The last decade has been a real boom period for video games based on classic horror movies. Games have been made based on Friday the 13th, Halloween, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Predator and Saw. Plus, the ongoing Dead by Daylight, which has crossed over with just about every fan-favorite horror franchise around, from A Nightmare on Elm Street to Scream.
On the surface, Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival might look like the latest in a long line of online games cashing in on a classic horror IP. But unlike those aforementioned games, it’s not an asymmetrical multiplayer experience casting one player as Hellraiser’s Pinhead and the rest as fleshy humans. No, it’s a single-player survival horror title.
A narrative-driven, single-player, survival horror experience set in the brutal world of Clive Barker’s original “Hellraiser” movie? Sign me up.
However, after playing through the entire 10-hour campaign on PS5 Pro, I'm disappointed. I love the intent behind Hellraiser: Revival, but the execution is all too often a whole lot more pain than pleasure.
We have such sights to show you
You play Aidan Lynch, a gruff (somewhat unlikable) biker who unwillingly summons Pinhead and his Cenobites — extradimensional beings who are described in the films as “demons to some, angels to others” — during a raunchy evening with his girlfriend, Sunny, when they activate a strange box known as the Genesis Configuration.
Pinhead and his grotesque pals whisk Sunny away to the depths of their hellish dimension, and it’s up to Aidan to rescue his lost love — even if flashbacks suggest that the couple's relationship was anything but blissful. It’s your routine “save the girl” story, but because this is Hellraiser, the whole narrative is coated in a thick soup of blood, guts, and seriously graphic sights.
It will come as no shock to anybody familiar with the “Hellraiser” movies, but Revival is extremely graphic. And I don’t just mean in terms of violence (though there’s a lot of that). There is so much extreme sexual content here that I felt obligated to forewarn my partner about it before starting, just in case she accidentally walked in on me playing.
On the one hand, I commend the developers at Saber Interactive for being willing to push the boundaries of good taste — one early objective has Aidan collecting sex toys at the request of a woman decked out in a full leather outfit. To have presented a watered-down Hellraiser experience would have been inauthentic. But pretty quickly, the frequency of sexual content starts to feel like a shock-value play.
This felt most keenly in the game’s most meaningful original contribution to the Hellraiser canon, the Scarlet Church. A Cenobite-obsessed cult that you spend the vast majority of the game hiding from and then butchering with sharp melee weapons and powerful firearms. The Church adds an extra wrinkle, but is often used as a vehicle to shove yet more graphic scenes in the player’s face. Which, at the very least, does make thinning their ranks rather cathartic.
A revival, but certainly not a gameplay revolution
Like many modern survival horror games, from the Alone in the Dark reboot to The Sinking City 2, Hellraiser: Revival’s is a close approximation of the recent Resident Evil games.
I’m okay with this; Resident Evil is among my favorite series in gaming, and I’m happy to play games that pinch its best ideas in between new RE releases. As Aidan, your goal is to slowly make your way through each area of the Scarlet Church’s vast compound, picking up items, fending off foes, and finding keys that open more doors, and repeat.
Enemies can be engaged head-on, not always wise due to limited ammo and breakable melee weapons, or you can take a stealthy approach. The Genesis Configuration is added to your arsenal, giving you supernatural powers like controlling flame, or best of all, telekinesis, letting you throw all sharp objects at enemies, impaling them on walls.
It’s a compelling enough loop, and Hellraiser: Revival largely works on a moment-to-moment basis because of this. But what’s particularly disappointing is that the sporadic occasions where the game strikes out and tries to be its own beast are among the best sections.
After major story beats, you’ll usually find yourself in the Cenobites labyrinth. These levels have you solving basic puzzles or trying to escape from the demon fans refer to as the Chatterer, which are comfortably the most intense parts of the game. There’s also a riff on the (in)famous PT demo, which is simple but effective.
In fact, I had to wonder why the whole game isn’t set in the labyrinth instead of the generic corridors of the church’s base, which become very repetitive.
The most hellish part isn’t Pinhead
Hellraiser: Revival spends a lot of time showing you hellish sights or forcing you to come face-to-face with repugnant characters, both the Cenobites and the sadistic leaders of the Scarlet Church. However, the fear they strike in you is nothing compared to the terror I faced thanks to constant glitches.
Unfortunately, on a technical level, Hellraiser: Revival is rough. At its best, the game looks and runs to an acceptable standard. It’s never a graphical showcase, but interiors are detailed, and characters closely resemble their movie counterparts. However, Hellraiser: Revival is only rarely at its best. Far too often, the cracks show, and then start to widen.
If I listed every bug and glitch I encountered, this article would triple in size, but the lowlights include textures frequently taking several seconds to appear, particularly after a loading screen, enemy bodies regularly morphing into furniture, which admittedly was quite funny, and noticeable framerate drops during large combat encounters.
Adding to the pain, the game gets increasingly unstable as you delve deeper. In the final three hours of my playthrough, something would break around every corner. A late-game save station refused to work, the in-game storage box ate my revolver pistol, completely robbing me of a powerful weapon for late-game levels, and the final boss became totally unresponsive not once, but twice, forcing a reload both times.
If all that wasn’t enough, Hellraiser: Revival waved me off with a final cutscene glitch. Character dialogue began looping. Each line repeated over the next. And so, the culmination of the game’s story descended into barely comprehensible audio gibberish. Talk about ending on a real low.
Should you play Hellraiser: Revival this Halloween?
With Halloween on the horizon, there’s no doubt an appetite for new horror games, and I’d hoped to declare Hellraiser: Revival the perfect gaming experience for Spooky Season.
Sadly, in its current state, I simply can’t. However, I do want to acknowledge its $39 / £34 price point, which I appreciate, making it a more cost-effective option in an era of $69 games.
Maybe by Halloween 2027, the technical shortcomings will have been smoothed out, and at that point, Hellraiser: Revival might justify a purchase, at least for dedicated fans of the horror franchise.
Still, in a year that has seen truly essential horror games like Resident Evil: Requiem and Silent Hill: Townfall, it’s hard to recommend in its current state. Hellraiser: Revival might beat its contemporaries for disturbing content, but that’s about the only area where it wins.
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