Buried Alive: Breathless Rescue – Don’t hold your breath

Buried Alive: Breathless Rescue has a lot in common with me. We’re both short and not much fun.

I don’t like writing reviews for games that have few redeeming features, simply because it’s nice to be nice. But Buried Alive: Breathless Rescue just isn’t very good. Honestly, the best things I can say about it are that there’s a solid premise and that its technical performance was fine. Beyond that there’s little to recommend throughout the less than an hour it takes to reach the conclusion.

As I said, the setup is at least intriguing. You play as Jack, a man who went out partying a little too hard one night only to wake up trapped inside a coffin with a knife lodged in his leg. A phone call from his fiancé Hannah tells him that she’s in a similar predicament and it’s up to him to rescue them both from whatever maniac trapped them.

From this point, Buried Alive: Breathless Rescue behaves mostly like a first-person puzzle game with some stealth sections. In each of the five environments you find yourself in, you’ll need to find a few items to unlock your way out. Frustratingly you’ll frequently scour the map to find a key or a shovel which unlocks the way out only to be told that now you need something else to bring back to the same area. It’s like a constant series of arbitrary-feeling fetch quests. 

The larger problem here is that the environments are fairly sizable, meaning you’ll need to wander around very dark areas trying to find something without really knowing where to look. There are notes left by the kidnapper to give you slight hints, but if it weren’t for these treasure hunts with severely underpowered light sources, I think you could be through the game in under thirty minutes. 

A couple of the areas have patrolling characters who will attempt to kill you. They follow simple paths so are fairly predictable, but the penultimate location is very small with an irritating find-the-key section, meaning you’ll spend significant amounts of time sitting around waiting for the coast to be clear. They weren’t fun and I found myself more frustrated than tense. Then there’s the laughable final confrontation that I won’t spoil, but if you do choose to play this then be prepared for a let down.

Then you have weird story and gameplay features that don’t really go anywhere. The tale of the kidnapper’s parents is silly and meaningless. Jack’s brutal knife wound never comes up again. That titular “breathless” feature appears as an oxygen metre that has absolutely no meaning to the gameplay or story. It’s like the bulk of the game was barely thought out.

On the positive side, the game runs well on Xbox. I ran into no glitches or bugs, although there was a hilarious visual issue where I could look up and see my own head. The frame rate was solid throughout too, which apparently was an issue on the PC release at the end of 2023.

The visuals aren’t great, mind. Everything looks as though it would fit in two console generations ago. I realise that in some cases this can be an active artistic choice, but I don’t feel that’s the case here, as the trailer appears to make things look a lot more impressive. A lot of the animations are quite stilted too. Some of the sounds are solid enough. I liked the ambient sounds throughout, but the voice work was a real mixed bag. This was especially noticeable during the aforementioned stealth sections where you’ll hear the same lines repeated every fifteen seconds or so, often with poor delivery.

Like I said earlier, I don’t really enjoy reviewing something without much nice to say, but Buried Alive: Breathless Rescue just isn’t very good and it’s hard to find anything to recommend about it. Even if you’re a fan of short games, at over £10 it feels criminally overpriced for the time you’ll spend on it. Probably best to leave this one buried.

Buried Alive: Breathless Rescue is available now on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation.