Death Relives is a first-person survival horror game with stealth and puzzle-solving mechanics, set within the framework of Aztec mythology. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Death Relives Review Overview
What is Death Relives?
Death Relives is a stealth-driven survival horror experience that blends escape room-style puzzles with narrative elements drawn from Aztec mythology. Players control Adrian, a man trapped in a ritualistic nightmare where hiding, solving puzzles, and uncovering ancient truths are key to survival.
Death Relives features:
⚫︎ Puzzle Elements
⚫︎ Stealth Based Gameplay
⚫︎ Mobile App Companion
⚫︎ Jumpscare Toggle
⚫︎ Aztec Mythology
| Digital Storefronts | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Steam |
 PlayStation |
 Xbox |
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| Price | $24.99 | ||||
Death Relives Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Puzzle Designs Are Decent Concept Had Potential |
Stealth Is Tedious Poorly Delivered Story Visuals Look Like Low-Effort Asset Flip Over Reliance on AI |
Death Relives Overall Score - 36/100
Death Relives is the kind of game that makes you question your life choices halfway through, not because it’s emotionally moving, but because you can feel your time slipping through your fingers. Its ambitions are buried under poor execution, half-hearted mechanics, and an overreliance on AI that makes everything feel lifeless. Even its few decent ideas, like the puzzles or companion app, are undermined by clunky design and a lack of polish. There’s just nothing here worth the investment—not in time, money, or patience.
Death Relives Story - 4/10
The story had the bones of something interesting, with Aztec mythology as a thematic foundation, but it never really stood on its own. The plot plays out with zero tension, and the protagonist, Adrian, is so emotionally detached that it’s hard to feel invested in anything he’s going through. The twist at the end could’ve landed if it weren’t telegraphed so early and smothered in flat dialogue. It’s not the worst story ever told, but it’s told so poorly that it might as well be.
Death Relives Gameplay - 4/10
The survival horror mechanics here are dated, dull, and uninspired, like someone meshed together genre staples from a checklist without asking why they worked in the first place. Stealth is reduced to extended bouts of hiding and waiting, never evolving beyond "sit still until it’s safe." There’s combat, technically, but it’s so limp and unimpactful that it might as well have been cut. The gameplay loop isn’t broken, but it is aggressively boring.
Death Relives Visuals - 3/10
This isn’t just a low-budget game, it’s a low-effort one. Environments are lifeless, and the visual storytelling is practically nonexistent. Most assets look like they were pulled from generic libraries and shoved into the world without care. It fails both artistically and technically, with nothing memorable to latch onto.
Death Relives Audio - 3/10
There’s a hollowness to the soundscape, the music is forgettable, and the overall atmosphere lacks the weight and tension horror games need to thrive. The voice acting—if it even was voice acting—felt like flat, emotionless line reads. It lacked soul, and that’s a death sentence for me.
Death Relives Value for Money - 4/10
At $24.99 for a 4-hour experience, Death Relives delivers neither length nor quality, making its price tag feel insulting. There’s no replay value, no meaningful progression—just four hours of frustrating gameplay and missed potential. The companion app might’ve added something novel, but its clumsy AI execution undercuts even that.
Death Relives Review: Better Left Dead
I have played a lot of horror games in my life. Some bad, some brilliant. Some that made me want to throw my controller across the room and others that nestled themselves deep under my skin like a splinter I couldn’t quite reach. But Death Relives? This one… this one made me stare at the credits, then at the wall, and question everything I’ve ever done to deserve this.
I’m not even being dramatic. I wish I was.
I have never, in all my time of playing games, felt this disrespected by a game. Not because it was hard or scary or even broken—though we’ll get into that—but because it wasted my time. It dangled the promise of something meaningful in front of me, something rooted in a mythology rarely explored in modern media, and then slapped a paper-thin coat of horror paint on it and called it a day.
Yes, I finished Death Relives. And no, not because I wanted to. I did it because I had to. Because I kept hoping it would redeem itself in the end, that all the clunky mechanics and uninspired design choices were just a slow burn building to something worth talking about. But no. It never got better. In fact, the further I got, the more certain I became that the only reason I was still playing was so I could warn you not to.
