DYING: Reborn

My honest reaction after clearing all six chapters of DYING: Reborn was something like relieved confusion. The premise hooked me: protagonist Mathew wakes up in a decaying hotel, gets taunted by a masked figure on a television screen, and has to solve his way room by room through what the game wants you to read as a Saw-inspired psychological horror story. That framing has real atmosphere on paper. In practice, the horror scaffolding is mostly cosmetic, and the story it supports is a convoluted mess that limps toward an abrupt ending without resolving much. I spent more time re-reading memos trying to reconstruct the plot than I ever did feeling genuinely unsettled. The puzzles are where DYING: Reborn earns whatever goodwill it gets, and the gap in quality here is real. The six chapters each contain at least one puzzle that genuinely rewards lateral thinking, and a few that require you to carry items across rooms and combine them in ways you would not anticipate. That cross-room inventory logic can produce satisfying moments, but it also produces the game's worst frustration: objects tucked into corners that look like background dressing, items that find their use three chapters later with no hint of foreshadowing, and a cursor hitbox so finicky that interacting with objects sometimes requires pixel-hunting rather than spatial reasoning. Some puzzles feel rewarding; a larger portion feel obscure in ways that are more arbitrary than ingenious. The whole experience clocks in at roughly two to six hours depending on how often you consult a walkthrough, and puzzle solutions are completely static, meaning a second playthrough offers nothing new. Presentation is the other weak flank. The voice acting for most of the cast sounds flat and clearly recorded without much direction, though the antagonist gets slightly better treatment. The ambient audio that is supposed to build dread relies heavily on predictable jump cues and random loud sounds rather than sustained tension. Visually the environments are competent enough to read clearly, with passable lighting that at least reinforces the hotel's sense of rot and abandonment. It is not a handcrafted indie gem in the pixel-art sense I usually celebrate on this page. It is a 3D first-person room escape that wears its budget and its Chinese studio origins plainly. The English writing has the slightly off-kilter quality of a translation that went through one pass too few, which can charitably be called atmospheric and uncharitably be called rough. Steam users rate it Mostly Positive across a small sample, and I think that tracks for a specific kind of player: someone who enjoys the tactile satisfaction of item-combination puzzles, can forgive thin storytelling, and is not expecting genuine horror. If you come in wanting a tightly paced puzzler with good atmospheric bones and low ambitions, you will probably get your money's worth at a discount. If you want coherent narrative, consistent puzzle logic, or actual scares, DYING: Reborn will disappoint you on all three counts.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on DYING: Reborn.