《Hellraiser: Revival》采用单人叙事恐怖玩法，做到了《Friday the 13th》《Evil Dead》《Halloween》等未做到的事

The last decade has seen no shortage of horror games based on iconic franchises. Perhaps inspired by the lasting success of famous horror slashers crossing over with Dead by Daylight, or by the relatively shorter-lived success of the Friday the 13th game, we’ve seen many legendary horror movie franchises chase success on the PC and console gaming market, only to find middling success.

Friday the 13th, Evil Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: they all sought to capture a gaming audience, and all of these games are now dead or sunsetting. In a world where every franchise horror game tries to do the same thing, Hellraiser: Revival dared to try something different, and horror gamers should be glad it did.

Horror Franchises Have Been Chasing the Same Multiplayer Formula for Years

Dead by Daylight has been one of the most popular horror games for nearly a decade, proving that the game’s asymmetrical survivor vs. killer game design can work. Inspired by the success of the game, many horror movie franchises, often not long after having a crossover with DbD itself, have sought to capture a bit of that success, while putting their own unique spin on it.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre game tried to expand the scale of the slaughter with bigger maps and multiple killers. Evil Dead: The Game was unique for empowering survivors and giving the ‘killer’ the ability to spawn waves of minions, creating an almost tower-defense-like gameplay loop. Halloween: The Game took Michael Myers ‘ moniker of “The Shape” literally and gave the killers the power to traverse the shadows as an amorphous blob.

While all of these titles had their own unique spin on the formula, they all wanted to be Dead by Daylight at their core, and tried to compete with the same audience. However, just because the formula was proven to work once doesn’t mean it would work every time.

Why The Asymmetrical Horror Formula Doesn’t Always Work

Ask yourself: what is Dead by Daylight missing that you could find in the Evil Dead, Halloween, Friday the 13th. and Texas Chainsaw Massacre games, especially when Dead by Daylight features the killers from all four of these games? If you want a live service title to work, there is one surefire thing you will always need: new content. Without updates, these games become stale and boring, to the point that players will consider these games “dead” if they haven’t received updates in a long time, even if a steady player base still exists.

So how do you continue to patch in new killers, new survivors, and new maps into a game all about a franchise about one killer? How many versions of Michael Myers can you put into a game before the novelty wears off?

Single-franchise live service games are doomed to fail simply because they don’t have enough material to continue updating the game in perpetuity. This is a problem Dead by Daylight doesn’t have, because it can not only license killers from all over the horror space, but create its own. Dead by Daylight will never run out of playable content because it has a limitless creative well to pull from.

Not only that, but single franchise horror games have the implicit disadvantage of trying to pull from the fans of a single horror franchise. While horror is becoming more popular, it is still relatively niche. There aren’t as many die-hard fans of Halloween or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as you think there are. In fact, many modern-day horror fans, at least in the younger generations, are coming straight from Dead by Daylight, introduced to franchises through licensed partnerships.

Any single franchise horror game must hope that it can pull in existing fans of the franchise and create new ones by proxy. However, as the player base of these games starts to die down, these very same fans will simply find themselves pulled towards Dead by Daylight, where their favorite slasher already exists, with a larger player base to boot.

Hellraiser: Revival Is Embracing What Made the Series Scary

Hellraiser: Revival dared to break the mold, announcing early on in its development that it was going to be a single-player, story-driven experience. Not only does this avoid the problems many other franchised horror games face, but it helps the game to embrace everything that made Hellraiser so popular in the first place.

Hellraiser: Revival is a shockingly explicit, violent romp into Clive Barker’s extended universe. The game uses its nature as a single-player campaign experience to push players through beautifully horrible sets, including the terrifying Labyrinth itself. It is from start to finish a narrative experience, built upon all of the shocking visuals, unsettling themes, and introspective questions that made the novels and movies so iconic.

The developers of Revival also didn’t shy away from making the game as gross as possible, paying deep respect to the source material. This is something that is surely a lot easier to do in a single-player game, as live service titles tend to have different rules and technical restrictions.

Hellraiser: Revival will never face the same problems as the other franchised horror titles on this list, because it dares to be something different. As a single-player, narrative-driven horror game, Hellraiser: Revival is essentially timeless. Players will have just as much fun with it now as they will in ten years, as everything the game has to offer will be preserved regardless of player numbers or server statuses. The game will always be a memorable, scary experience, no matter when you decide to pick it up.