The premise isn’t terrible on paper. Death Relives is a survival horror game that pulls from Aztec mythology, a setting so rarely tapped in this genre that I was genuinely excited. I wanted to like it. I mean, think about the potential! The gods, the rituals, the deep spiritual connections to death and sacrifice… there’s a well of untapped horror here that could’ve been rich and unique. And hey, survival horror mixed with stealth? That’s my blood type.
But from the very beginning, something just felt… off. And not in the good tension-is-building way. No, this was the kind of off that made me instinctively brace for disappointment. I tried to shake it off. Gave it time. Thought maybe it was just a slow start. But that feeling never left, and unfortunately, I was right to trust it.
What Death Relives gives you instead is a bland, recycled escape-horror experience. You play as Adrian, a young man who finds himself trapped in a hostile environment soaked in blood and mysticism. The game promises you’ll explore mythological horrors, solve ancient puzzles, and survive against a twisted monster drawn from an ancient deity. What you actually get is a sluggish stealth experience, unmemorable characters, and a story that feels like it was stitched together with duct tape.
And it’s a shame. Because it’s not all bad. There are flickers of effort. The puzzles, for example? They’re decent. Not revolutionary, but competent. They’re well-paced, interactive, and sometimes even satisfying. There’s a twist near the end that might’ve landed with more impact if the rest of the story wasn’t such a mess. And I appreciate that you can toggle off jumpscares—a rare option in horror games, and one I wish more titles would implement. Ironically, though, the game probably needed them. Because without them? There’s almost no tension at all. Just gore. Lots and lots of gore.
But we’ll get to that.
The important thing is, this game had potential. Real, honest-to-goodness potential. It could’ve been something special. But what we got instead is one of the most disappointingly hollow experiences I’ve ever had to endure. And I’m going to tell you why.
Where It All Fell Apart
Let’s talk gameplay, or rather, let’s talk about the ghost of gameplay. Because what Death Relives offers isn’t bad gameplay so much as absent gameplay. Like the skeleton of a better game had been unearthed, only for someone to slap together the wrong organs and call it a day.
When I hear the words "survival-horror-escape" game, I think of stealth, limited resources, tense exploration, and occasional puzzle solving. Except here, every one of those elements feels like a demo version of something better. The stealth is nothing more than glorified hide-and-seek. The survival aspect is hollow. The horror is propped up entirely by its blood-slick aesthetic. And the combat—if we can even call it that—is about as engaging as swatting a fly with a spoon.
Here’s how most of the gameplay loop worked: You enter a new area, you solve a puzzle, that puzzle then emits a sound loud enough for Xipe Totec (the Aztec god chasing you) to hear, you hide. You wait. You wait some more. You control your adrenaline. Then you wait again. Rinse and repeat. That’s the loop. Hiding, waiting, occasionally moving from one dimly-lit corridor to another in the hopes that you’re doing what the game wants. I understand that in horror games, tension is everything. But this isn’t tension, it’s boredom disguised as gameplay. It’s a waiting simulator with a blood filter.
The worst part? Not once during these hide-and-seek segments did I feel that paralyzing fear, the kind that freezes you mid-step and makes you clutch the controller a little tighter. Not once. And that’s because Death Relives never earns your fear. It doesn’t create dread through atmosphere or sound design or narrative stakes, it just assumes the act of hiding is inherently scary. But fear without context isn’t fear. It’s just noise.
The puzzles, oddly enough, are the only thing that feel like they had any real thought put into them. They're spaced out nicely, and there’s a decent sense of interactivity. I actually found myself wishing there were more puzzles, just so I could take a break from crouch-walking through endless samey corridors. It's telling when the only satisfying part of your horror game is the logic puzzles.
And this is where the real heartbreak lies, the concept of the game is solid. A survival horror steeped in Aztec mythology, with a stealth-driven design and escape-room logic? Sign me up. But every idea feels like it was pulled from a hat and executed without care. The mechanics don’t build on each other. They don’t reinforce the themes. They just exist. Like someone ticked boxes off a list and moved on.
