《Hellraiser: Revival》评测

From the opening scene of Hellraiser: Revival, in which an intimate moment of sexual fetishism goes horribly wrong for its hero and his lover, this survival horror adventure inspired by Clive Barker’s bloodsoaked ode to BDSM makes it painfully clear that it’s not for the squeamish. So graphic is its ebb and flow between blasting gory holes and bathroom glory holes that the greatest moments of tension I felt playing it were not when I was fending off its hordes of gimp-masked cultists, but rather when I was nervously looking over my shoulder just in case my wife happened to walk in the room. However, peel back the sordid surface layer and Revival doesn’t have much meat to go along with its many buckets of blood. Heavy-handed storytelling, repeated chase sequences, and uninspired boss encounters meant that no matter how many meatsacks had their skin pierced and flayed by chains that tightened onscreen, Hellraiser: Revival never managed to properly get its hooks into me.

We play as Aiden, a one liner-spouting everyman with some troubling addiction problems who’s on a quest to bring his newly murdered girlfriend back to life the only way he knows how: by making a pact with pale-skinned series poster boy, Pinhead (voiced with trademark unnerving eloquence by original actor Doug Bradley), to slaughter several members of a local death cult and feed their hearts to her partially reanimated remains. It’s a disturbing premise that’s pretty faithful to the first (and best) two films in the Hellraiser series, but I wish its plot was presented in a more dynamic fashion. The exceedingly gory scenes that featured Pinhead and his cenobite pals always had me glued to the screen, but so much of Revival’s roughly nine-hour story is otherwise delivered in drawn-out exposition dumps spouted by secondary characters, and I never really felt too invested beyond the broad strokes. It’s not a great sign when the chatty in-game merchant is doing most of the heavy lifting here, and I’m not just talking about her ammo crates.

Still, at least the shooting is pretty solid, albeit fairly stock standard for the survival horror genre. To be honest, if Revival’s weapon and inventory system borrowed any more from the Resident Evil series you could probably squint and spot a Capcom logo watermarked somewhere onscreen. However, its assortment of upgradeable pistols, shotguns, machine guns, and breakable blades and bats facilitate some fun ways to decapitate and dismember the hedonistic hordes that stand in Aiden’s way, and ammo is scarce enough that I was forced to make use of absolutely everything at my disposal.

I admittedly had to toggle off the overzealous aim assist since it would regularly snap to a single enemy when I was trying to target an explosive barrel in the middle of a group, and I also lamented Aiden’s inability to vault over obstacles. This became particularly ludicrous in one instance where I could clearly see a room full of precious items through a wide open window, but instead of simply jumping through the gap, I had to stop and hunt around for a key to the locked door in order to access them.

If Revival’s weapon and inventory system borrowed any more from the Resident Evil series you could probably squint and spot a Capcom logo watermarked somewhere onscreen.

Even so, Revival’s mixture of slash-and-sidestep melee encounters and skull-shattering shotgun blasts makes for some gory good times, even if the variety of enemy types is somewhat limited. Beyond the machete and gun-wielding cultists, it’s mostly the same gaggle of gangly ghouls, suicide-bombing beasts, and legless creatures crawling after you that you have to mow down.

There are ample opportunities for stealth, too, with bricks and bottles to throw for distractions and violent stealth kills to pull off. Although I wish there were controls to peek around corners like in the recent Silent Hill: Townfall, because too often I’d be spotted ever-so-slightly stepping out from cover and be forced to go in all-guns-blazing anyway. It was even worse during the occasional instant-fail stealth sections with stalker enemy types, who could sometimes spot me through bushes even when I was standing still.

The Sweet Suffering

What elevates Revival’s combat slightly above the norm is the introduction of the Genesis Configuration, a powerful reimagining of the series’ iconic puzzle box that gives Aiden the ability to grab objects like conveniently placed nails and sawblades from his surroundings and hurl them at enemies with forceful blasts of telekinesis. Use of these BioShock-style superpowers is tied to his ‘suffering’ bar, which must be continually topped up by staggering enemies and performing a grisly execution move that jams the hellraising Rubik’s Cube into their mouths and blasts nine inch nails directly into their skulls like they’re front row at Coachella.

I like that the limitations of the suffering bar means these supernatural abilities don’t make you feel too overpowered, and how the short timer on keeping an object suspended in stasis means you can’t confidently wander around with a fanblade ready to launch like you could in Dead Space. Eventually these powers are expanded to let Aiden play with fire, which allowed me to shoot explosive barrels to take out one group of enemies, before hoovering up the resulting flames and hurling them at other monsters hustling over to provide backup. There’s even a bar-draining super move that shackles clusters of creatures together and tears them all apart at the same time, chaining your attacks in a gruesomely literal sense. It’s just a shame that this devastating option for crowd control doesn’t arrive until much later in the story, giving you relatively few opportunities to really put it to use.

It’s also disappointing that Revival’s boss fights are so utterly flat and forgettable for the most part. There are some interesting exceptions like the flying Sister of Mercy, who shrouds the arena in a blood mist and darts at you through the crimson haze, and another beast that scrambles on all fours and locks you in a cage suspended from a tree branch, forcing you to desperately fend off ghouls clumsily climbing up the bars in order to escape and finish the fight. But too many of the boss encounters are boring, close-quarters clashes that barely raise a hair let alone hell, and are just not all that engaging to overcome.

