I was burned alive in Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival, and I've never been so glad to suffer in a shooter

The Hellraiser horror franchise has simple rules. You should never ask for the truth unless you've prepared your mind and body to know it. Then, you must recognize the perversity of that truth: pain and pleasure are sisters. And I'm OK with that, but I was surprised to see it reiterated at Summer Game Fest 2026, while I played a demo for the upcoming torture-shooter Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival.

I don't know what else I expected. I guess I thought developer Saber Interactive would stick to typical video game conventions like most studios adapting major horror franchises do; Friday the 13th: The Game never dared to show a bit of nipple, for example, even though toplessness famously makes Jason feel extra murderous. But, no, Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival is faithful to Hellraiser writer and 1987 movie director Clive Barker, whose oeuvre of fantasy film, horror writing, and 2000s PC shooters obsesses over unctuous, black, and unspeakable things – especially if you can find them between human thighs. It's freaky incarnate, and it makes Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival better.

My Summer Game Fest demo starts somewhere in the middle, after new character and wayward sadomasochist Aidan is forced to retrieve his girlfriend Sunny from Hell. Having had enough with injectables, bad sex, and other earthly delights, Sunny did what you should really never do in the Hellraiser franchise and opened a strange puzzle box, banishing herself to the blood-drenched Labyrinth to be tied up and stripped of her flesh for all eternity. Bummer.

Good suffering

Developers Vid Rajin and Danira Karović Lačević tell me they needed vomit bags for players during a different demo session, which included a sex scene at the beginning of Hellraiser: Revival. During my time with the first-person perspective game, I never feel sick. I take stock of all the interesting ways Saber Interactive has chosen to apply leather.

True to the Hellraiser films, in which the extradimensional Cenobites summoned by the puzzle box inform clueless solvers that their suffering will be legendary, Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival clearly wants me in agony – but it expresses this with the mutilated wink of an eyeball pinned open. My demo takes place within a pleathery clubhouse, in which Aidan is in the midst of incinerating Cenobite cultists with the Genesis Configuration, an alternative puzzle to the Lament Configuration of the movies. Instead of playing an odd lullaby and opening up a portal to the sex dungeons of Hell, I discover the Genesis Configuration can swallow light and fire from nearby power sources to completely cremate my enemies. I never fully figure out how to best aim the box during my more advanced demo, though, and I'm miserable when I learn the Genesis Configuration's blast radius doesn't discriminate. When I hold it too close, it sizzles pink, orange holes into my skin and I swear I can smell burnt pork through the screen as I try to slap the fire out with my palms.

The pistol I have equipped feels practically pacifist in comparison, and I reach for it often while sneaking around the clubhouse searching for a way out, occasionally ogling posters advertising things like the Voyeur Fetish I should "CUM and SEE," or a cultist's relaxed stance in his skintight pants as he describes slicing Aidan's "cock off and [shoving] it down his throat." I get the sense that, in some circles down here in Hell, that would be considered a compliment.

But things in my Revival demo don't really get fucked until the Voyeur Fetish show. The serrated sword I carry in my Resident Evil-style inventory helps in calming my nerves, as I know that I can simply slice the forearms off anyone who approaches me with unfriendly-looking clamps. But once I'm through that red door to the show, Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival shifts into the jagged fantasy the Hellraiser movies present as being a constant presence in buttoned-up, daily life, only tucked away in the attic.

In the Fetish room, Aidan is blasted with visions of both his past and, seemingly, his future as Cenobite leader Pinhead (whose role here is reprised by the indomitable Doug Bradley) would like it. A woman – Sunny? – is suspended by chains pulled into the shape of a grotesque star; hooks pull at her lips, breasts, and stomach, encouraging various white organs to spill down her legs like exposed worms.

I'm transported into a hallway lined with more of these chains, which chime sadly and gently as they knock into Aidan's thick skull. Reality is flexible here, as it was in 1988's Hellraiser 2, which also sees its protagonist braving Hell to save the one she loves. Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival, though, is more cynical about it in this demo.

After managing not to be disemboweled by a few environmental puzzles, including a room-size Configuration box, I get trapped in Aidan's initially unremarkable house. Old post-it notes left to Sunny reveal our supposed hero's desire to poke her sensitive flesh with needles and lick up the blood, plus empty syringes, and other evidence of the numerous ways the lovers destroy themselves just to feel anything. Finally, Aidan finds Sunny, or maybe his idea of her, hogtied in their bed. Her eyes have been completely scooped out of her skull, so when he reaches his hands out to caress her mottled cheeks, a part of me expects him to press his thumb into the muddy holes left over.

I think that's because I, like all those who dared to open the box, often turn to the taboo for comfort. When you're a self-conscious person, it can be easier to place yourself among things that are already dirty and unwanted – broken porcelain and soiled dresses – instead of daring to imagine yourself as lovely, or loveable. I look to horror games to indulge in this dark sense of belonging, as my favorite characters like Alice from Alice: Madness Returns or Jennifer in Rule of Rose also inspire me to come up from the mud, at least sometimes.

So far, Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival seems poised to do the same thing, while daring to be even more explicit in its imagery – including genitals, yellow fat, crushed skulls, and other things I've never seen a rated-M game utilize for their artfulness, rather than just shock value. Through them, I think I'm starting to pick up on a message. You can try eviscerating yourself through bloodbaths and sex magic, but your soul remains intact. It'll cry and ask you why you've ignored it, but it'll still be there.

Upon realizing this, suddenly, I want to shut the demo off and make a bowl of my favorite apple cinnamon oatmeal. But, like Aidan, I instead dare to coexist with the muck I've chosen to live with. But I can tell Hellraiser: Revival has many more lessons for me once it releases in full, and I'm ready to receive.

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