Wales Interactive have been making and publishing FMV adventures for a while now, putting out solid, entertaining games in a much-maligned genre. Games like The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker, The Complex, and Night Book offer spooky, Lovecraftian tales played out by real actors in real sets, existing somewhere between B-movie and a weird sci-fi show you might stumble upon on BBC America. Time-loop horror adventure Dead Reset, the latest game published by Wales Interactive and the first from developer Dark Rift Horror, certainly exemplifies that B-movie weirdness.

If you remember FMV games the first time around—when the 1990s were cursed by the arrival of the CD-ROM and developers suddenly had 650MB to fill rather than the 1.44MB floppy discs—it was…not good. Bad. Very bad. Horrible. 

But forget those grainy windows with someone who might be Christopher Walken or Christopher Lloyd (it’s too small to tell). The 2020s have far better offerings—HD, crisply filmed, and far more professionally made. While there are still some complete stinkers out there, the genre is at last a worthwhile place to explore.

Dead Reset makes for an interesting showcase of where the genre's at these days. It’s a tremendous amount of fun, features a really strong cast of mostly unknown British actors, and has a really interesting premise. And at the same time, it’s a gloriously schlocky and gory B-movie with a monstrous enemy that’s so silly it’ll make you laugh out loud.

Cole Mason, a 34-year-old former surgeon, wakes up to find himself being hauled up off the floor by a giant of a security guard who loves to pull his gun. The room could be anywhere in science fiction—a secret underground base, a spaceship by a distant colony planet, a dystopian tower block. The point is, we don’t know. Cole has no memories of any of his life prior to waking up, but seems to retain his skills, and is being commanded (at gunpoint) to operate on a woman lying on a hospital gurney.

You’re immediately presented with choices. The video pauses, and you have limited time to pick between two options: Do you agree to help or try to run? Do you try to grab the security guy’s gun or pick up the scalpel? That sort of thing. And for the opening sequence of Dead Reset, pretty much any choice you make is going to end in your death—for good reason.

Cole quickly learns that he’s stuck in a time-loop. As soon as he dies, the whole scene starts over, being hauled up from the ground. Of course, it’s a new performance each time, as Cole becomes increasingly freaked out by the situation, and attempts to convince this antagonistic group of what’s happening. And what’s happening is their deaths, over and over, as a grotesque tendrilled creature erupts from the patient’s belly and murders them all.

So yes, Groundhog Day meets Alien—an excellent premise! And due to plot devices, the starting point of Cole’s loops changes as you progress, allowing for the story to move forward without having to replay everything over and over (until later). The cast of characters will either like or loathe you based on your actions, and people can even live or die based on how you play. But a lot of people are going to die either way. And it’s going to be gruesome.

It appears that the director and the majority of the cast have worked together before on a movie you almost certainly haven’t heard of called How to Kill Monsters. It’s about rookie cops and criminals teaming up to fight monsters from another dimension, and like Dead Reset, it's directed by Stewart Sparke and co-written by Paul Butler. It’s also a gore-ridden splatterfest. This goes some way to explaining why the cast of Dead Reset feel so immediately comfortable with each other.

It also means Dead Reset comes from a very specific culture where film is celebrated because of its wanton level of disgusting special effects and rubber-suited monsters, which is perhaps less familiar in gaming. It’s certainly quite the thing.

In the first part of the game, it’s so wonderfully obviously a glove puppet that I laughed. Imagine if you took Alien’s baby Xenomorph and turned it inside-out—that’s basically what we’ve got here, and we see it scuttling around the room poking in from the side of the camera such that your mind automatically fills in the human arm just out of frame.

Later we’re treated to the full rubbery suit version, and this is even more over-the-top, a combination of awkward lumbering and puppeteered tendril arms, which you’d be very hard-pressed to find scary. It's paired with some incredibly impressive carnage though, with scenes showing spinal columns being torn from living humans, a lot of heads being redecorated with bullet holes, and one spectacular moment of a person being entirely torn in half. I cheered aloud.

You know those warnings you get at the beginning of games that let people know there are aspects that might be upsetting? Dead Reset has a whole bullet-pointed page of them, including one I’ve certainly never seen before: “Parasitic infection and mutation.” One that’s missing is “Blood will appear in bucketloads.”

This makes Dead Reset a tremendously silly game—but in a knowing and very enjoyable way. It’s important to say it definitely takes itself very seriously, but without ever feeling naive or incredulous. 

Choices are perhaps a little too infrequent, to the point where you can forget it’s a game and just get comfortable watching it all play out, scrambling to find your mouse when a timed option does eventually pop up. It’ll make a choice for you if you don’t. And those choices do make a difference! I’ve played through twice (you can skip scenes you’ve seen before on repeated plays), and had very different relationships with some of the cast and definitely a very different ending the second time, even if it does of course follow all the same story beats.

Also—and this is really important—having played through the whole game twice trying to make very different choices the second time, I’ve still only seen 259 of the 339 available scenes. Once you’ve finished it, Dead Reset changes into something else entirely, as you skip past all the scenes you know to try to find the dozens and dozens you’ve missed, and work out how to reach all four endings. (Both the two I’ve found have been spectacularly bad!) 

I do wish that after a couple of loops you could jump to particular scenes, instead of playing the whole story from the start—but at least with the scene-skip it’s possible to get through the whole game in just a matter of minutes.

Dead Reset feels like a very lo-fi and personal production, from the splendid hand-made weapons and machines—you can see how they’ve been built from bits of old PCs and egg cartons—to the hilariously wobbly metal wheels on each door. But it also features fantastic gore effects and genuine moments of pathos in the acting. It’s completely daft, no question, but such a different experience from almost everything else in games.

If this all sounds like fun to you, Dead Reset is available now on the Epic Games Store.