Saber Interactive’s Hellraiser Revival has been a successful return-to-form for the horror franchise. In the weeks since its release, the game has been praised by series creator Clive Barker, and fans are already hoping for a follow-up in the future.
Prior to launch, Saber talked a big game about the fact that Hellraiser Revival would not be censored on any platform, not even the Nintendo Switch 2. Alongside this, the studio announced that the game had surprisingly passed ratings boards without any cuts, despite its high level of violence.
In a post-launch interview, lead writer Antony De Fault revealed that the team made the game with a possible ratings board ban in mind. This allowed the project to stay as close to the graphic detail of The Hellbound Heart, the novel the series is based on, as well as the original film.
“It was an unofficial goal of the team to be banned, unrated, or restricted at least somewhere in the world as one barometer of whether we’d done our jobs right,” the writer told IGN in a recent interview. He’s right, really. If the goal isn’t to push the boundaries of what’s acceptable, it’s not really Hellraiser, is it?
De Fault explained that this becomes harder in a video game form as you can’t just witness graphic events. “It shouldn’t be enough to have the player simply see taboo things,” they said. “It’s necessary to get them to perform taboo acts, too.”
While Hellraiser Revival’s gameplay is often a Resident Evil clone with very similar elements to Capcom’s recent first-person entries, there are also sections that feel very unique to Hellraiser. For example, one scene early on has you in a smut club looking for toys to use on latex-covered woman that’s holding a key item, and you engage in a restraining and spanking scene just before getting to the part where you rearrange their guts with a more-than-sizeable friend.
De Fault explains that this scene in particlar is integral to Hellraider Revival as it offers the “forbidden experience” that is so essential to Clive Barker’s boundary-pushing work. You don’t get to do that in games, at least in commercially available ones on consoles. That’s not something you do on a Nintendo Switch 2, for example. But now it is.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t cuts. In one section in the labyrinth, a prison inmate is clearly fondling to an image of the protagonist’s partner, Sunny. While we all know what he’s doing, his John Thomas is invisible, with De Fault saying that including that one added bit of detail “would have certainly tipped out age ratings over a threshold and eliminated the game from sale in most places”.
These are the increasingly clever cuts that need to happen to bring the level of extremism that a game in this universe requires. It’s not perfect: there are obvious cuts around the game that have been made to appease ratings boards. In fact, if you’re looking, you can see obvious cuts in detail in pretty much every level, but the game does do well to bring the grit and grime you’d expect.