A skinless freak that sluices down into a pool of viscera like some sort of blood-splattered Splatoon character certainly makes one hell of an entrance, but the fight itself demands little in the way of strategy beyond circle-strafing and shooting him until he’s done for. Ditto the second time you face him later on. Meanwhile a sluglike cenobite that has enough arms to give himself a group hug is equally one-note, and you have to fight him a staggering total of four times over the full course of the journey. For all the sharp objects that litter its environments, it's somewhat surprising that Revival’s boss fights can frequently be so dull.

For all the sharp objects that litter its environments, it's somewhat surprising that Revival’s boss fights can frequently be so dull.

Revival’s puzzles aren’t the sharpest either, typically limited to tried and tested tasks like searching for bolt cutters to bust open chained gates or scouring documents for clues to four-digit keypads. There are at least a handful of occasions where it really leans into its seedier – and at times sillier – side with quandaries that are designed to tease not just your brain but potentially other parts of your anatomy. (No judgement.) At one point I was asked by a latex-clad NPC to go on a treasure hunt for uncomfortable-looking toys in a bondage club in order to progress the story, while at another I found myself flummoxed by a combination lock that demanded I arrange the positions of a variety of couples in an orgy. Truly there are moments where Revival feels a bit like Resident Evil if you swapped out Leon Kennedy for Leisure Suit Larry, and while none of its puzzles are particularly challenging, a number of them are at the very least somewhat unique.

Yet while Revival might be sexually depraved, it’s also disappointingly deprived of any interesting new gameplay ideas elsewhere, regularly cribbing from survival horror classics without doing enough to match them, let alone improve on them. Remember the frantic cabin defense in Resident Evil 4 that saw Leon team up with Luis to board up windows and kick down ladders as crazed villagers spilled in through every entry point? Well, there’s a version of that here set in a much smaller, single-storey space that inspires considerably less in the way of panicked problem solving. How about a looping household hallway a la Hideo Kojima’s P.T.? Yep, that’s in here too, minus any interesting puzzle elements or baby-in-the-sink levels of genuine terror.

Even the absolute fundamentals are regularly fumbled. At one point I powered up an old elevator, and as I waited for it to make its agonisingly slow ascent to my level I steeled myself for a fight, since as we all know nothing spawns enemies faster in a survival horror game than the simple press of a call button. However, as the gun-toting goons inevitably started filing into the room from all corners, I discovered that I could just leave the building through the front door and gun them all down while they funnelled their way through the exit, which completely robbed the moment of its intended intensity.

Hellmazer

In occasional departures from the slaughter-filled hallways of sex clubs and cult leader mansions, Aiden is regularly whisked away to the Labyrinth for a brief break from combat. Although this MC Escher-inspired maze of concrete corridors is far more linear than it initially appears, it nonetheless does a great job of capturing the ominous feel of Hellraiser’s infamous realm of torture and pain. From the looming Leviathan on the hellscape’s horizon to the insect-like cenobites that scatter along the walls like grotesquely fleshy cockroaches, it’s initially a very intimidating place to explore. Every jagged surface looks like it could have your eye out, and Revival plays some clever tricks on you to keep you on your toes, like rearranging the walls around you to make you feel like you’re really trapped inside a tangle of impossible architecture.

[Revival] does a great job of capturing the ominous feel of Hellraiser’s infamous realm of torture and pain.

I very much enjoyed the occasional use of Aiden’s telekinesis power to manipulate large chunks of the environment and create paths through this otherworld, as well as dashing past its spinning instant-deathtraps in order to snare optional upgrades to Aiden’s health and suffering bars. What I did grow tired of, though, were the overused chase sequences that see you pursued by Chatterer, the cenobite from the films that basically resembles a wind-up pair of chattering teeth being smuggled inside a stretched-out skinsuit. The first instance of me being hunted by this rictus-grinning goon certainly may have gotten my blood pumping, but by the third of fourth instance of sliding under the same clusters of chains and obstacles, my heart rate had dipped well below the speed of his perpetually pattering pearly whites.

Still, even though my repeat runs through Revival’s mazes eventually became monotonous, at least they consistently functioned as intended. Back in the story’s mortal realm, things didn’t always seem to go to plan. Beyond minor bugs like enemies glitching through walls and audio dropping out during boss fights that made them seem more silent than violent, there were a handful of more significant errors in the PS5 version I played that, while never completely gamebreaking, were pretty annoying to endure. In one instance, I’d fought my way to a cabin deep in a cemetery and puzzled open a locked safe, only to find that I had no inventory space to claim the gun upgrade inside it. So, I trudged all the way back to the nearest save point to temporarily offload some weapons and ammo into a storage box, only to return to the safe and be frustrated to find it locked again with no button prompt to reopen it.

Later on, I was surprised to find the door to a safehouse had somehow become stuck and wouldn’t budge. It was open wide enough to let me see the merchant calmly blinking back at me, but I couldn’t get close enough to actually buy anything from her. This meant that for about a 30-minute stretch at the more combat-heavy end of the story, I was forced to make do with the scarce amount of ammo I could scrounge from the environment until I finally battled through a number of enemies and a boss fight on my way to the next save point, which made that period substantially more of a grind than it probably should have been.

However, at least I’ll only ever have to suffer these problems once, because although Revival cribs plenty from other, better survival horror series’ like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, one thing it hasn’t replicated is their signature replayability. Although there are two endings to achieve, they each stem from the one binary decision made at the story’s climax, meaning I was able to instantly reload my last save and experience both without having to play through the full story a second time. No matter whether you opt for the thoroughly bleak or more optimistic of the two outcomes, this tale eventually closes with a Pinhead quote that reads, “Your suffering has only just begun, we have such sights to show you.” Apparently those sights don’t include a New Game+ mode or any other form of unlockables, though, because Revival simply boots you out to the main menu with nothing extra to reward you with for completing its story.