When Pleasure and Pain Become Just Pain
Hellraiser: Revival opens with a scene that sets its intentions immediately: an intimate moment of sexual fetishism spiraling into catastrophe for its protagonist and his lover. This survival horror adventure, inspired by Clive Barker’s visceral ode to BDSM and the macabre, makes no apologies for its explicit nature. The game wears its influences proudly—perhaps too proudly at times—delivering an experience that will undoubtedly repel the squeamish while attempting to satisfy devoted fans of the franchise.
The game’s graphic content oscillates between blasting gory holes and bathroom glory holes with such frequency that the most intense moments of tension often stem not from fending off masked cultists, but from the paranoid glances over one’s shoulder, hoping a spouse doesn’t walk in during particularly explicit sequences.
A Familiar Pact, A Predictable Path
Players assume the role of Aiden, a wisecracking everyman grappling with troubling addiction issues, who embarks on a quest to resurrect his newly murdered girlfriend. His method of choice? Forging a pact with the pale-skinned series icon Pinhead, voiced with trademark unnerving eloquence by original actor Doug Bradley. The agreement demands that Aiden slaughter members of a local death cult and feed their hearts to his partially reanimated lover’s remains.
This premise remains faithful to the first two—and arguably best—films in the Hellraiser series. However, the execution leaves much to be desired. The narrative unfolds through drawn-out exposition dumps delivered by secondary characters, with the chatty in-game merchant shouldering most of the storytelling burden. For a roughly nine-hour journey, Revival struggles to maintain investment beyond its broadest strokes, leaving players wishing for more dynamic storytelling to match its ambitious subject matter.
Combat: Derivative but Functional
Where Revival finds some footing is in its combat mechanics. The shooting feels solid, if unremarkable for the survival horror genre. The weapon and inventory system borrows so heavily from Resident Evil that one might expect to spot a Capcom watermark somewhere on screen. Yet, the assortment of upgradeable pistols, shotguns, machine guns, and breakable melee weapons provides satisfying ways to decapitate and dismember the hedonistic hordes blocking Aiden’s path.
Ammunition scarcity forces players to utilize everything at their disposal, though the overzealous aim assist—which regularly snaps to single enemies when targeting explosive barrels—requires toggling off for optimal play. Aiden’s inability to vault over obstacles proves particularly frustrating, especially when precious items sit visible through open windows, yet remain inaccessible without hunting for keys to locked doors.
The stealth mechanics offer ample opportunities for creative approaches, with bricks and bottles for distractions and violent stealth kills to execute. Unfortunately, the absence of corner-peeking controls means players often get spotted when barely stepping out of cover, forcing them into guns-blazing confrontations regardless of their intended strategy.
The Genesis Configuration: A Glimmer of Innovation
What elevates Revival’s combat above mediocrity is the Genesis configuration—a powerful reimagining of the series’ iconic puzzle box. This ability grants Aiden telekinetic powers, allowing him to grab objects like conveniently placed nails and saw blades from his surroundings and hurl them at enemies with forceful blasts.
These BioShock-style superpowers tie to a suffering bar, continuously topped up by staggering enemies and performing gruesome execution moves that jam the hell-raising Rubik’s cube into their mouths and blast nine-inch nails directly into their skulls. The limitations imposed by the suffering bar prevent these supernatural abilities from making players feel overpowered, while the short timer on object suspension ensures players can’t confidently wander around with a fan blade ready to launch like in Dead Space.
Eventually, these powers expand to include fire manipulation, enabling players to shoot explosive barrels and then hoover up the resulting flames to hurl at approaching monsters. A bar-draining super move that shackles clusters of creatures together and tears them apart simultaneously provides gruesome crowd control—though it arrives too late in the story to see substantial use.
Boss Fights: Forgettable Encounters
Revival’s boss fights prove disappointingly flat for the most part. Some interesting exceptions exist—like the flying Sister of Mercy who shrouds the arena in blood mist and darts through the crimson haze, or a beast that scrambles on all fours and locks players in a cage suspended from a tree branch. These moments hint at what could have been.
Too many boss encounters, however, devolve into boring close-quarters clashes that barely raise a hair, let alone hell. A skinless freak that slides into a pool of viscera like some blood-splattered Splatoon character makes an impressive entrance but demands little strategy beyond circle-strafing and shooting until defeated—a pattern repeated when facing him again later. A slug-like Cenobite with enough arms for a group hug proves equally one-note, yet players must fight him a staggering four times throughout the journey. For all the sharp objects littering its environments, Revival’s boss fights frequently feel remarkably dull.
