The Red Exile: Survival Horror Review

A seemingly endless grid of dingy rooms, a crazed killer with a literal axe to grind, and a semi-complete pentagram sans a few candles. This is the situation you find yourself in The Red Exile: Survival Horror. But is it an experience to still your beating heart, or do we need to break out the Benny Hill?

Red Exile is a survival horror game from NipoBox in which you are tasked with completing a magical circle by collecting five candles in a large grid of similar-looking rooms. Making this somewhat difficult is the ever-present Killer, a large man with a giant axe and surprisingly light feet! If the Killer happens to spot you, or the game decides it's chase time, he will make a beeline toward you, no matter how many doors he needs to kick down to get there. To avoid a horrific fate, you need to be quick on your feet, using doors to slow the Killer down and hiding in convenient lockers, as you do in the genre.

In addition to the vital candles, you can find other useful items to make your frantic flight slightly more successful: crowbars can destroy planks blocking doors and syringes filled with weird blue glowy goo can be used to give yourself a short boost in movement speed to skedaddle when you start hearing soft footfalls behind you. You only have three slots to fill, however, so being smart about managing your resources can mean the difference between an early death and a successful run, though I found the number of items littered around to be quite plentiful! Succeed or die, the run ends, and you are given points and stats, after which you are given the option to start again.

For each run, successful or not — you do need to survive for a few moments, though — you will be rewarded with perk points, which can be used when not in a run to unlock perks. You get one for surviving and two for a successful run. Since the time you need to survive to earn a perk point isn't that long, the points accrue by themselves quite quickly, so just keep playing! Eventually, it'll get easier.

The perks themselves cost anywhere from one to four perk points. Interestingly, the perks do not tell you what benefit they offer until you buy it, giving you only a name and an image — with a very familiar design, I might add — to go off of. Since you get the points almost automatically, saving up isn't much of a hassle, though the perks weren't anything special. Some spawned you with an item in hand or in a specific position, while others made you faster or the Killer slower. Useful, sure, but not to any specific degree. Though the more costly perks were generally better, the difference between a one-point perk and a four-point perk was low. My favourites were ones that removed "blank" rooms from the grid, making finding useful items and candles easier.

The game, in general, is regrettably quite rough. First and foremost, I played the game on the PlayStation 5, and any console game that uses a cursor you move with the analog stick is a big red flag from the get-go! Additionally, the game had few settings (the most important being sensitivity, as the default setting had me spinning more than a dog with a treat on their tail), and generally felt like it just… lacked things. In terms of music, there is very little, in addition to the small piano sting that plays when the Killer shows up, and there are even fewer sound effects; swing a crowbar at a plank, and your character will lazily wiggle the implement while wood_breaking.mp3 plays. I even walked into the Killer once since I couldn't hear their footsteps!

Two selling points the game has are a procedurally generated map that encourages replayability and a smart Killer that tracks the player and gets stronger as the game goes on. I'm sad to say I experienced neither of these. Sure, the rooms you run through are different each time, but they are all still the same simple rooms: same size, same doors, same random things strewn about. Similarly, the "AI" of the Killer is seemingly non-existent. They will roam around the rooms looking for you, always opening a door, walking in, standing around for a moment, and then deciding on which direction to repeat the process! I followed them around for a while to confirm this. At some point, you will hear a chuckle, or your heart will start beating, meaning they're on the hunt, but I did not feel like anything I did actually triggered this. And honestly, the "slam a door in their face and run to a locker" technique worked every time. I did manage to break the game by being caught by the Killer while transitioning into a locker to hide, forcing me to restart the game, so that was pretty scary.

I try to go into every game I play with an open mind and take pride in giving each game a chance to impress me! It brings me no joy to say that The Red Exile: Survival Horror was a letdown. With dull gameplay, lifeless sound design, mainly adorable Killer, and a playtime of about two hours (I even got the Platinum trophy within the first 90 minutes), the game had little to offer. No plot to speak of, no "difficulty level 2", and little reason to keep playing. I will say, the seeds of a cool survival horror are here, with a smart antagonist learning your tricks, but this is not it. I cannot recommend The Red Exile: Survival Horror in its current state, even with the low price point.