The first good Hellraiser game?

As a lifelong fan of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser mythos, I’m cautiously enthusiastic about its first “true” game adaptation, Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival, after spending an hour hands-on with the game. Saber Interactive’s new first-person shooter horror game feels a bit like BioShock Lite that’s been slathered in the leather, latex, blood, sex, and gore the Hellraiser franchise is infamous for.

It will not be for the faint of heart: Speaking to Hellraiser: Revival‘s developers, even they seemed surprised the game received an M-rating instead of something stronger.

It can be tough being a Hellraiser fan. The majority of the Hellraiser movies are awful, with the notable exceptions being the two movies named Hellraiser released 35 years apart (first in 1987, then another in 2022). But as a fan of Barker’s early work, I once steeped myself in the first three films and Marvel’s initial run of Hellraiser anthology comics, where artists were free to play with the sadomasochistic demons imagined by the author in his 1986 novella, The Hellbound Heart.

Hellraiser: Revival captures the essence of many Hellraiser stories, many of which involve people seeking intense new forms of pleasure, only to be cursed and violently tortured by the Cenobites, extra-dimensional servants of the mysterious entity Leviathan. In Revival, players take on the role of Aidan, a man whose troubled girlfriend Sunny has been captured by Pinhead and the Cenobites. Armed with a new form of the franchise’s famous puzzle box, the Genesis Configuration, Aidan battles a horrific cult devoted to the Cenobites.

In a section of the game I played, this involved exploring an underground S&M club and battling leather- and latex-clad cult members. Without much context, and really only seeking a way to survive and escape, I played this section of Hellraiser: Revival like any other first-person shooter. Some of this felt rote; I exchanged gunfire against handfuls of human enemies — some of whom hilariously sprang forth from iron maidens — and beat others to death with melee weapons. I listened to cassette recordings and absorbed some story details from photos and diaries. I found keys to unlock doors and scrounged for scarce ammo.

More interesting was the use of the weapon in Aidan’s left hand, the Genesis Configuration. With this version of the puzzle box, I could sap fire and other energies from the environment, then set cult members ablaze. Hellraiser: Revival feels like a perfectly capable single-player first-person shooter with a spicy twist, and the game became much more interesting when the Cenobites showed up.

In another section of the game that felt more inspired by Kojima Productions’ P.T., Aidan finds his way into the Hellraiser fiction’s version of Hell. This cold, dark, liminal space was composed of labyrinthine corridors and impossibly constructed puzzle rooms full of whirling torture devices. In one dizzying space, I could use the Genesis Configuration to twist and turn sections of a room to piece together a walkway for Aidan to pass through. Things got more bewildering from there.

Image: Saber Interactive

After working my way through a Hell space, I was transported to a small house that consisted of a looping pathway. Like P.T., each time I would walk through the house hallways and staircases, I was presented with new rooms to explore, new snippets of story, and a variety of flashback cutscenes. It was impossible to piece a cohesive narrative together in this section of the game, but it appears that Sunny and Aidan regularly use illicit substances, and have paid the price for seeking increasingly intense highs. Sunny is shown being tortured by the Cenobites, violently clashing with Aidan, and also clearly in love with him. They have a messy, combative relationship, it seems, but Aidan is obviously willing to go through literal Hell to rescue the love of his life from her Cenobite captors.

Hellraiser: Revival was one of my most pleasant surprises from Summer Game Fest. It’s a great-looking, tightly playing shooter that captures the vibes of a Hellraiser film. It’s also dripping with blood, gore, and flesh torn apart by hooks and chains; a “red band” trailer promises ample nudity, graphic violence, and declarations from Pinhead actor Doug Bradley that players are in for plenty of pain-as-pleasure.

Granted, Hellraiser: Revival has an incredibly low bar to clear. But as a fan of the franchise who has been underserved by Hellraiser video game adaptations over the past 40 years, I’m surprisingly excited to see what sights Saber’s Cenobites have to show us.

Hellraiser: Revival is out Oct. 8, for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.