Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival is Resident Evil dressed in leather

I went into my hands-on demo of Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival expecting Outlast, or at least that genre of YouTube-baity first-person horror game where you spend all of your time running and hiding in cupboards from invincible enemies. There’s a bit of that, of course – this is the 2020s – but for the most part, what I got was Resident Evil in a gimp suit. 

“Resident Evil 7, 8, and 4 were our big inspirations and references,” assistant game director Aleksandra Pelivanovic tells me during my Gamescom play session, and after playing, I have no reason to doubt. Of course, this is still Hellraiser so it has its own, well, vibe. 

Before my session began, I was sent a content warning that told me to expect explicit sex scenes and brutal violence – to expect Hellraiser, basically – and the gameplay station came kitted out with a sick bag for weak journalists. 

“We went as far as possible because we need to do justice to the franchise,” assistant game director Srdan Nedic tells me. 

“But we don’t want to put in gore and violence for the sake of it,” Pelivanovic adds. “It had to make sense to the story and franchise. There’s a meaningful message behind it but you really have to play the game to take that message. When I was researching the franchise, I realised how deep and meaningful it is about voids, filling up those voids, and inner desires.” 

It opens with a graphic S&M sex scene, with needles pushed through nipples as a man and a woman mix pain with pleasure, playing with a mysterious cube that arcs electricity between their bodies, causing them to moan in ecstasy. Until– oops, as is always the way, a portal to Hell opens and they decide to have a little wander inside. This liminal space – cold and brutalist – promises carnal pleasures beyond understanding, so the woman heads off and leaves the guy you play as cuckolded by a corridor. 

This stone labyrinth of chains, meathooks, and spikes is instantly familiar to anyone born in the ‘80s to parents who saw movie age ratings as a maximum. Pinhead is here, the Chatterer is here, your childhood trauma buried deep in your subconscious is here, in this horrible concrete dungeon filled with creatures with too many limbs, like spiders stitched together from a human jigsaw puzzle. 

You play as a generic man called Aidan Lynch, an enforcer for a biker gang who’s too dumb to be scared, and you spend most of the game’s opening 30 minutes completely in the buff. Once you escape the other world, things don’t get much better — Aidan is captured and drugged by members of the Scarlet Church, sadists and masochists who covet the cube. He’s still nude. 

The developers say the game is split 60/40 between the real-world and the labyrinth, favouring the real world for pacing reasons. The demo was split 60/40 between nude and not nude, in favour of nude. 

When you wake up, you’re still very nude. You’re also pinned to a chair by meat hooks, stitches, and nails, which you have to pull out when you’re left alone, leaving you staring directly at your blood slug. If there’s some kind of record for most peen time in a game opening, Hellraiser: Revival’s probably got it. 

Once you free yourself and your willy from the chair, you’re soon whisked back away to that other place, where you’re chased by the Chatterer. This plays out exactly how I expected the entire game to be. You’re defenseless and lost, forced to run, changing direction when it teleports in front of you. If it gets close, you die a horrible death. But what comes after took me completely by surprise. You get clothes! Sorry, it’s something else really. 

Hellraiser: Revival features grimy first-person melee combat that reminds me of Condemned: Criminal Origins — that’s the something. You use blunt weapons like pipes and bats against armour, and sharp weapons like knives against flesh. There’s stealth, allowing you to slip past enemies unnoticed or get the drop on them and stick them in the neck. There are also guns and limited ammo, moving it much closer to a traditional survival horror game than I expected, and you can find currency to spend on items and upgrades. 

“You get a bunch of firearms and other weapons,” Nedic says. “You get the abilities with the cube as well, and that really empowers the player. You can manipulate sharp objects, chains, and other forces. There is a lot of player agency in the gameplay – you can sneak, you can use powers, you can use melee, ranged.” 

Until I see how all those mechanics play out across the entire game, it’s hard to say how successful it’ll be, but it’s got its hooks in me enough to want to see more.