Saber Interactive’s upcoming Hellraiser: Revival is planned to launch later this year. The first-person horror game is the first proper video game adaptation of Clive Barker’s horrific cult-classic series, and the game is replicating the horror series’ extreme brutality as much as humanly possible.
As a true Hellraiser experience, Saber’s upcoming game is violent, brutal, and incorporates all of the carnal sensuality you’d expect from Barker’s Cenobites. In the game’s first trailer, Saber put it all on display, so much that many expected the game would be censored as soon as it hit ratings boards.
In an interview with IGN, Saber CCO Tim Willits confirmed that Hellraiser: Revival has officially passed the ESRB ratings board without any cuts. “I can say that we have our ESRB rating, which was great, and we had to take nothing out for that,” Willits said.
While the American ratings board has passed the game without issue, the game still has to go through classification in other countries. While PEGI isn’t expected to be a problem for the game, the game could be altered in Australia where games have often come into trouble with the Australian Classification Board for adult content.
Willits explained that Saber is “working with all the other ratings groups now”. The Saber CCO claimed that the game is “going to do really well” as the game’s most adult scenes are all in content and fit within an IP that’s already been sold in these territories on film.
“It is an artwork, and it is a mature game for mature audiences,” Willits said. “We’ve stayed within those lines, and we’ve been very successful at moving the game through all rating boards.”
The Saber exec also explained that the team working on the Hellraiser game don’t want to release a diminished experience. Clive Barker’s series is known for its relationship with brutal violence and carnal pleasure, and if the game censored those aspects it might as well not be a Hellraiser game.
“When we announced that we were making this, lots of people online were like, ‘They better do it right, they better not make some ‘whooshy’ game that’s all censored.’ So we’ve tried to embrace it as much as we can. I really hope that players, they’re kind of like, ‘What’s around the next corner? What crazy stuff am I going to see next? Where is this going to go? Oh my God, I can’t believe they did that.’ That’s the kind of emotions that we want to get out of people,” he said.
As it stands, Willits is hoping to release Hellraiser: Revival as a game that goes “as far as we possible can, as far as the people that make rules will let us go”. After all, that’s what Hellraiser is all about; it’s a series that survives on pushing against the rules, whether that’s in book, film, or video game form.
Alongside working on Hellraiser, Saber Interactive is pumping out a number of other games, including the brand-new John Carpenter’s Toxic Commandos. Additionally, the studio is still working on additional updates to Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, a new Jurassic Park game, and much more.
