XBOX REVIEW | Death Relives

As a lifelong horror fan, the moment I saw the Death Relives trailer, I felt that familiar chill, like Resident Evil, had spawned something new and sinister. A few weeks later, I stepped into the nightmare myself when I was given the opportunity to review it.

When the past creeps into the present, survival becomes a ritual. Death Relives throws players into a chilling, Aztec-inspired nightmare, where every shadow hides a secret and every sound could be your last. It’s the debut game from Nyctophile Studios, blending psychological horror with ancient mythology. Death Relives is a single-player horror game with stealth elements: you’ll explore eerie locations, solve cryptic puzzles, and face constant danger. This game doesn’t just want you to play, it wants you to endure.

The story begins like a classic horror film. Your mum is driving down a dark forest road, with you in the passenger seat. Suddenly, you spot what looks like a body lying ahead. She gets out to investigate, but the body moves, stabs her, and carries her off into the woods. You chase after them, and that’s when the nightmare begins.

Things I liked!

• Visuals | Death Relives runs on Unreal Engine 5, and despite a few minor issues here and there, I eventually got used to things like pop-in and slight screen tearing. You have three quality presets: Performance, Balanced, and Quality. I tried all of them, and for me, Performance was definitely the best, offering the most consistent all-round experience. With Balanced and Quality, I found the frame rate to be quite jumpy and off-putting. As you enter the mansion, the hallways look polished and elegant, packed with detail. The dining rooms are especially extravagant. I was really impressed with the lighting effects, candles give off a warm, natural glow, and while the overall atmosphere is dark and eerie, distant lighting helps you clearly see what’s ahead. Some of the darker rooms and areas look like something straight out of a slaughterhouse: blood-soaked walls, mutilated bodies, and torture instruments strewn everywhere. It all adds to the immersive feel as you play.

• Sound | I really liked the audio in Death Relives. As you load up the game, the screen recommends playing with headphones for the best experience, and rightly so. The audio was easily my favourite aspect of the game. When you’re hiding in a closet, you can hear the footsteps of the Xipe Totec demon growing louder and closer, as it mumbles unrecognisable words to itself. As you run and creep around, you can also hear your own footsteps and the panic in your breathing as you try to stay quiet. Other ambient sounds, like fireplaces crackling as wooden logs burn away, are equally impressive. The voice acting was also solid, from the intro scene where you’re talking with your mum, to the distant screams you hear while searching for her. The character you play, Adrian, often mutters to himself when looking for specific objects, saying things like, “I must find the key.” The soundtrack is rich and atmospheric, blending tribal rhythms with orchestral elements to amplify the game’s horror. Chase sequences are elevated by intense, fear-inducing music that ramps up the tension brilliantly.

Mixed & disliked!

• Gameplay | What starts out fun and intriguing soon becomes repetitive. The gameplay revolves around solving puzzles, which I mostly enjoyed, especially one where you redirect light beams to open the path ahead. Others felt too basic, like finding fuses to restore power. Throughout the game, you’re relentlessly hunted by a powerful demon called Xipe Totec, an Aztec god of death. If it gets too close, it kills you instantly. You’ve got two options: fight or hide. Your main weapon is the Tear of Tlaloc, a small gun-like device. Two or three shots will temporarily down the demon, giving you a chance to banish it. But each time it returns stronger, needing more shots to take down, and with ammo in short supply, hiding often becomes the better choice. Thankfully, there are plenty of closets to duck into. Sometimes, the demon will stand right outside the closet door, triggering a rhythm mini-game where musical notes scroll across the screen and you have to tap the matching buttons in time. It’s simple enough. Other times, it just stares at the door before slowly walking away. Each encounter drains your health, and the only way to recover is by collecting ghost blood, yes, apparently ghosts bleed. Using a plant-based wrist device called the God Seed, which you acquire earlier in the game, you can sneak up on weaker ghosts, kill them from behind, and extract their blood with a needle. It’s like feeding the God Seed, which then restores your health and lets you carry on. Believe me, it’s every bit as bizarre as it sounds. Basically, you move around the mansion, doing your best to avoid the Xipe Totec Demon, solve puzzles, advance to a new area and rinse and repeat. Gameplay quickly becomes a chore.
  
  
• Game Length | I completed Death Relives in a single session, and unfortunately, it only took me four hours. While I was quite glad it was over, I had expected a much longer experience, something closer to the ten-hour mark. There are four different difficulty levels to choose from, which may add some replay value if you enjoyed your time with Death Relives. For this review, I played on Normal difficulty.
  
  
• Technical Issues | Unfortunately, there are many game-breaking bugs in Death Relives. Firstly, whenever I start a new game, I head straight to the settings to invert the camera controls. For some strange reason, they always default back to the original settings no matter what I did, leaving me with no choice but to change the invert controls in the actual Xbox system settings. Another time, after I had completed the game, I went to load a previous save only to find that all my progress had vanished. I also encountered an issue where achievements weren’t unlocking at all. The developer, Nyctophile Studios, has said this will be fixed in a future update. As I mentioned earlier, there’s a lot of screen tearing and pop-in, especially in the woodland area at the beginning of the game.

How long did I play the review before publishing? 7 Hours
How long to beat the story? 5 Hours
How many Achievements did I earn before publishing? 0/10 OR 0/1000G
How long to achieve 1000G | 5-8 Hours (When achievements fixed)
You’ll love this game if you like these | Remorse: The List and Bendy and The Dark Revival

CONCLUSION

Score: 59/100

Death Relives has flashes of brilliance, but its repetitive gameplay and technical hiccups drain the dread from its promising premise. With polish, it could haunt players for all the right reasons.