Since its initial reveal, Hellraiser: Revival has been touted as the most ambitiously violent and depraved game ever released. It’s made headlines on its lack of censorship, its ability to skirt past ratings boards, and its ability to stay true to the depravity of not just the original films, but Clive Barker’s original novella. And I just don’t see it.
The reviews for Hellraiser: Revival are, for now, mixed. There are some critics that have absolutely adored the game, and some that have not. These negative reviews have been met with the same usual comments from fans of an IP that have not engaged with the latest entry. “Oh, well, this game is made for the real fans!”, “They just don’t understand Hellraiser”; “The game is too much for them.”
Well, I’m a huge fan of Hellraiser’s first two films, an admirer of its most recent film despite its flaws, and an adorer of The Hellbound Heart. While there’s been endless talk of Hellraiser’s faithfulness, that faithfulness sadly exists at a surface level in aesthetic and sound, and not really in the actual feeling of Hellraiser’s universe.
In Hellraiser: Revival, you play as S&M-intrigued former drug addict Aiden who tries to rescue his lover Sunny from Hell after using the Genesis Configuration puzzle box in the bedroom. This calls the iconic Cenobites and the usual chain-flaying you’d expect. You’re then kidnapped by a cult, nailed to a chair so you can see your Prince Albert (now, that’s bold!), and then the game begins.
Hellraiser: Revival is actually a very small budget Resident Evil game, albeit one with horrendously clunky, mediocre, and insanely easy combat. Between your usual combat rooms and little puzzles, you’ll be able to explore the Labyrinth where you solve even more puzzles and run around spike traps.
There isn’t really a moment in gameplay where Hellraiser: Revival shines. Everything is a little too clunky, or a little too broken, and enemy AI is so dramatically stupid that they become laughable. There’s also a Resi-style inventory and crafting system which only serves to get in the way, especially as its auto-arrange feature is so poor at managing your actual space that you might as well just do it yourself.
What’s most disappointing though is that Revival often feels like a parody of Clive Barker’s work. There are some great scenes such as Sunny’s revival early in the story into a living dessicated corpse similarly to Frank’s revival in the original novella and film. But the overarching plot, the way in which Hellraiser is pushed from film to game doesn’t capture the actual spirit of the films.
In a recent interview, it was stated that the new game is inspired by the original films and book, and specifically aimed to avoid the feeling of the later films. Unfortunately, the closest film that Revival actually sticks to would be the undeniably awful Hellraiser: Deader, which featured a cult trying to get closer to the Cenobites and the afterlife by ending their own lives.
Revival’s own cult is decidedly more grusome, slicing up victims into works of arts and torturing themselves and one another in hopes to become cenobites. There’s an intent there where you can see what the writer was originally going for, but one that falls apart as the same itself continues to stretch into wacky, video game, Resi clone.
At its core, Revival is supposed to be a horror game in the same vein as Resi, but with cartoony-looking creatures and leatherbound gimps in lieu of actual zombies. The reality is, even though they are trying to cut you open, leatherbound gimps simply aren’t scary villains, especially when their in-game barks are poorly-acted lines about screwing your skull.
Even in its set-dressing, the game is simply too juvenile in its depiction of this cult. One scene has you exploring the mansion of one of the game’s cult members, finding weird keys and solving puzzles in the standard Resi formula while the aforementioned gimps pop out of iron maidens at regular intervals. Almost as if it has to remember its a spooky horror game, the mansion is dotted with the occasional severed head, an almost cartoony realisation that it doesn’t actually know what makes the violence of Hellraiser’s universe scary or disturbing.
The original Hellraiser and The Hellbound Heart’s horror doesn’t come from the fact that there are hundreds of people in groups all around the world seeking this horrific pleasure. In the original film, its horror comes not just from its depravity, but the fact that it’s all happening in the attic of an unassuming home. Across your street, Frank could be growing back. In Revival, just down the road there could be a hundred gimps chopping people up. The scale required for a video game is simply reductive to the intrinsically personal horror of The Hellhound Heart. Just like how the films fall apart when the Cenobites are popping up in clubs.
Then there’s the sexual angle, an aspect where Hellraiser: Revival is obviously coming up against the limits of ratings boards. The opening sex scene with Aidan and Sunny is blocked in a way where you can’t actually see what they’re doing. A later scene in a smut club has you collecting toys to use on a latex-clad sub, but stops the act just before the freakiness as they can tell “you’re not into this”. In fact, the entire club is remarkably un-sexy with most people just standing around or kneeling waiting for something to happen that can’t happen.
In these reasons, Hellraiser: Revival never really feels like Hellraiser. It feels like those later movies. There are moments of wonder, such as the first time you spot that gorgeous skybox in the labyrinth, but it’s a game that simply doesn’t know how to actually adapt the true depravity of Clive Barker’s universe into a video game form.
Maybe there just is no way to actually make a proper Hellraiser game, at least via a way that you have to go through a ratings board and ship it on console platforms. Maybe the series was never meant to be explored in a virtual world. But what’s here is both tame and comical, not boundary-pushing or scary, the latter not in the slightest. Nevertheless, I commend the team for trying.
