Dead Reset

As is the way, hockey expanded my horizons and put Wales Interactive on my radar. While I’d played some of the publisher’s previous titles in passing — Late Shift immediately comes to mind — it was Letterkenny star Michelle Mylett’s turn in The Complex that had me really paying attention to the full-motion video (FMV) titles coming from it and its film-making partners.

One of the best FMV games out there, Dead Reset blends body horror, timeloops and foreign entities to create a sci-fi narrative that's as entertaining as it is ridiculous. More player choice and input would be nice, but thanks to great acting and high-quality production values, you likely won't mind too much.

Dead Reset is a delightful sci-fi romp full of practical effects and gruesome sights, and works wonderfully as an FMV game.

It's a Switch release, although those playing on Switch 2 will need to, uh… consider not for now. The game frequently freezes, sometimes indefinitely, and although Wales Interactive is fully aware of this, the team is currently unable to apply a fix thanks to the lack of dev kits. Performance on Switch 1, mind you, is mostly fine. I experienced one of the aforementioned freezes, but it wasn’t a particularly lengthy one.

I’ve always found a strange fascination with full-motion video (FMV) games that I’ve never been able to put my finger on. Maybe it’s how FMV fundamentally changes how we interact with stories and narratives. Or the uniqueness of living actors being superimposed on pre-rendered backgrounds. While FMV games were more common during the 90s, recent titles like Immortality and The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story have shown that the format does have a place in modern gaming. But in all hone...

Dead Reset is the latest and 17th FMV game from Wales Interactive, a studio that has done just FMV titles, but it’s a well the studio draws from, more than it does from making more roguelike deckbuilders, survival FPS games, 2.5D auto-attack survival games, and VR titles, to name just a few of the ways the studio bounces around.

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.