Dead Reset review: blood, guts, and boring characters

It may only be September, but I’m already settling in for the spooky season. While some fools are out there trying to enjoy the last, fleeting moments of summer, I’m watching a poor squad of doomed souls die terrible deaths with plenty of squelchy gore noises. Dead Reset is an FMV game that’s chock full of death: unfortunate industrial accidents, failed surgeries, a hungry specimen, and some truly baffling design choices from the architects of an underwater facility.

I play Cole Mason, a surgeon who awakes with no memory of the expedition or its purpose, in a room with a few hapless souls. I’ve been brought here to extract a mass from a poor patient, but no one decided to tell me that the mass is like a murderous Muppet, pulling itself out of the patient’s cavity and causing chaos in the makeshift operating room. Everyone dies — and then Cole comes back to consciousness. Surprise! It’s a time loop, and all of these characters are going to get shocked, stabbed, squished, and shot.

The story will occasionally pause, giving me two choices. Should I try to run, or buckle down and do the certainly lethal surgery? Dare I save the engineer from a lethal shock and tip off my knowledge of the future, or do I ignore her and let her perish? These choices, made up of over 300 individual scenes, lead to four different endings. The game also tells me that I need to weigh the health and approval of the surviving crew mates, and restarting the time loop too many times could permanently cook Cole’s noodle. 

The first major problem with Dead Reset is that the supporting cast isn’t great. Daniel Thrace portrays Cole, and he does a fantastic job throughout the entire journey, whether he’s snivelling and shaking in a vent or having a tense standoff with a security officer. Cooper (Michaela Longden) and Weir (Andrew Dunn) are almost non-entities. Fearne (Lyndsay Crane) plays the angel on Cole’s shoulder and is one of the more compelling characters.