[Editor's Note: Minor spoilers for Dead Reset ahead.]

Cole Mason has a problem. He’s woken up in a dank cellar of a room, surrounded by people he doesn’t know and under circumstances he doesn't recall. They are all very unpleasant and really need him to perform a high-stakes surgery as soon as possible under threat of a swift execution at the hands of extra-ornery security guard named Slade. I was given a few choices upfront, mostly to attempt to resist being forced to cooperate. Early attempts to run and refuse are met with pretty convincing pushback, so Cole ultimately plays ball and helps them with the surgery.

Of course, that's when things get weird. The patient is revealed to have a pretty dramatic, pulsating tumor in her abdomen, and after Cole’s understandable recoil of disgust, he gets to cutting. Pulling back the skin reveals a sort of living tumor that she certainly wasn’t born with. Before he can attempt to extract it, though, Cole is grabbed by one of its tentacles, and we’re given a choice as to how to deal with it: hack away at the rubbery limb or attempt to calm down and let it ease up on its own. It doesn’t really matter which choice you make, as both moves have a similar outcome of the tumor bursting from the patient’s body, revealing its mangled alien form of meat and mouth, and killing everyone in the room in gruesome fashion.

Then things get really weird, as Cole wakes up on the floor he started on, startled by the fact that not only is he not dead, but he’s the only person who remembers the past several minutes of their lives together. What ensues is a tense, quirky, and clever horror sci-fi experience that does a great job at building suspense with limited set and effects budgets, and a cast of actors taking the Russian Doll meets Alien premise seriously, despite being a hard sell on paper.

You could argue that horror games that are more like interactive films peaked in quality with 2015’s Until Dawn, but there’s been a steady drip of them hitting market places thanks almost entirely to developer Supermassive Games and the work they’ve done since Until Dawn with The Dark Pictures anthology and other little releases here and there. And while those virtual slash fests are fun and give artists some flexibility on how they can render a gnarly monster or a brutal death of some unfortunate camper by its hands, Dead Reset’s commitment to real actors with real props on real sets is such a refreshing sight that feels novel both in video games and in film in general in 2025. Does every prop live up to Tom Sevini’s best? Probably not. But the SyFy tv show chic and the audacity to do it at all is what scored the most points for me so far.

The choice-making parts of these sorts of games can be dubious, though. It’s often tough to know in the moment if a choice you’re making would change the outcome of a scenario, or if it's all an elaborate set of smoke and mirrors to build tension in the present at the expense of replayability in the future. Developer Dark Rift Horror signals that there are multiple endings, each wildly different from one another, and the one-hour demo of the first chapter is absolutely not enough to determine if that's true or not.

The death-loop gimmick does a lot of work to help every present moment feel important, though. Every respawn, Cole (and I) got a little smarter based on our last set of attempts and failures that would sometimes reveal just a smidge more new information to be exploited next time. Cole can’t delay the surgery because the creature will let itself out rather explosively. Attempting to steal Slade’s gun and force your way out of the room reveals that it's got a security measure that Cole will certainly regret triggering if he tries to use it. Magson, the older leader of this gang of misfits, made this and other modifications to the room that essentially locked everyone in it without their knowledge. The patient’s name is Amanda, and Fearne, another crew member in the room, has some sort of relationship with her. These tidbits add up to become a laundry list of facts that helps Cole convince the crew that he’s in a sort of Groundhog Day scenario that maybe they can help him navigate in a way that doesn’t involve all of them getting murdered.

All of these seemed pretty guided in that I could make different choices, but there isn’t much room to interpret that any of the smaller details would happen differently, or even in a different order. But all of this gets us to the surgery itself, which was the first glimpse of how the paths could branch into different outcomes further down the line. This is a bit of a spoiler, but going into a bit of detail about how this sequence plays out might help illustrate the ways in which your choices do and don’t matter.

You can guide Cole through the extraction of the creature in a couple of ways, specifically choosing how to keep it sedated long enough to detach it from Amanda without killing them both. You can use drugs to keep the patient and the creature’s vitals low but steady, or you can stop Amanda’s heart, which would also stop the creature’s temporarily. Ultimately, I wasn’t able to find (and don’t believe there is) a way to save Amanda during this operation, but how you choose to attempt it will either ingratiate you with Fearne or draw some light praise from Slade. It seemed pretty clear here that this was the beginning of a sort of trust system that could hold some consequences down the line.

Things in Dead Reset get somehow even weirder after this, but I think it’s best to avoid those spoilers, as they’re pretty key to what’s going on and why, but the suspense is thick and intrigue is high during its entire runtime. Real bodies on real sets with real stunts and props is a philosophy sorely missed in film these days, so it's ironic that a video game is attempting to bring that feeling back. The game-ness of it all, specifically necessity and weight of your limited inputs, is still pretty dubious, with little sense of how your actions affect the story in front of you. But if you’re willing to approach this like you would a movie, being present and acting in the now without thinking too much about finding branching paths for your next playthrough, I think you can have a lot of gore-drenched fun when Dead Reset hits Steam in September.