Dead Reset Review

It’s been a while since we last played a Wales Interactive live action game; The Isle Tide Hotel was the last one by our count way back in 2023. In the three years prior we got quite a good selection of titles from them, and so the news that WI were back with another choose your own adventure was greeted with much anticipation at Tavern Towers. Dead Reset is the game in question, and while it might not be our favourite of the bunch, it’s an enjoyably campy sci-fi thriller that certainly is the goriest yet.

We start the game waking up suddenly as Cole, lying on the floor, just before he’s yanked to his feet and thrust into performing emergency surgery on a not very well-looking patient at the behest of some rather rude and insistent people. All we know is that this patient is going to die, and Cole’s skills as a surgeon are all that can hopefully save her. We are very quickly introduced to the rest of the crew – security man Slade, mechanic Cooper, psychiatrist Weir, and scientist Fearne and leader Magson – before we’re cutting into the patient and finding, well, something very unexpected. Shit proceeds to hit the fan and the entire crew are killed before our eyes, before Cole joins the ranks of the deceased. Game over…

…or not.

Almost instantly we’re thrust back to the start, Cole yet again yanked off the floor, and the whole sequence replays before our eyes. Dead Reset’s central hook is the old faithful time loop whereby each time Cole dies, he is transported back to a specific moment in time to try again. He’s the only one who’s aware of this happening, and so each retry we are offered new dialogue choices and scenes to reflect this. I used to not particularly enjoy time loop mechanics in games, but after games such as 12 Minutes or Deathloop I’ve become far more enamoured with the idea. Dead Reset is another notch on the plus side here, with Wales Interactive and fellow developer/film studio Dark Rift Horror making clever use of the loops. Cole gradually unravels more of his identity and deals with aggressive comments from Slade – or clear attempts at manipulation from others – in better ways. He learns the dangers and can help or hinder the other crew members, and each failure is not only a learning experience, but also an excuse to ratchet up the gore as Cole dies yet again.

As mentioned, this is easily the most visually brutal of the live action games I’ve played. Heads are crushed, people ripped in two, limbs ripped off leaving bloody stumps – it’s not for the faint-hearted. It is, however, done with half a tongue-in-cheek, the over the top deaths both gruesome and comical in equal parts. I’m not sure if it’s intentional, but the practical effects used here remind me of things like Red Dwarf, and while the presentation is far more modern, there’s an element of b-movie to the whole game that I found endearing throughout. 

If you’ve played one of these types of games before, you’ll know what to expect. We watch live actors much as if we were watching a TV show, and occasionally get prompts pop up that let us steer the story (do we side with person A or B, do we run or hide etc). Naturally, choices have consequences, and so as we follow the story we get to see who lives, dies, or whatever else may have happened due to our choices. The gold standard for me is still 2023’s The Complex, but Dead Reset offers up some genuinely tough choices to make, and even tougher punishments one way or another. I was engaged from start to finish as the mystery unravelled, and although my choices meant I couldn’t quite get the happily ever after I was looking for, it all wrapped up in a satisfying way, with the promise of four different endings to go back and uncover. 

Performances range from affecting to downright stilted (in the best b-movie way), and it’s never anything less than entertaining to watch and participate in. Lead man Cole fits the bill well whether we’re being nice or an asshole, Slade’s continuous aggression is always fraught with a well executed unstableness, and Magson’s cold, calculating focus on her project behind all of this goings on in Dead Reset is unnerving indeed. The scene transitions are also very well handled here, with very little in the way on continuity errors of characters having a complete change of attitude from one scene to the next. Presentation wise, Dead Reset might just be the one of the highlights in WI’s catalogue.

At movie length in terms of commitment, Dead Reset is an easy one-nighter, and the want to go back through for different endings is far more appealing due to its shorter nature. One thing I would have liked to have seen is the inclusion of a timeline of sorts, where we can see a map of where stories diverge, and maybe even pick up from later in the story rather than have to play the whole thing again, much like The Casting of Frank Stone achieved with its Cutting Room floor feature. While we can skip scenes we’ve already seen, I still have nearly 200 out of almost 350 to unlock after finishing the game so having an idea of where I still need to look would have been a nice touch.

Conclusion

Dead Reset is an enjoyable sci-fi horror story, with fun characters, great b-movie effects and gruesome deaths, and is ripe for several playthroughs to see how different we can make the outcomes of the crew. The time loop addition means we even get a small sliver of experimentation in our choices, as a bad one means we can try again almost without penalty – a rarity in these types of games.