Hellraiser: Revival: Kotaku 评测

The lurid environments of Hellraiser: Revival, a horror survival game continuing the sadomasochistic legacy of Clive Barker’s Hellbound Heart, might not be the best place to say “wow, deja vu!” Nonetheless, while combing the sticky floors of an in-game sex club for crafting supplies and coins, I suddenly remembered the rolled-up cocaine fiver I found in one of KitKatClub’s washroom stalls. Which I used on beer. The more continuous flashbacks I experienced were to Resident Evil Village, a similarly structured, over-the-top barrage of guns, goo, and ghouls. In seeking absolution in its earthly form as a video game, Hellraiser suffers some. It bleeds. You will, too. But oh, it has such sights to show you.

Few horror classics have benefited from distance to their respective eras quite like Hellraiser. Waves of critical reappraisal have sweetened the interior qualities of Halloween and Texas Chain Saw, but the rich, bespoke appeal of Hellraiser was always undercut by its own immediate success. Adapted from his own short story, Barker rendered a modern castle gothic for the big screen, chronicling a woman in peril from her evil stepmother and nasty uncle. The standout characters were the Cenobites, divine facilitators of pleasures beyond what flesh can provide. It was a nuanced interruption to ’80s slasher fare, but Miramax wanted a Freddy. And so, through increasingly diminishing sequels, Pinhead’s campaign of thanatos and eros was swapped for more boilerplate evil.

With Clive Barker’s name reattached, Revival wants to reestablish the distinct pleasures of the flesh to maximalist degrees. You play as Aidan Lynch, a medical doctor turned biker gang enforcer, the ultimate horror video game protagonist. You and your partner Sunny like to keep things freaky on the frameless mattress. Opening on the throes of their passion, the game finds the two deciding to give their latest toy a whirl: an ornate puzzle box that keeps spitting blue bolts of electricity. Despite clear omens, Sunny lashes the odd box across her naked form, summoning the Cenobites to bind her in hooks and twist her into heaps of molten sinew.

If things weren’t grotesque enough, Aidan is immediately kidnapped by a cult of oversexed thriller killers. Their leader Marlowe, a tacky ego tripper who fashions himself like Casey Jones from the Ninja Turtles, has spent the last few years recreating every Hostel movie beneath his nightclub in hopes of becoming a Cenobite himself. With Lemarchand’s box in Aidan’s hand, he discovers he can bargain with the Cenobites to bring Sunny back. Paid in flesh. Pound for pound.

A waste of good suffering

Initially, Revival lunges for the throat. There’s more sex and evisceration in the immediate hours than Steam usually allows for even a few seconds. I cannot think of another commercial video game where you spend so much time with your virtual balls out. Naked, afraid, and in the face of gods.

That doesn’t mean it necessarily hits the jugular. As Aidan seeks his footing, he’ll face shockingly well-armed latex fetishists, naturally camouflaged in dark, blood-damp basements. Where they keep those grenades we will never know. The gunplay the game asks of you is unsatisfactory. A lack of staggers and feedback make it unclear how much impact each blow is having. Each clash makes you feel like you brought a gun to a knife fight, loading bullets into spongy opponents before eventually trading lashes like Tommy Lee Jones and Steven Seagal at the end of Under Siege. Savoring each bullet is a survival horror tradition, but no matter how true my aim, I mostly felt like I was wasting them.

Hellraiser: Revival

• Back-of-the-box quote:

  "The feral ghouls make Taz noises and you can throw railroad spikes through them with psychic angel powers!"

• developer:

  Saber Interactive

• type of game:

  First-person horror survival in the vein of Resident Evil Village: solve puzzles and shoot bullets, but with a lot more body parts dangling out.

• liked:

  Dealing punishment with newfound Cenobite powers is a hoot, impressive visuals especially within the Labyrinth, actually getting to solve the puzzle box, lots of quality time with our boy Chatterer.

• disliked:

  Takes a while to get to the really good stuff, gunplay is an unrewarding chore, story is a bit unrefined compared to the source material.

• platforms:

  PC (played), PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2.

• played:

  17 hours, through to the credits.

• release date:

  October 8, 2026

Trying to fit the frame of Resident Evil, the Ethan Winters entries especially, under the ill-fitting skin of Hellraiser feels like a miscalculation. Craft ammo. Solve puzzles. All well and good, but I often wished it played closer to something like Condemned: Criminal Origins, which revolved its survival mechanics around chasing freaks with a board with a nail in it. Thankfully, while the game’s gun fetish lingers throughout, it becomes far less pronounced as it goes on. Aidan acquires abilities as you progress, and the more magically powered alternatives to blowing a full clip into an enemy’s head you attain, the more decadent the game grows. By no coincidence, this shift occurs as Revival grows increasingly aligned with what sizzles in the source material as well.

Amen

As Pinhead has had to teach his disciples time and time again, there is no true splendor without having to suffer great pain. After wallowing in sewer tunnels and urban dungeons, you enter the Labyrinth, the homeworld of the Cenobites, and it is an immaculate feast for the eyes. Though vulgar, the game is never ugly, but when in the company of these divine beings, it’s genuinely beautiful. Brutal clockworks, the Chatterer’s horrendous gnawing, the scowls dripping off of Pinhead actor Doug Bradley’s digital lips. Like RoboCop: Rogue City it is reverence done right. Clear that people on the team knew which minutiae to recreate to make a player feel right at home in the bowels of hell.

When the story comes into its own, Revival begins to mirror the basic components of the first two movies as well. While it doesn’t add anything too novel to the formula, it at least stirs up the direct path its original plot seemed to be on. And while I could have used music beats from the immaculate film score, or even the remix of Peaches’ “Fuck The Pain Away,” the soundscape of jangles, skitters, and groans is remarkably well assembled. When I needed a better soundtrack to a graveyard shootout, I just put on Sisters of Mercy.

The Cenobites, as they are in the best Hellraiser tales, are arbiters. Observers to depravity rather than participants. You may not find the tacky perverts you’ll be mowing down as fascinating, but they’re certainly a real kind of person on this forsaken earth. Revival‘s greatest sin is chaining itself down with attempts to mimic more popular games, but it’s not offensive enough to be sacrilege. Brothers, sisters, angels to some and demons to others. All that squirms in between. This is our congregation. May a good time hunt you down. Amen.