CONCRETE BURIAL Review

A Blood-Fueled Descent Into a Brutalist Catacomb

CONCRETE BURIAL is a short, first-person horror game from Games From The Abyss, published by DreadXP, built around a single, sharp hook: your only weapon consumes your own blood to fire, so every shot and every swing is a small bet against your own health bar. You play a Knight of the Crimson Clan descending into the Whispering Crypt, a sprawling brutalist megastructure, to recover four Artifacts of Desire from four distinct branching areas before confronting whatever waits at the center. Reviewers repeatedly invoke Junji Ito-adjacent dread, the industrial-labyrinth atmosphere of the manga and anime BLAME!, and the fallen-god cosmology of Dante's Inferno as touchstones, and at least one reviewer draws a direct line to the PS2-era survival-horror aesthetic and to Lunacid's brand of lo-fi dungeon dread. Designed to be finished in a single sitting of one to two hours, and priced at $3.99 (currently discounted to $3.19), it's positioned as a compact, mechanically distinct horror experience rather than a sprawling adventure.

A Strongly Positive but Very Early Launch

CONCRETE BURIAL launched to 21 reviews, 20 of them positive, for a 95% "Positive" score on Steam. This is a small enough pool that it should be read as an enthusiastic early reaction rather than a fully settled verdict, and the reviews themselves bear that read out — several are explicitly first-impressions, written by players who hadn't finished the game yet but wanted to flag how much they were enjoying it so far. The mix of languages in the sample (English, Russian, Spanish, and Portuguese all represented) suggests the launch reached a genuinely international horror-fan audience quickly, and the one dissenting voice in the pool raises specific, narrow complaints rather than a wholesale rejection of the game.

Striking Atmosphere, a Distinctive Blood-as-Ammo Loop, and a Gun That "Feels GREAT"

The praise across this pool centers on atmosphere and the specific texture of the game's central mechanic. One reviewer calls the visuals and sound design good enough on their own to justify the price, writing that as "a huge fan of Lunacid," they "enjoyed this game a lot" and found it "a great value for the price" despite its brevity. Another, focused specifically on how the shooting feels moment to moment, writes simply that the "gun feels GREAT to shoot. Real meaty," even while noting the story is "a bit of a shaggy dog" that could use tighter dialogue. The most detailed first-impressions review in the pool leans hard into the BLAME! comparison, writing that the game "aces the BLAME! vibe" with megastructure locations that "vary and have their own tweaks and turns," and describing the feeling of being "lost in a labyrinth which I do not understand and do not know what could happen" as a core part of the appeal rather than a frustration. A reviewer who finished the game and went for full completion describes it as "very short but if you go for 100% you'll probably get around an hour of gameplay," with the game's central tension built entirely around managing a shared health-and-ammo resource, since both shooting and melee attacks consume the same blood pool. One reviewer who has finished the game says they're "really intrigued by how this world could expand," comparing the soundtrack favorably to Dread Delusion and calling the whole thing "a solid prototype with great potential to be scaled up into something much bigger," and another, more effusive review calls the experience "absolutely phenomenal," saying it built to "a certain moment that really shook me" and predicting it will "stick with me for a very long time."

Trial-and-Error Combat, a Divisive Ending, and Requests for Borderless Fullscreen

The most detailed critical review in the pool pushes back specifically on the combat, arguing there are "tons of instant death pits" and that fights are mostly spent "babysitting your health bar" rather than engaging with an interesting system, and singling out a particular enemy encounter that triggers a "jarring 'find the red glow' mini-game" they found more irritating than tense. That same reviewer is also the pool's most pointed critic of the story's closing twist, describing a late meta turn where the player character is abruptly addressed as a god responsible for fixing the world, and objecting that "I didn't make this world, I haven't even seen outside the one dungeon" — a complaint about earned narrative weight rather than the twist's concept in the abstract. A separate reviewer who otherwise praises the visuals, audio, and atmosphere says they are "extremly split on the game" because it "relies too much on trial and error" with "just not enough checkpoints for that to not get tedious," while still concluding that "for that price it's just hard not to recommend it." On the practical side, one reviewer flagged before finishing that the game does include mouse-look inversion, calling it a near dealbreaker had it been absent, and a detailed "definitive review" that's otherwise glowing lists borderless fullscreen support and additional weapon variety as the game's most-wanted missing features going forward.

Verdict

CONCRETE BURIAL is a compact, atmospheric horror shooter built around a genuinely distinctive idea — a weapon fueled by your own blood, deployed across a moody brutalist megastructure that draws favorable comparisons to BLAME! and Lunacid alike — and its very early review pool is strongly, if not unanimously, positive. Its rough edges are consistent and specific: combat that leans on trial-and-error against instant-death hazards with sparse checkpoints, a late narrative swerve that at least one player found unearned given the game's tight scope, and a wishlist of quality-of-life additions like borderless fullscreen and more weapon variety. At under four dollars for a one-to-two-hour, single-sitting experience, though, nearly every reviewer in this pool — even its harshest critic — agrees the price makes it an easy recommendation. For horror fans drawn to short, mechanically unusual, visually striking dungeon crawlers with real atmosphere to spare, CONCRETE BURIAL's opening reception suggests it delivers well above its asking price, so long as you're prepared for a punishing, trial-and-error edge beneath its polish.