Puzzles: Between the Challenging and the Bizarre
The game’s puzzles typically limit themselves to tried-and-tested tasks: searching for bolt cutters to open chained gates or scouring documents for clues to four-digit keypads. However, Revival occasionally leans into its seedier and sillier side with quandaries designed to tease not just the brain but potentially other parts of the anatomy.
One memorable instance involves a latex-clad NPC requesting a treasure hunt for uncomfortable-looking toys in a bondage club. Another finds players flummoxed by a combination lock demanding they arrange the positions of various couples in an orgy. These moments make Revival feel like Resident Evil if Leon Kennedy were replaced by Leisure Suit Larry—unique, if not particularly challenging.
Derivative Design: Borrowed Without Improvement
While Revival might be sexually depraved, it’s also disappointingly deprived of interesting new gameplay ideas elsewhere. The game regularly cribs from survival horror classics without doing enough to match them, let alone improve upon them.
A cabin defense sequence reminiscent of Resident Evil 4—where Leon boards up windows and kicks down ladders as crazed villagers spill through every entry point—appears here in a much smaller single-story space that inspires considerably less panicked problem-solving. A looping household hallway straight out of P.T. makes an appearance too, minus any interesting puzzle elements or genuine terror.
Even fundamental design elements get fumbled. During one elevator sequence, after powering up the slow ascent and steeling for an inevitable fight, enemies file into the room from all corners—only for players to discover they can simply leave through the front door and gun down foes as they funnel through the exit, completely robbing the moment of its intended intensity.
The Labyrinth: A Terrifying Highlight
In occasional departures from slaughter-filled hallways of sex clubs and cult leader mansions, Aiden gets whisked away to the Labyrinth for brief breaks from combat. Though this Hellraiser-inspired maze of concrete corridors proves far more linear than it initially appears, it brilliantly captures the ominous feel of the franchise’s infamous realm of torture and pain.
From the looming Leviathan on the hellscape’s horizon to the insect-like Cenobites scattering along walls like grotesquely fleshy cockroaches, the Labyrinth initially intimidates. Every jagged surface looks capable of taking an eye out, and Revival plays clever tricks—like rearranging walls to create the sensation of being trapped inside impossible architecture.
The occasional use of telekinesis to manipulate large environmental chunks and create paths through this otherworld proves enjoyable, as does dashing past spinning instant-death traps to snare optional upgrades. However, the overused chase sequences featuring Chatterer—the Cenobite resembling windup chattering teeth smuggled inside a stretched skin suit—grow tiresome. The first pursuit gets the blood pumping, but by the third or fourth instance of sliding under the same clusters of chains and obstacles, the heart rate dips well below the speed of his perpetually pattering pearly whites.
Technical Troubles
Even when the Labyrinth’s repeat runs become monotonous, they at least function as intended. Back in the mortal realm, things don’t always go according to plan. Beyond minor bugs like enemies glitching through walls and audio dropping out during boss fights, more significant errors plague the experience.
One instance involved fighting through a cemetery to puzzle open a locked safe, only to discover no inventory space for the gun upgrade inside. After trudging back to the nearest save point to offload weapons and ammo, returning to the safe revealed it locked again with no button prompt to reopen it. Later, a safe house door somehow became stuck, open wide enough to see the merchant blinking back calmly but too narrow to actually reach her—forcing a thirty-minute stretch of scraping by with scarce ammunition through combat-heavy sections and a boss fight before reaching the next save point.
Limited Replayability
At least these problems only require suffering once. Although Revival copies plenty from better survival horror series like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, it hasn’t replicated their signature replayability. Two endings exist, but both stem from a single binary decision at the story’s climax, allowing players to reload their last save and experience both without a full second playthrough.
Regardless of which outcome players choose—the thoroughly bleak or the more optimistic—the tale closes with a Pinhead quote: “Your suffering has only just begun. We have such sights to show you.” Apparently, those sights don’t include a New Game Plus mode or any unlockables. Revival simply boots players back to the main menu with nothing extra to reward completing its story.
As someone who’s been seriously spooked by Hellraiser films since barely being tall enough to reach them on video store shelves, there’s certainly something thrilling about staring down Cenobites in Hellraiser: Revival while stalking the cold concrete chambers of the sprawling otherworld Labyrinth. The combat is derivative but solid enough to serve a satisfying amount of slaughter, and some not-safe-for-work-or-home puzzles prove memorable, if not particularly challenging.
However, Revival often struggles to sustain tension with enemy encounters easily manipulated, a story propped up by too much telling and not enough showing, and obnoxiously repeated boss fights and chase sequences that make its nine-hour runtime suffer from more bloat than Butterball’s belly. While the studded scalp of otherworld antagonist Pinhead absolutely looks the part, it’s a shame that little else in Hellraiser: Revival has been nailed to anywhere near the same extent.