I love the modern trend of revisiting old-school horror. As a kid, I remember seeing Pinhead’s perfectly disfigured face staring out from the Hellraiser cover at Blockbuster Video. As an adult, I’m glad I never convinced my folks to let me watch it. But as an ADULT adult, it’s a longtime favourite of mine.
So for Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival, I worried it would take the franchise into slasher territory or strip out the story’s cerebral nature. Thankfully, Hellraiser: Revival is pretty faithful to the themes and gives a compelling glimpse into the world of the Cenobites and the humans who call them ‘angels’.
Explorers in the further reaches of experience
For those who are new to the Hellraiser series, it has a backstory longer and more twisted than Pinhead’s trademark chains. It started with a Clive Barker novella called The Hellbound Heart back in 1986, which then became the 1987 film Hellraiser. From there, the Hellraiser franchise spanned nine films and a 2022 reboot. Some of those films are certainly better than the others, but Hellraiser: Revival sits neatly 20 years after Hellraiser — which is conveniently before the films really started to jump the shark, so it’s a good place to be.
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The franchise centres on humans who, in one way or another, are hedonists looking for the next big experience. They always solve a mysterious puzzle box and summon the Cenobites. Theologians of the Order of the Gash and “explorers in the further reaches of experience”. In practicality, they are body-modded sadists with interdimensional powers who worship a giant floating diamond in Hell-but-not-hell.
Hellraiser: Revival centres on Aiden Lynch, whose partner, Sunny, solves one of the puzzle boxes: the Genesis Configuration. In doing so, she summons the Cenobites and is transported to their dimension. Aiden is pulled into a Faustian bargain with the Cenobites to get her back, by sacrificing members of a cult to rebuild her earthly body. It draws heavily on the original Hellraiser, but it also introduces some strong new ideas.
The cult itself is deeply weird, but morbidly intriguing. Ordinary humans lead it, having solved other puzzle boxes and gained powers, but they remain unsatisfied with their earthly experiences. Bruno, the mad surgeon, feels straight out of the darkest parts of BioShock. He is hell-bent on creating his own Cenobites (or Angels) out of willing participants, stitching them together and cutting them apart to create grotesque tableaux.
Riding the line
Sex and violence have always been at the heart of the Hellraiser franchise. The interplay between control and surrender, submission and violence. So it’s no surprise that Hellraiser: Revival is a bloody game. That said, I was genuinely surprised by how far the game takes it. If you’ve played Scorn, Resident Evil, or watched the new Evil Dead films, pick the most body-horror sequences and work up from there.
You’ll have to explore hallways and avenues literally dripping in viscera, observe wild body-modification surgeries, and interact with more stitched-together statues to the cult’s wildest fantasies than you can shake a sex toy at. An early sequence in a BDSM club looks to contrast the extremes of ordinary human excess with the wild consentual depravities of the cult.
That’s probably all I can say without getting into specifics, but be forewarned — body horror galore!
A bit of boom and gloom
When you aren’t listening to lamentations on the frail state of human existence, you’ll be fighting off cultists and hordes of unworthy angels. They might act like zombies, but they’re in fact all failed attempts to create more Cenobites. Just where Bruno gets hundreds of willing “participants” is hand-waved.
It is a bit of a shame that most enemies are dumb as a box of rocks. They come in two flavours, some charge headfirst into melee and try to swarm you, while the more humanoid cultists stand back and shoot. That’s about all the tricks they have, and they often get caught on the environment or line up conveniently facing a wall for you to stealth-kill. You have your knife, as well as a pistol, shotgun, SMG and a couple of other standard weapons. If you’ve played the first-person Resident Evil games, you’ll feel right at home here.
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The combat does get interesting when Aiden receives more powers from the Cenobites and the Genesis Configuration becomes a weapon itself. The first is an ability to kill stunned enemies with a Doom-like finisher. Then telekinesis to throw spikes or objects. It even grows to throw fire and burn enemies, plus a cool ultimate ability where you summon chains to rip enemies apart.
Puzzles beyond your imagination
Puzzle boxes are at the centre of the mythology of Hellraiser, it’s how ordinary humans gain the attention of the Cenobites, so I’m glad puzzles are a central conceit. There are plenty of locked gates that need weirdly specific keys, but also very interesting ones where you use the Genesis Configuration as a key itself. You have to rotate the box to make shapes and match a specific silhouette. It’s similar to the classic Resident Evil-style puzzles where you have to find a very strange key to fit a strange lock, but you’re creating the key yourself- good stuff.
Some of the best sequences in my mind are actually puzzle and non-combat sections where Aiden is pulled into The Labyrinth with the Cenobites. In this alternate dimension, Leviathan, the Cenobites’ god, watches over a wasteland of souls and maze-like creations. It’s part hell from Doom and part M.C. Escher painting. In these sections, you dodge traps and solve puzzles while often outrunning The Chatterer, one of the Cenobites. They’re very cool sequences that created a real sense of otherness and alienation to the ‘Angels’.
Unfortunately, there are a fair share of technical glitches that stood out during my time with the game – enemies attacking walls, visual pop-ins and a section where the audio cut out entirely. And while the inventory system is directly lifted from Resident Evil, why I can’t use healing items or refill ammo directly from the ground, but have to make inventory space first seems insane. But these all feel like things that can be trussed up post-launch.
Should I buy Clive Barker’s Hellraiser Revival?
If you’re a fan of the early Hellraiser movies, or the Hellbound Heart, I reckon Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival is about as faithful (or unfaithful) as a game can get. It’s dark, moody, astonishingly violent, and it spends half its time spouting lyrical lamentations of the soul.
However, if you’re looking for a horror game that’s more boom than gloom, or if you’re squeamish about blood and unmentionables, you may want to keep this puzzle box on the shelf.
Quest Daily Scores Clive Barker’s Hellraiser Revival:
7.5/10
Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival is out now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC via Steam and Nintendo Switch 2.
Early access to Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival was provided by the publisher.
