Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival review: "Pinhead's return is glorious – this is a true love letter to the original movies"

Early on in Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival, as I try to escape a torture dungeon full of mangled victims with only a plank of wood for protection, a huge man in tough leather stomps towards me, calling me "vanilla" as he shrugs off my hits. In a way, he's not wrong. While the violent adventure protagonist Aiden Lynch is thrust into is filled with extreme gore and upsetting imagery, its core combat is fairly basic. Enemies take hits until eventually keeling over on the spot, and guns I pick up later feel like peashooters.

Then I get my hands back on the Genesis Configuration, the mysterious puzzle box that led to me being kidnapped in the first place (after my girlfriend Sunny is summoned through an impossible gateway in our bedroom mid-coitus), and the whirring mechanism that is Hellraiser: Revival begins to reshape, shift, and slot into place.

Such sights

With Cenobite Hell Priest 'Pinhead' (voiced by original actor Doug Bradley) and his crew's pain-dimension antics serving as an enigmatic third-party, and themes that revolve around the arrogance of humans and boundary pushing without demonizing fetishes, Revival feels true to the spirit of Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart novella, and the original Hellraiser movies. Ditching the direct-to-video sequels that turned the Cenobites into simplistic slasher villains, it's great to see the nuance and complexity of their torturous machinations return. This isn't just a great Hellraiser game, but a great continuation of Hellraiser across any medium.

Even so, there's no escaping it – Hellraiser: Revival is still a horror-themed action game that has to take Aiden through a sequence of bloodsoaked combat rooms. Yet, an increasing number of toys, from propelling flames towards enemies or flinging metal saws across the room to decapitate foes Gravity Gun-style, keep action interesting. There's a Condemned: Criminal Origins-like grottiness and emphasis on melee combat. If an Xbox 360 crackled with the blue electrical energy that marks a Cenobite visitation, this would be the result.

While fights could use more impact, and finisher animations are somewhat limited, there are still moments that impress, whether that's cutting off the limb of a human enemy and having them begin to bleed out before instantly collapsing, or switching to a baseball bat to batter armor away, exposing flesh to damage. Eventual supernatural threats, the shambling Unworthy, even offer Doom-like health restoration if you get close enough to finish them off with your Genesis cube once they're staggered.

Gore in combat is one thing – who hasn't lopped off limbs in a game before? – even if the occasional opportunity to command the Hellraiser series' iconic hook-chains is a novelty. But, Hellraiser: Revival ratchets up to another level in set-dressing and cutscenes. This is undoubtedly one of the most explicit games I've ever played, with scenes ranging from flaying to body-ripping and stomach-churning flesh statues. One primary antagonist has shades of Bioshock's Sander Cohen about him, but here his flesh artistry is truly sickening to observe.

Many moments are direct callbacks to the original Hellraiser movies as well, though arguably have more impact as, here, completely digital, there's no blurred line between real and practical effect. Hellraiser: Revival has plenty of new sights to show you as well. It's almost the game's mission to ensure you find something stomach churning. (I'm avoiding showing too much in the screenshots here).

After fighting my way through this cult's basement, solving the odd puzzle to progress, I emerge into a thriving sex nightclub that serves as the organization's front. The standard club goers here are innocents, just looking for a place to have a good time, while the Cenobite-worshipping cult are essentially posers who use the guise of BDSM to prey on the vulnerable, who mask their sex club in positive, consent-forward posters until one step into the VIP section they're replaced with banners hailing their prophet.

As always with Hellraiser, villainous depravity is dialed up to 11, but there's truth in how Hellraiser: Revival tackles the subculture its themes are rooted in, and how bad actors can hide their own selfish abuse behind rhetoric. Count yourself lucky if you've never crossed paths with someone like that.

Thankfully, Pinhead has just as little time for the cult as Aiden does – though more out of a bored apathy that its leaders think they can match the Cenobites' freak – sending you on a collision course to take out them out in exchange for favors from Leviathan's labyrinthine realm.

While, as a game rooted in combat sequences, the focus is often on meting out ironic punishment against enactors of abuse, there are some surprising moments of sweetness. One early, short scene has Aiden talking frankly about consent boundaries with a patron at the club as he searches for a keycard. Likewise, on his quest to revive Sunny from the Hell-like Labyrinth, Pinhead emphasizes to Aiden that she entered the pain dimension of her own consensual volition and that, if resurrected, she has just as much free will to leave Aiden again if she wishes.

Demons to some

Plumbing the cult's base of operations for clues, and exploring the Labyrinth and its nightmarish reflections on reality, Hellraiser: Revival effectively explores objectification, control, and consent in relationships more responsibly than a lot of other games would dream of. For all its shocking violent imagery, Hellraiser: Revival can also be thematically mature. It's clear Saber Interactive really understands what sets Hellraiser's original entries apart from the horror competition. The story itself has been worked on collaboratively with Hellraiser's creator Clive Barker, and it shows. In that respect, this a much better resurrection of the Cenobites than the flashy but shallow Brucker-directed 2022 Hellraiser reboot.

This sense of purpose helps make the gore that litters the cult's compound feel more than pure shock value – though in Hellraiser the shock is part of the point too. Exploring denser, lively environments is where Hellraiser: Revival shines, such as poking around a deranged artist's workshop (and occasionally bopping enemies that emerge from Iron Maidens), or tracking down a ticket to gain entry to a peep show. Detours through sewers and woods are less interesting, though, thankfully, don't overstay their welcome.

Between gunning through these locations, Aiden finds himself intermittently visiting the Labyrinth realm from which the Cenobites hail. Filled with tight, claustrophobic tunnels, and clever use of quick-loads to create impossible geometry and decoy dead ends, these excursions feel true to the movies – Hellraiser 2 especially – while also making creative use of the digital medium.

No combat ever occurs in the Labyrinth, but there is danger. Sequences where Chatterer – the teeth-chattering, mouth-flayed creature – pursues you by walking menacingly towards you and teleporting around are nice and tense without being too demanding, the slight increase in pressure amplifying the disorientation of the maze to great effect. Sliding under hallway block death-chains to get away feels humorously like Call of Duty's omnimovement, and it's not long before I'm taking my traversal skills outside the Labyrinth to stunt on shotgun-wielding enemies back in the real world.

Light puzzling also exists here, but is thankfully not obtrusive. When it's revealed that the Genesis Configuration can move platforms at a distance and transfer fire between sconces, I worried that these would get in the way – the last thing I want is Pinhead tutorializing me on environmental puzzles – but they don't appear too often.

Snappy as good horror should be, Hellraiser: Revival took me just under 9 hours to beat, and never kept me in one place for too long. Despite some maps and number pad puzzles that give the impression of Resident Evil-like spaces, this is much more linear and keeps moving rapidly, always changing up the types of spaces and action you're doing even if combat does loom larger than I'd like, and I spend a touch too long juggling my limited inventory space between bullets and bandages.

Only during some so-so boss battles and fiddly insta-fail stealth sections do I start to get restless, but even these are infrequent. I even find myself invested in the narrative right up until the credits drop (which feature an unmissable, diabolical, and utterly iconic music remix I won't spoil here but had me cheering out loud). My horror gaming besties know that's a rare treat indeed, and it's a game I'm still turning in my (pin)head even now.

Rarely subtle, Hellraiser: Revival's rawness is truly shocking, but what's stuck with me more than the sights of sculpted, twisted muscles are the stories behind them. For a game based on Clive Barker's work (seriously, read the Books of Blood if you haven't), that's the right place to land. This is a pain that lingers.

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