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0 Race against time and break free from your coffin in Geekon’s Buried Alive: Breathless Rescue to save your love from the claws of a mysterious stranger who’s intent on ruining your relationship. Buried Alive: Breathless Rescue is a single player horror game where players start in a forgotten crypt and have to complete tasks and puzzles to free themselves from the confines of their coffin.
Break free and unveil dark secrets
This review contains spoilers for the end of the game – read at your discretion.
Gameplay
Buried Alive: Breathless Rescue wastes no time in getting into the story. As Jack, the protagonist, wakes from his slumber, the player finds themselves trapped in a coffin with only a lighter, his almost-dead phone and a knife buried in his thigh for company. With no introduction to the game, the speed at which you need to act is amplified and I found myself throwing my mouse around to try and find any piece of information or action that I could take to get out as my oxygen bar slowly depleted and the race to find fiancé Hannah began.
The controls were your standard horror game set-up, which is good considering there was no real tutorial for this game. The only real tutorial you get is that you use E to interact, which is shown every time you want to interact with an object.
It doesn’t take that long to break out of the coffin – in my playthrough it took a couple of minutes.
Break Free From The Norm
Occasionally, the game does shift and give you some simple minigames to play however they don’t really do much for the game as they only happen once or twice. There is a lockpick minigame in the early stages of the game that doesn’t appear after that moment so, despite it adding a nice change to the flow of the game, it does feel somewhat out of place in the grand scheme of things.
It’s also a short game. My first playthrough took me just over an hour to complete and that was mainly because I’m impatient and struggled with parts of the game where you had to sneak to succeed.
There’s a lot of story packed into the 60 minutes of game time as you learn about Jack, Hannah and the mysterious person who buried you. There was a lot that could have been developed if the game was slightly longer but it did have some strong development points in the time that I did have.
Cockroaches
Sadly, I did have a few bugs with this game. There were some pretty minor things like graphical glitches where prompts would stay on the screen too long or items would clip together. The worst one however was during the Psycho Mike fight.
The final moment of a game should end with a powerful hit, however, the tracking for Mike is slightly off. I often found him getting stuck on random objects so I could stand there and hit him with a stick without having to put that much effort in. I did reload a few times to see whether it was a one off thing but after playing myself and then looking to see if anyone else had this issue on YouTube, it does look to be a consistent occurrence within the game which takes away from all of the build up that the player goes through.
Audio & Graphics
The graphic quality of Buried Alive plays well into the tense atmosphere of the game. Everything has a darker edge to it and this darkness carries on throughout. Some cutscenes do look a little clunky, such as the fire in the Church, however it isn’t something that would put you off playing the game. Everything fits together really well.
The audio becomes a big part of the gameplay as you listen for footsteps nearby or the sound of a crow cawing in the distance. The crow cawing did get a bit repetitive with the frequency that it occurred however I wasn’t too bothered by it because it was a part of one of the games many searches for story continuation. It was, however, implemented well and the devs made the most out of it.
Longevity
As mentioned, Buried Alive: Breathless Reckless is a relatively short game with a story that only lasts around an hour. As a result, there isn’t much longevity for this game in particular however it would be very interesting to see some of the stories presented in the game as a spin-off or delved into a bit deeper. I would love an exploration of Mike’s parents’ relationship or even a game about Mike that explains his character development and his obsession with Hannah.
Final Thoughts
The premise for Buried Alive: Breathless Rescue is definitely an interesting one that is explored through the game. The short game time might be enough to put some people off but I think it does add to the urgency that the game is trying to present as you desperately try to find Hannah. That being said, the bug that I kept experiencing in the final boss fight really put a damper on the mood of the game and when I think of the game that’s what I think of over the actual story. If this is resolved and Psycho Mike doesn’t get caught on objects then I would definitely rate the game higher but it really ruined the big build up that was there the entire game.
There’s a lot of promise here and the potential this game has can easily increase the rating that it has received.
Buried Alive: Breathless Rescue receives the Thumb Culture Silver Award.
Disclaimer: A code was received in order to write this review
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