Death Relives

With spooky season right around the corner, game companies are scrambling to release what they hope will be the most-talked about horror game of the year. One of the early contenders is Death Relives, a new first-person survival horror game that sees a massive Aztec demon hunt down one very scared man. It’s like what if Resident Evil was more interested in cursed relics from Mesoamerican ruins than perfecting the T-Virus. Does that add up to a frighteningly fun time? That’s what I’m about to find out when I review Death Relives, the debut game from Nyctophile Studios.

What do you do when you’re driving home late at night and run across a body laying in the middle of the road? Do you get out and help or just keep driving? When it comes to Adrian and his mother, the answer was simple – you get out and help. But in the case of Death Relives, that is the worst decision you could possibly make. Horrified, Adrian is forced to watch his poor mother brutally stabbed and then dragged off to a nearby mansion by a mysterious figure. Angry that he couldn’t do anything to stop the attack, our hero embarks on a frightening adventure where he’ll come face-to-face with an old Aztec legend that dates back hundreds of years.

What we have here is a simple damsel in distress adventure wrapped up as a survival horror game. The goal here is fairly simple, with Adrian mostly investigating the mansion and solving a number of very simple puzzles. He’s searching through the house for his mother, which ultimately means covering the three different floors of the mansion and dealing with all of its craziness.

And when I say that, what I’m actually talking about is the nine-foot-tall demon that lumbers around looking for intruders. He’s the kind of video game villain that will kill you in a single hit if he gets within striking distance, often in an especially brutal way. This is a game that wants you to hide when he’s nearby and avoid walking over broken glass and other loud objects. This is a sneaking mission.

By himself, it would be easy enough to avoid the slow-moving demon. However, he’s joined by ghosts and other floating ghoulies, each of which will attack that will give away your location. So much of this game is about sneaking around the different monsters while collecting the pieces you need to solve the next puzzle. Once you do that, you’ll move on to the next floor of the mansion and be introduced to a whole new set of baddies.

The good news is that Adrian is not completely defenseless. He’s given an old Aztec pistol that is surprisingly effective against the various ghouls and ghosts. He also picks up a ghost vale that hides him from some of the supernatural villains. This will allow him to sneak up behind ghosts and kill them with his special Aztec knife. It’s also worth mentioning that he has a weird piece of plant technology tied to his left arm, allowing him to not only see where the demon is, but also where the next story beat is located.

While there are letters and journals you can pick up that will help to flesh out the story, a lot of the narrative takes place through holographic images that are being projected right in front of Adrian. This comes with a loud, booming voice explaining the history and lore, slowly revealing the origin story of this nine-foot-tall demon. This is useful for the audience, as it does help to get you a little more invested in the story, but when you think about Adrian standing in a room hearing a voice explain history to him, it does come off as a bit goofy.

Hey, remember that pistol I just mentioned? If you shoot that tall demon a couple of times, you’ll be able to kill it and sent it to a supernatural time-out bench. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it will come back even stronger than the last time, requiring three, four, five shots to kill. The even worse news is that every time you kill the beast, your plant technology will slowly start to kill you, forcing Adrian to collect ghost blood to refill its health. Don’t ask, I didn’t make up the rules.

The extremely obvious problem this sets up is that there’s almost no reason to use your gun. If the demon is just going to come back stronger the next time, then why bother? And it’s not like there’s a lot of ammo lying around. Plus, killing him also slowly kills you, so there’s really no upside. You might as well just hide. The one unique aspect of this game is that it has a simple rhythm game you sometimes have to play when hiding, but it’s extremely easy and basic. To put it in perspective, in the several dozen times I had to tap out the rhythm, I never once failed it.

Once you understand monster’s specific attack or pattern, the game stops being scary and became more of a chore. Although massive on the outside, the inside feels surprisingly cramped. The ghosts and monsters don’t give you a lot of room to maneuver, and there are often times when you can’t help but get caught. Death Relives desperately wants to be a stealth game, but it doesn’t have the gameplay to get the job done. The game is full of annoying cheap deaths, something that teaches you to save often.

Perhaps fearing that the nine-foot-tall demon wasn’t scary enough, Death Relives comes with jump scares. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Every horror game comes with jump scares.” But in this case, it’s something you can turn off and on. Instead of a cat jumping out of nowhere or something genuinely effective, the game does the thing where it plays a loud sound and shows you something that doesn’t exist. This is terrible and cheap, and you should turn it off.

Speaking of gimmicks, the game wants you to download a smart phone app that would, in theory, work in conjunction with the story unfolding on my TV. That sounds like a fun idea and I downloaded the app, but I could never get it to work. It tells you to scan the QR code on the pause screen, yet the pause screen never once gave me a QR code to scan. I looked through the options and everywhere else, but it simply wasn’t there. Make of that what you will.

As a horror experience, Death Relives is fine. The mansion is effectively spooky and clearly a lot of work has gone into making each part look different. The story bits are handled well, and I appreciate that I didn’t have to read dozens of journals just to figure out what was going on. That said, the whole thing is over in a couple of hours and the ending is anticlimactic. It’s a game that plays its one note over and over, until you’re just ready for the whole thing to wrap up. Death Relives is a solid enough debut for Nyctophile Studios, but I have a hunch they have a much better game in them.