A Hellraiser video game shouldn’t work. Clive Barker’s original novella and the subsequent horror franchise that spun off from it explore pleasure, pain, passion, and sin. It coaxes its heroes and heroines with temptation to save what is theirs, and it does so with intimacy and sex, drugs, and copious amounts of BDSM. Yeah, a Hellraiser video game shouldn’t work. And yet, Hellraiser Revival seems to.
Developed by Boss Team Games and by Saber Interactive, Clive Barker’s Hellraiser Revival isn’t just using Barker’s name to gain legitimacy with the fandom. They worked hand in hand with the author to bring a new seductively tormented narrative to life. During Summer Game Fest Play Days, we got the chance to play a demo of the upcoming horror title.
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Sitting in front of the demo station, it would be a lie to say that there wasn’t any hesitation. “There is no way, they went all the way,” I thought, putting on the headset with chains on the walls behind me and a drink called the infernal pleasure by my side. Saber Interactive had gone all out with the dark corner of their Play Days space, and it made me more worried.
Clive Barker’s Hellraiser Revival embraces the franchise and all of its violence and seduction.
Hellraiser is vital to my understanding and appreciation of horror and its intersections with sex and romance. But I started up the game expecting just a standard horror-survival fare, and the first-person perspective, where players see the puzzle box in one hand and a weapon in the other, spoke to that. And in truth, it is a survival horror game by all the genre’s hallmarks.
As you progress, you explore areas, solve environmental puzzles, and find cultists who have dedicated their lives to the cenobites. Players pick up pieces of lore, food, and ammunition. It’s all standard for the mechanics at the start of the demo. Simple and straightforward, weapon variety was nice, but ultimately it was the design of the environment that began to shift the game from something expected into something fit for the franchise.
Then, as you explore more of Hellraiser Revival, you start to see that many things are scattered in the environment. Needles, alcohol bottles, and a whole host of other things that, if I named them, would get this article solidly demonized.
While the survival-horror action is rudimentary, the worldbuilding is layered.
Then came the cultists that you fight, and you realize that the game has spared no chance to go all out with the sexuality it throws at you while you fight for your life. And all of it is done in astonishingly detailed environments with layered storytelling and set dressing that feels the right kind of grimy and kinky.
Each of the enemies is decked out in different variations of kink-ware, for lack of a better term. There is nudity, there are drugs, and you know from the very little you learn about the story, that the character you’re playing as, Aidan, isn’t a good guy—like many people that the puzzle box comes to.
After you fight your way through the first section of the demo, you step into something entirely different. Using the puzzle box, you work through a puzzle room where you have to avoid blades and rotate a room to pass through it. This is a small section, but it embodies more of the thoughtful gameplay that the game will offer players.
Lockpicking, puzzle solving, and combat are all as you expect, but the game has more in the tank, too.
Then, for the last bit, you finally see how truly terrible Adidan has been. His violence, his hate, his regret, his addiction. In the game, Aidan is a man who decides to open the Genesis Configuration as he’s having sex with his girlfriend, Sunny, because, of course.
She’s dragged to hell, murdered in front of him. His goal throughout the game is to unlock the box’s powers to rescue Sunny from Pinhead and the Cenobites, harnessing his suffering to power the box. Much of this, players can see in the trailer for the game, but it doesn’t do justice to the artistic gore in the game.
An original story in the Hellraiser universe, speaking with the developers at Play Days, they explained the importance of working with Clive Barker to craft Hellraiser Revival. And the craftsmanship Barker is known for is present in the final part of the demo, which takes you on a repeating loop through your home as it deteriorates each time you interact with the next object.
Boss Team Games and Saber Interactive have made me believe a Hellraiser video game can be good.
You see your cruelty to Sunny, and the guilt that fills Aidan is clear as he circles through the house, until he opens the bedroom door to end the loop. And in the end, the loop reveals Pinhead (voiced by Doug Bradley) with your girlfriend flayed and bound on the bed.
It’s an unsettling visual that matches the franchise that it is adding to. Gruesome, unnerving, and sexual, Hellraiser Revival was beyond my expectations. As I put down the controller and talked with the developers at Play Days, I was almost speechless.
Boss Team Games and Saber Interactive have sights to show its players, and it goes all in. If you are thinking about how far you think the game will go, add more to that. At an NC-17 rating, it earns every bit of it, and that was just in a what I was told was a mostly tame demo. Horror is alive and well, and yes, a Hellraiser video game is possible.
Clive Barker’s Hellraiser Revival releases on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC (via Steam).
