《Hellraiser: Revival》评测：真实感 S&M 俱乐部的描写令游戏其他部分显得尴尬

Please, no tears - it's a waste of good cringe

Not being much of a kinkster, I'm the wrong writer to assess how Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival portrays BDSM. I can't say with any authority, for example, whether developers Saber Interactive have succeeded in distinguishing consensually practised fetish from otherworldly torture. But I will say that the faithful-seeming sex club you visit early on does a fine job of underlining the ridiculousness of Hellraiser, and of so many violent horror videogames with 'sexual themes'.

Revival is a game that speaks of sensory abandon, but also needs to meet expectations for first-person experiences in which you bludgeon your way towards quest objectives – a clash of priorities roughly akin to faking an orgasm by means of a swanee whistle. You play Aidan, a dabbler in dark delights who has just lost his girlfriend Sunny to Hellraiser's infamous Cenobite S&M demons, after getting a bit too handsy with a golden puzzlebox. Shortly thereafter, you are abducted and nailed to a chair with a luxuriant view of your own penis, while loud men with tattoos that resemble an in-progress game of Twilight Imperium rant about ecstasy and agony beyond comprehension. Escaping the room, you immediately find some scrap and trigger a crafting tutorial. Videogames!

The opening hour or two takes place in an artisanal murder dungeon that is consistent with the Barker films - themselves inspired by Barker's experience of leatherplay and sexwork - but often feels like a collage of grandiose guignol from BioShock, Condemned 2, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent. You know the kind of thing: cadavers chopped and strenuously reassembled/combined into pieces of tediously literal sculpture. Limbs lying all over like odd socks, and walls covered in all-caps ranting about pain being pleasure and vice versa.

The dungeon is home to the Scarlet Church, an organisation devoted to mutilating its own members in order to suck up to the Cenobites. You find lore materials detailing the Church's liturgy and history, including a few bizarre Obama '08-style posters of the film's pyramidal Leviathan god. Thanks, Leviathan! The individual cultists have much to say when unaware of your presence, and don't always seem very convinced. "Gotta have faith in the process," one reminds herself, dabbing a corpse with a cleaver. Still, if Hellraiser: Revival has a sense of humour about itself, this isn't much apparent in the opening hours. I think Aidan is the problem. There's a line between "butt of the joke" and "boringly sincere" and he is on the wrong side of it.

Ascending through crimson sanctums, offal-strewn tunnels, and assorted really untidy bedrooms, you pick up blades that deteriorate after a few swings, learn how to craft bullets for a pistol, and master the basics of hiding in the gloom. You do a lot of moidering, and occasionally bumble into the mazey Cenobite dimension care of some sneaky terrain-loading behind your back. Your overarching goal is to rescue Sunny from the Cenobites, which also means wresting the aforesaid puzzlebox from the cult's hands.

Then suddenly, you find yourself in a relatively 'everyday' S&M club, apparently founded by the cult as a source of potential initiates. The sex club is a wholesomer reprise of the foetid chambers below, full of little ironic correspondences. Among the first things you see are some signs about safe sex practices, amusing to read after all the "BLOOD FOR THE FUCK GOD" graffiti. The manager - who is clearly more than she seems - cautions you not to equate the "innocent maniacs" of the club (her phrase) with the "batshit maniacs" (Aidan's phrase) in the catacombs. (At the risk of being Holier Than Both Of Youse, I'm not sure mania is the appropriate reference in either case.) As you explore, the persistence of activities such as finding materials for crafting keeps nudging you to draw comparisons.

The club's dancefloor is a sea of shiny leather and spiked masks. There are people cavorting in cages, and people suspended rather sleepily from the ceiling. There isn't really any blood beyond some extravagant chest piercings. On the edge of the dancefloor, you find curtained alcoves with quivering bottoms emerging from holes in the wall, and screened cubicles with performers in torso restraints. You find a few people lying in a recovery position, and there's a designated recovery room down the hall. There are quite a lot of people just standing around chatting, with a distinct "Plans for the weekend?" energy. In general, I found the place fairly chill, with a decorative NPC throng that made me think of Hitman 2016.

Your goal in the sex club is to leave the building by way of the VIP area, which is where the cult brings those it wants to recruit. This involves getting hold of an M-rated plushie that serves as a passkey. Fortunately, there's a nice lady in pink who is prepared to lend you hers. But first, she wants to get it on. She asks you to find a paddle, a spreader - a bar with cuffs for ankles - and the biggest, thickest dildo you can lay your sticky fingers on.

There isn't much on-getting, in practice. Having procured all the sex gear, you apply the cuffs and proceed to paddlin' ass, but the nice lady wearies of you before you unzip anything or reach for the dildo. The scene's frisson derives less from the listless (and perhaps, regulator-wary) displays of fully clothed bum-whacking, than from the fact that you're using right trigger to do it. Right trigger, the same controller input you'd been using to jam knives into skulls, just a few moments before.

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Attribution

The woman calls whatever is going on in the VIP room too "extreme" for her tastes. But her dissatisfaction with your handling of good old right trigger also works as an implied meta-judgement; it makes the videogamey mayhem elsewhere in Revival seem all the more pretentious and contrived, deeply childish for all its sinew-splitting and pancreas-puncturing. All of those feats of skinflap origami, the ribcages converted into free-standing storage for quest items, the pretzel patterns made out of severed elbows, etcetera... it doesn't suggest 'dark desire' at all. It's just artists goofing around, on both sides of the screen.

Possibly this is the aim. The cult aren't supposed to be horrifying but off-puttingly earnest and fundamentally unserious. They think they are fucking their way to Hell but really they are just playing Doom Eternal. All told, what I like most about Revival's sex club was that it provides space for an overdue cackle at the rest of the game. There's at least eight hours to go in my playthrough, according to the developers, but this does feel like a natural place to end it. Sorry Sunny.