Which brings me to the pacing. Dear gods, the pacing. Death Relives feels like it’s always dragging you forward but never giving you a reason to care. It’s slow, but not in a methodical or atmospheric way. It’s slow because you’re constantly stopping, hiding, waiting. Not exploring, not surviving. Waiting. And in a game where your only tool is patience, the payoff has to be worth it. Here, it never is.
So what are we left with? A game that wants to be stealth-horror but forgets what makes stealth and horror actually work. There’s no rhythm, no escalation, no catharsis. Just repetition and wasted potential. If gameplay is the spine of a game, Death Relives is already broken.
The Hollow Core
If you asked Death Relives what kind of story it’s trying to tell, it would probably mutter something vague about betrayal, rituals, and ancestral sins. And sure, that sounds cool on paper. I wanted it to be cool. I was ready to dive into a mythos rarely explored in games—Aztec mythology—with all its complexity and rich, brutal beauty. But what I got was a story that felt like it had been uncaringly cobbled together.
Adrian seems just like a regular guy thrust into a nightmare scenario where the Aztec god Xipe Totec is apparently real, active, and very, very angry. There's a ritual, and somehow, Adrian is at the center of it. Why him? We don’t know. The game doesn’t care to tell you. It’s one of those "because the plot needs it" situations that start weak and never recover.
And this isn’t a problem of complexity, I don’t mind minimalist storytelling or sparse worldbuilding when it’s intentional. But Death Relives doesn’t feel minimal, it feels incomplete. The storytelling is shallow, haphazard, and emotionally weightless. The motivations are unclear. The lore is underbaked. And worst of all, the game seems afraid to actually commit to the richness of its source material. Instead of celebrating the mythology, it vilifies it, turning the god into just another monster in the dark. No nuance, no reverence.
And then there's Adrian. I don’t want to be too harsh on the voice actor—or voice situation, as we’ll touch on later—but Adrian is, for lack of a better term, a void. He’s a blank slate with no edge, no emotional range, no narrative gravity. I wasn’t annoyed by him. I wasn’t intrigued. I just… wasn’t anything. He’s a whisper in a storm, a protagonist so paper-thin he practically disappears behind the static of the game’s many failures.
And that’s actually worse than if I hated him. At least a frustrating protagonist can give you something to react to. Adrian feels like he was designed to not offend, and in doing so, ends up having no soul. He doesn’t grow, he doesn’t learn, he doesn’t even really react all that much to the horrors around him. You could replace him with a blank camera feed and the game would be exactly the same.
The supporting cast is similarly nonexistent. There's a dad you can communicate with through the game’s mobile app (more on that disaster later), and a few friends who call or text occasionally, but these interactions are robotic, brief, and emotionally disconnected. You don’t build relationships. You don’t feel anything. It’s all flavorless exposition delivered through bland one-liners and dead-eyed text prompts.
Even the ending—meant to be the game’s big twist—fell flat. Yes, I saw it coming. Yes, it had potential. But by the time the credits rolled, I was too numb to care. A good twist should recontextualize everything you’ve experienced up to that point. This one just made me sigh and say, "Of course." What makes it worse is how the game seems to think it’s deeper than it really is. You know those stories that insist they’re profound by sheer force of mood and dialogue? That’s Death Relives. It insists upon itself. It wants to be artful, mythological, emotionally complex, but it has none of the craft, none of the connective tissue. It throws gods and rituals at you, but never weaves them into something meaningful. It’s all surface.
There’s no rhythm to the narrative, no sense of pacing. Cutscenes just sort of happen. Exposition is dumped without buildup. Emotional beats are rushed or skipped entirely. It’s like reading a story where every third chapter was deleted for space, but no one edited around it. So, yes, the game has a story. And yes, there’s a twist. But a twist without stakes is just a shrug. And a protagonist without a soul is just dead weight.
The AI Misfire
Let’s talk about the companion app. When I first booted up Death Relives, I was cautiously optimistic. The title screen invites you to scan a QR code that links to a mobile companion app, styled as if it were Adrian’s own phone, synced in real-time with your progress. I’ve seen similar ideas before—games like Simulacra come to mind—and when they’re executed well, they add intimacy, tension, and that grounded, real-world layer that horror games thrive on.
