TimeQuest: Reset

I’d been wanting to return to TimeQuest since my first visit four years earlier, though they’re not the easiest to get to without a car. In the meantime they’ve expanded from three games to five, and we played their newest two: their Christmas game and this one, Reset. The company has an over-arching time travel narrative, and in this game the mission is to restart and repair their central computer system.

TimeQuest have a unique location in a set of old oast houses, and this gives Reset a very distinctive look. Where the same building shape gave the feel of a castle chamber in their Camelot game, here it works equally well at creating a low-fi industrial/futuristic atmosphere. Your puzzles involve plenty of consoles and cables, and overall it felt to me something like a set from 80s-era Doctor Who.

I thought the sequencing in Reset was particularly good, starting off in a smaller area and gradually expanding, becoming increasingly non-linear but always with very clear signposting as to what we could or could not make progress on. In common with their other games, there’s also a clear indication of your progress, which in this instance gives the satisfying sense that you’re gradually bringing a large and complex machine to life.

One puzzle towards the end outlived its welcome by requiring what seemed rather more process work than needed, but that was an exception. Reset involved rather less searching than the other games I’ve played here, which suited me fine (though we still managed to be blind to something right in front of our noses), and I found it thoroughly enjoyable for the distinctive location, for interesting puzzles, and a game structure that even with only a light narrative was able to create a sense of satisfying momentum towards the finish.