game itself slows down so you can pick a decision, then perhaps there will be a momentary freeze while the game sorts the next scene out, and then you can watch your decision play out.

The choppiness is distracting and gives you the feeling that the connected scenes are like stubborn jigsaw puzzle pieces refusing to fit in exactly where they’re meant to, but this is lamentably the cost of developing an FMV game with a plethora of branching scenes that lead to other branching scenes depending on the individual choices you decide upon. It’s like overstuffing a robot with too many command options-a few are fine, but give it too many then its processing will go awry.

Passiveness is another enemy of the FMV game and Dead Reset definitely and unintentionally promotes this lackadaisical behaviour. While the scenarios are engaging enough, the characters are so lacking in personality and verve that you may ultimately decide their fates through random selection of either option A or option B.

We know Dead Reset is a B-Movie type horror game, but that B may as well stand for Boring-because it genuinely is boring most of time-and it’s only 2 hours long! The B could stand for Banal too, but there are times when Dead Reset does bring its own punch to the party-even if that punch has been spiked by claret and entrails.

Sometimes Cole will be required to make urgent choices due to an imminent threat. In these situations your selected decision can either get Cole out of a perilous predicament, or he’ll become victimized by it. Victimization isn’t the end however, as Cole will only temporarily drop dead, but then he’ll return right back into another perilous predicament and given other choices to proceed you can take advantage of.

It is at least a little interesting to see what will kill Cole and what will save him, but thankfully whatever you decide will move the game forward without forcing you to retry. Therefore, you can readily enjoy Dead Reset and indulge in any option you give Cole, and rejoice in seeing him destroyed just to return and continue onwards.

Keep in mind though, that your treatment of other characters will either help or hinder you. In our playthrough, we decided not to help a teammate and even though he survived, he remembered your unwillingness to save him, and he made us pay for it later.

The FMV format certainly works its magic, and there’s always intrigue in seeing how scenes and the general story plays out with every single branch Dead Reset leads you down. This FMV formula is worn and could do with an evolution, but it does work-even if the game surrounding it is very flawed.

If you don’t mind sitting through an interactive FMV videogame, Dead Reset might be grotesque and weird enough to keep your attention for 10 minutes, and along with Cole’s ability to return from death and carry on to give you more decisions that’ll either help or hinder him, Dead Reset does have ways to hook you in.

The major flaws within Dead Reset are that the characters are so dull, the dialogue is so awful, and the environments are so plain to such an extent the whole experience becomes really old before its two-hour runtime concludes.

Dead Reset has horror, it can gross you out, and the choices and their deviating paths encourage experimentation-but its low-budget thrills quickly decay into rot as it fails to hold your attention or invigorate you in surprising new ways.