Seasonal Reset: Halloween Edition レビュー (PC)

‘Tis the season to be spooky. Or, in the case of a game like Seasonal Reset, ‘tis the season to be bland and, well, a little miserable.

I’d be lying if I said told you that I didn’t lunge at the opportunity to sift through vast layers of pumpkin-laced decorations and blood orange plushies. Fall was calling, and I knew that I would have a brilliant time either groveling with the dark arts or waxing lyrical with an encyclopedia of pagan literature. Oh, I knew Halloween, and I knew that I would happily fork out for a chance to separate the orange from the violet, the vampires from the skeletons. But then, Seasonal Reset shed its true colors. Shock horror, it wasn’t all that great.

Suffice it to say, AI has an awful habit of twisting your expectations. Sure enough, the surface may look great, but the interior is often a clinical white space that has one-dimensional features that, frankly, you just have no interest in spending time with. And that’s one of the main problems with a game like Seasonal Reset: it presents itself as an all-round love letter to Fall, but it also fails to capture the essence of Halloween. It isn’t what you would call spooky, and sadly, it just isn’t all that enjoyable to play, either.

I fell into Seasonal Reset: Halloween Edition with infectiously high expectations — and that was the first problem. Looking at it from the outside, I expected it to have that magical effect—a palpable sense of energy that you would expect to find in a Librarian flick. In all seriousness, it should have been enchanting, and it should have been both whimsical and mysterious. But, Seasonal Reset wasn’t any of those things, nor was it a place where I would naturally pivot to after a long day at the office. I wanted it to feed me fragments of Fall, but instead it handed me little more than a generic storeroom and a whole lot of white.

The last thing I wanted was to feel underwhelmed by Seasonal Reset. I figured, if it could at least capture the beauty of Fall, or even the magical infusions of a seasonal pastime, then it could all amount to an oddly satisfying experience. And yet, it all just fell apart at the touch of a button. It should have been a treat, but all that it was able to cough was the trick and the trick alone, with, perhaps, the smallest grain of joy. Rather than piling on the seasonal dust, it simply opted to embrace a liminal setting, a colorless tone, and a dull gameplay loop that couldn’t illuminate the flair of a Fall-inspired world. That should have been the easy part. A splash of color would have gone a long, long way, but, much like the products, it just lacked a soul and any form of vibrancy.

I’d hate to spend all that long on nitpicking, but the truth is, Seasonal Reset is mediocre at best. While it does take full advantage of the usual Librarian tropes—the passive upgrades, the multiplayer mode, and the physics-based handling mechanics, for example—it sadly stumbles far too easily. From the painfully dull setting to the generic font, the screen-hogging text boxes to the reused assets, Seasonal Reset just doesn’t deliver an original idea. Don’t get me wrong, it works as a self-contained organizing sim, as does it flow as well as you would expect it to. But, again, there just isn’t much here to spark a conversation.

While there’s no shortage of products to catalog and distribute in Seasonal Reset, there is a lack of heart — to the point where the dead skin cells far outweigh the palpitations. With thousands of objects to sort out and organize, it clearly offers a sizable chunk of content to work through. The problem is, the game doesn’t do enough to keep you motivated. Granted, the addition of a co-op mode does add flavor to the experience, but sadly, it doesn’t add enough to resurrect an otherwise motionless carcass. Even with a theme that’s as easy to implement as Halloween, it never truly does a lot to grab and, more importantly, hold your attention.

Technically, there’s nothing inherently bad about Seasonal Reset. True to the spirit of an organizing sim, it hands you a treasure trove of objects, a simple objective, and a chance to whittle down the stock in a calm, quiet and somewhat familiar environment. But, it just isn’t all that memorable. Clearly, it has enough bells and whistles to keep you fumbling around for hours. But what it doesn’t have is a hook—a special ingredient that makes you want to stick around for the long haul. Unlike Librarian or DinoBones, which both hand out a little treat for completing sections of the workspace, Seasonal Reset chooses to keep things to the straight and narrow, with little to no post-chaos  rewards or memorable collectibles.

Seasonal Reset: Halloween Edition isn’t the worst organizing sim I’ve played, but it is one that fails to deliver an experience that hits all of the same notes as Librarian. Maybe it’s just a little too bland. Either that, or it relies a little too heavily on AI to fool its users into believing that there’s more on the other side than meager tricks and white-washed corridors.

Verdict

Seasonal Reset: Halloween Edition isn’t necessarily a bad game, but it is a rather underwhelming one that, even with some spooktacular elements of its own, just doesn’t do a lot to spark your enthusiasm or curiosity. It doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel, but to tell you the truth, I do wish that it at least tried to make an effort to do things a little differently. The fact of the matter, though, is that it’s a rather mediocre puzzler that doesn’t quite capture the spirit of Halloween.

To give it the benefit of the doubt, Seasonal Reset is a budget indie game, and so, if you are able to accept it at face value, then you might enjoy it for the simple pleasures that it brings to the table. With all of that said, I wouldn’t expect a brilliant organizing sim here.