FMViolence in an Alien Motif
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/preview/71929/dead-reset-pc-preview
In recent years, Full Motion Video (FMV) games have made a quiet resurgence in the independent game space. They’ve been a proving ground for low budget interactive filmmaking that always felt like a video version of the old choose-your-own-adventure books. The Shapeshifting Detective dipped into the “Whodunit” mystery storytelling that showcased an interesting set of actors working within a limited storytelling framework. In the same genre also lie games with more interactivity, such as the hilarious Not for Broadcast. Thanks to developer Dark Rift Horror, we were given the opportunity to preview their upcoming release Dead Reset, which has promise as a narrative focused horror mystery.
Dead Reset follows Cole Mason, a surgeon who wakes up on the floor of what appears to be a space station, a la the Aliens movie series. He’s abruptly pulled to his feet by an armed guard who then drags him to an operating table where the patient has a growth underneath her abdomen that requires surgery. You’re held at gunpoint as an authority figure and a friend of the patient presses him to cut into her. Through the conversations I was given occasional binary decision points that’d drive the next story beats. For example, when you’re being pressed to operate, you can choose for Cole to try and grab the gun or run rather than proceed with the procedure. Under duress, I had Cole agree, which devolved into a horror show when an alien bursts out and proceeds to mutilate everyone in the room. Upon death, Cole shakes awake again on the floor and dragged up by the same armed guard and comes to the realization that he’s stuck in a time loop. We were given access to the first of eight chapters, and through my time there were several loops. Some act as dead ends, like when I got Cole’s arm blown off from trying to shoot a gun that requires ID verification. Eventually I found a route that moved the story forward, and the demo ended in the containment of the alien and a mystery about what to do next.
I appreciate how into the project all the actors seem to be. The performances are broadly good, with a few missteps during some of the more tense moments. There is an accelerated sense of time between when Cole awakes and integrates with the team that made some of the conversations feel too personal for people he hardly knows, but my sense is that it’s a product of time constraints in making the game more so than the acting chops themselves. It suits the theme well too – horror films quickly winnow people into closeness under pressure. The bits of gore in chapter 1 were a bloody affair, with entrails spewing out of people, gunshot wounds, and mauling by a little alien creature that would be just a little too silly looking if good work wasn’t done to limit seeing the thing close-up. Similarly, gunshots appear on screen like how it’d be displayed in that old Area 51 shooter arcade game – little flashes on screen where the shooting was happening. Under worse direction these shoestring budget choices could have made the experience too hokey, but there’s some cinematic chops on display that keep it engaging.
I broadly enjoyed my time with the Dead Reset preview. It pulled back the curtain just enough to give a taste of the game’s ethos and story conceit. Cole and the crew are a cast that were well acted in the first chapter, and the promise of more mystery around Cole’s time warp troubles and the monster lurking beneath the patient’s skin has me looking forward to when it is widely available. Dead Reset hits the Nintendo Switch eShop September 11th.