But the second the app opened, I was immediately met with AI-generated images. Not the polished, uncanny ones that almost pass for real on social media, no, these were unmistakable, and unashamed AI cartoony images. It looked like the game didn’t even try. Just a jarring flood of AI art slapped on screen like placeholder assets that somehow made it into the final build.
This isn’t a think piece. I’m not here to unpack the ethics of AI-generated content, or debate whether it has a place in creative industries. This is a review and in the context of this game, the use of AI cheapened the experience. I could have forgiven this. Maybe. If it was the only offense. But then something clicked in my brain, maybe Adrian sounded so flat for a reason.
Adrian speaks a lot. He reacts (sort of) to the events unfolding around him. He delivers lines in every major scene. But the performance feels off. Not outright bad, just wrong. Emotionless. Hollow. Like someone fed keywords into a text-to-speech model and called it a day. "Concern." "Mild panic." "Flat confusion." All stitched together with the cadence of someone who's never actually heard a person panic in a real crisis.
And there’s the fact that there’s no voice actor credited for Adrian in the game. None. Not in the credits. Not on the official site. Not even a whisper online. Maybe it's just confirmation bias in my case. Am I saying the voice of Adrian was AI-generated? No. I’m not making any accusations. I’m just saying that if it was, the pieces certainly fit.
There’s a disconnect here that runs deeper than just poor production. It’s a dissonance between what Death Relives wants to be—an emotional, mythologically-charged horror story—and how it actually presents itself: hollow, artificial, and completely void of soul.
Let’s zoom out for a second. This game centers around Aztec mythology, an ancient belief system with gods, rituals, and stories that pulse with life, with humanity. It’s a mythology of sacrifice and fate and blood, things that demand emotion. And yet, Death Relives delivers it all through synthetic monotony.
It shows a fundamental disconnect between what the game wants to be and how it chose to present itself. You can’t expect players to emotionally engage with a story about divine wrath and human fear when everything about your delivery feels computer-generated and emotionally sterile. You can’t preach immersion and deliver canned dialogue. You can’t ask for investment when you give us nothing human to invest in.
Is Death Relives Worth It?
Not Even If It Were Free
Let’s not drag this out. No. Even if it were free, I wouldn’t recommend it. Death Relives is the kind of game that doesn’t just waste your time, it insults it. It promises mythology and fear and immersion, and then delivers a stitched-together mess of cheap systems, soulless presentation, and design choices that feel like they were made in a vacuum, or worse, by a content farm.
There are sparks of good ideas here. I won’t deny that. The companion app could have been cool. The puzzles were fine. There’s a twist at the end that, in a better game, might’ve even landed. But surrounded by AI detachment, weak writing, flavorless gameplay, and a protagonist who is just impossible to connect with, it all crumbles.
Death Relives is trying to wear the skin of better horror games without understanding what makes those games good. And in the end, it becomes exactly what horror should never be: forgettable.
| Digital Storefronts | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steam |
PlayStation |
Xbox |
|||
| Price | $24.99 | ||||
Death Relives FAQ
What Are Death Relives’ System Requirements?
| System | Minimum | Recommended |
|---|---|---|
| OS | Windows 10 21H2 or above | Windows 10 21H2 or above |
| Processor | Intel i3/i5 or equivalent | Intel i7 or equivalent |
| Memory | 8 GB RAM | 16 GB RAM |
| Graphics | NVIDIA GTX 1060 | NVIDIA RTX 2070 |
| Storage | 40 GB available space | 40 GB available space |
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Death Relives Product Information
 |
|
| Title | DEATH RELIVES |
|---|---|
| Release Date | July 25, 2025 |
| Developer | Nyctophile Studios |
| Publisher | Nyctophile Studios |
| Supported Platforms | PC (Steam), PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S |
| Genre | Survival Horror |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| PEGI Rating | 18+ |
| Official Website | Death Relives Website |
