Wales Interactive, a studio you might recognize for games like Maid of Sker, Sker Ritual, and I Saw Black Clouds, is ramping up to the launch of its next FMV title, Dead Reset, which it's just revealed is due to launch on September 11, 2025, on Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC. Ahead of that launch, I got to check out the first chapter of the game to get a taste of what's to come across the rest of the interactive horror film.
Now, I do want to be clear that I've only played through the first chapter as part of a preview build. The full game is eight chapters long, and across it, players will make more than 280 choices, have the potential to see 340 video sequences, in seven different locations, and uncover four different endings. I've seen only a fraction of what's to come in Dead Reset, but if the rest of the game is anything like what the first chapter introduces, then I fear some horror fans (me, I'm some horror fans) are in for a disappointing time.
A fun time, don't get me wrong, and certainly the right kind of horror fan will have no issue with what Dead Reset has to offer, but at least a bit of a disappointing one in my book.
I want to start out by saying I love horror. Whether its video games, films, TV shows, books, comics, whatever, I'm always going to be up for a scary time. I love that horror can run the gamut between being shallow, gore-riddled for the sake of gore, half comedic jump scares and silly plots, to serious, theme and/or character-driven stories that are as deep as they are terrifying. It's the genre that, for my money, has pushed art forward more often than any other genre, where creators are still innovating, and where the biggest swings are taken from a risk perspective.
Dead Reset, at least based on this introduction, is not that kind of innovative, risk-taking horror story. It's a pretty surface-level, hammed-up horror story that mashes time loops with parasitic aliens, as if the concept started with the idea to combine the 1993 film Groundhog Day with 1982's The Thing. It's a creature-feature, which isn't inherently a bad thing; it just seems to lack the kind of depth I've seen in other horror works, which is what makes me excited for every new entry in the genre.
You play as Cole, a surgeon who is stuck in a time loop that resets when he dies, and for the first few times you die, it resets to him on the floor of a facility, before being rudely picked up by a security guard named Slade, and told by a woman named Magason that he must perform surgery on a woman (who we soon learn is named Amanda) and remove a "foreign specimen" from her abdomen. That foreign specimen is the creature, whose name remains unknown for now, and whose design seems to really be leaning into comparisons to The Thing, save for morphing into copycats of the people around it.
That design is part of what makes Dead Reset feel pretty hammed-up, especially when you see it attack the surrounding characters for the first time. The deaths were comical, with any tension built up to that point shattered by a mound of flesh that is the creature sliding around and jumping at everyone in the room, and watching the actors do their best to hold it to their neck or stomach while pretending to fight back, with a blood-spouting gash left behind that, admittedly, does not look very realistic.
From there, Dead Reset struggled to build up any more tension, especially considering that some of your deaths were entirely scripted, without a choice to be made before you died, either from being shot, getting killed by the creature, or a bit of both. There is a layer of mystery to be discovered, specifically around how exactly the time travel works, what the creature is, and why Magason has the same kind of drive to keep it alive that synthetics working for Weyland have for catching and breeding Xenomorphs.
It took me an hour to get through the first chapter, dying seven times before making it to the end of the chapter on my eighth run. While the performances and the various blood spats were fun to watch in that hour, and the rest of the story's mystery is set up nicely, I couldn't help but feel disappointed for reasons that, ultimately, came down to my own expectations and hopes. I wanted something more than a popcorn horror, and Dead Reset is more of a popcorn horror FMV game. At least that's how it introduces itself anyway.
I could, of course, be wrong about the final product and how the story will shape up over the other seven chapters included in the full release. This is, after all, just chapter one, and everything could take a deeper, darker turn as we learn more about the creature and how time travel works, why Cole is having his visions, and why his visions seem connected to the creature.
Previews are always an incomplete picture, so we'll see if there's more depth to be found in the next seven chapters, and if not, if Dead Reset is able to appropriately deliver on being an entertaining and popcorn-level horror story.
PC version tested. Preview code provided by the publisher.
