Death Relives (2025): The Review

Overview

Death Relives feels less like a game and more like a reminder of how fragile your free time really is. What little ambition it has gets smothered by sloppy execution, robotic AI, and mechanics that never feel fully realized. Even the moments that should shine, like the puzzles, collapse under awkward design choices. At the end of the day, there’s no reason to spend your time, money, or sanity on it.

Score: 3 out of 10

The Positives ✅

Death Relives is frustrating because it isn’t devoid of ideas. On paper, its core concept actually has teeth. Aztec mythology as the foundation for a horror experience is something you almost never see in the genre. The gods, rituals, and brutal spiritual imagery are fertile ground for fear, tension, and atmosphere. There’s a sense that the developers understood this at least enough to use it as a hook, and that initial spark was enough to grab attention. The concept of mixing stealth-based survival horror with escape-room style logic puzzles also isn’t inherently bad. In fact, those moments where you’re solving puzzles are some of the only times where the game feels like it has any rhythm or structure. They’re interactive, decently paced, and often gave me a temporary reprieve from the endless monotony of crouching and hiding.

Even the companion app, in theory, is an intriguing experiment. The idea of syncing a mobile app to your playthrough to simulate your character’s phone could have been a neat way to ground the experience in a personal, intimate way, much like titles such as Simulacra. And the inclusion of a jumpscare toggle shows at least a basic awareness of accessibility and player choice, something horror games rarely accommodate. These fragments: mythology, puzzles, app integration, accessibility, prove the game wasn’t totally devoid of ambition. The tragedy is that all these elements feel like loose sparks floating around a bonfire that never actually catches flame.

The Negatives ⚠️

For every spark, Death Relives smothers it under clumsy execution. The gameplay loop is mind-numbing: solve a puzzle, make a noise, hide from Xipe Totec, and then wait. And wait. And wait some more. The stealth isn’t immersive: it’s hide-and-seek without suspense. The survival mechanics are shallow, barely more than window dressing, and the so-called horror leans entirely on gore and blood-soaked imagery. Instead of dread, you get numbness. Instead of tension, you get repetition. And when combat does appear, it’s laughably inert, like swatting flies with a spoon. Nothing escalates, nothing develops, it’s just a waiting simulator with extra steps.

The storytelling is just as hollow. A setup rooted in mythological grandeur quickly collapses into stitched-together nonsense, riddled with missing connective tissue and exposition dumps that feel arbitrary. Adrian, the protagonist, is a non-entity, bland to the point of invisibility. He doesn’t react, doesn’t evolve, doesn’t invite empathy. Worse, his voice acting (if you can call it that) feels strangely flat, robotic, almost AI-like. With no credited actor and such a lifeless delivery, it’s hard not to suspect synthetic voices were used, which would explain the lack of humanity. This isn’t helped by the AI-generated artwork plastered across the companion app, which screams cheap and lazy rather than atmospheric. The supporting cast fares no better, offering only shallow interactions through texts and calls that fail to add weight to the story.

Then there’s the pacing, or rather, the absence of it. Death Relives drags you through endless corridors of waiting and crouching without ever giving you a reason to care. There’s no sense of escalation, no rhythm that pushes you deeper into the nightmare. Horror thrives on atmosphere, stakes, and release; here, you just get monotony dressed in blood. By the time the “twist” ending limps across the finish line, there’s no shock left to deliver. It doesn’t reframe the journey or elevate the narrative, it just adds one more sigh to an already exhausting experience.

The Experience 🎮

Playing Death Relives was less like diving into a horror game and more like enduring a slow erosion of patience. From the very beginning, I had a gut feeling something was off, and that intuition never went away. Every hour was spent hoping for a payoff that never arrived. The game doesn’t build fear, it builds fatigue. The repetition of hiding, waiting, and crouching through dim corridors drained any excitement I had, replacing it with boredom. The so-called moments of tension weren’t terrifying; they were chores. I never clutched my controller, never froze in fear, just sighed as I settled in for another round of hiding behind the same mechanics.

Narratively, the experience was just as hollow. What should have been a deep dive into Aztec mythology turned into a shallow, cobbled-together story that squandered its premise. The world never felt alive or dangerous, just stitched together from clichés and unfinished ideas. By the time Adrian reached the supposed climax, I wasn’t even frustrated anymore. I was numb. The ending twist landed with the impact of a shrug, because the game had already drained me of any investment. Instead of fear or fascination, I walked away with the heavy realization that the only reason I finished it was so I could tell others not to bother.

In the end, Death Relives is less an experience and more an ordeal. It doesn’t just fail at horror, it actively wastes your time, leaning on gore and gimmicks instead of atmosphere or soul. My time with it felt less like playing a game and more like being slowly ground down by repetition, bad design, and artificial presentation. Horror is supposed to linger in your mind after the credits roll; this one just left me staring at the wall, wondering why I ever bothered.