Saber Interactive’s Hellraiser Revival is a bold new video game take on Clive Barker’s iconic horror series. While the series has already seen its ups and downs in books, the team behind the video game tasked themselves to create “the best Hellraiser adaptation” yet.
In an interview with IGN, narrative director Anthony De Fault revealed they had never experienced the series prior to working on it. “The very first time I saw Hellraiser was when I began the project,” he said. “I started with the novella [The Hellbound Heart]. I read that twice. Let is soak in until I really understood what Clive [Barker] initially wanted to say with that piece of work”.
De Fault explained that the point of Hellraiser Revival isn’t just to piggyback off the IP. “Our approach was to try to make the best Hellraiser adaption there’s ever been. I will acknowledge, that it’s crazy ambitious and we may not hit it. But we thought there would be a good struggle in the trying.”
While De Fault had never seen Hellraiser prior to being a part of the project, the studio housed numerous diehard fans that jumped at the bit to help bring the universe to life. As the first ever video game adaptation of Clive Barker’s extremely violent world, the team pushed to stay true to the look of the movies and the themes of the original book.
With that said, De Fault served not only to craft a good narrative, but to offer a new perspective detached from fandom. After all, anyone who’s seen how overly fan-servicey those movies could get knows, sometimes new eyes are needed to return to the source.
“I took the approach of being the filter and, once I felt like I fully understood the original spirit of Hellraiser was, it’s going to resemble Hellraiser, it’s gonna resonate for the reason Hellraiser resonates, but we can change everything else. I didn’t want us to just only draw on elements that had already been established in some of this material. And also, speaking frankly, a lot of this material is not widely respected by its own fanbase,” the writer continued.
Alongside continuing along the themes established in Barker’s original short story, the team worked to give agency to the iconic character of Pinhead. While players won’t directly control Pinhead, he has more presence and action in the story with the narrative revolving around a mystery central to his character, and everything has been approved by Clive Barker himself.
“I think we really aligned with Clive with what the heart and soul of Hellraiser is,” De Fault said. “Those were the product of ideation sessions with him and then we went away and bared our souls and wrote some stuff. We showed them to him and he was like: ‘Holy sh*t, guys, this is it.’ It felt like he’d always wanted to take the movie incarnations and then open up the cosmos of Hellraiser in a similar way to what we’d done in the game.”
After somehow passing video game ratings boards without any cuts, and making it onto Nintendo Switch 2 without any censorship, Hellraiser: Revival is nearing release. With just weeks to go, fans are already enjoying the game’s free demo on Steam.
While it’s not known how good the game will be throughout its entirely, the horror game has made some strong first impressions. While the notion of having a lot of Pinhead is worrying as a fan who believes the character is best kept mysterious, in fact, some devs believed it would be weird, it will be nice to hear Doug Bradley’s iconic voice say more than the same five lines we’ve heard for decades.
