Hellraiser: Revival marks the return of one of the great horror franchises of the 1980s as a single-player game. It features one of the greatest horror icons of all time.
I’m sitting here shoveling my lunch into the engine room when a message from editor-in-chief Heiko pops up on Microsoft Teams: Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival on your radar?” In my email inbox: a press release and red band trailer for a brand new single-player horror game from Saber Interactive.
And I wish I had waited until after lunch to look at it. There’s body horror, meat hooks, a little cuddling, then more meat hooks – and, of course, Zenobites who will accept any gruesome disfigurement in order to experience even more pleasurable pain.
You have no idea what I’m talking about? Then you were probably born sometime after the 90s or avoided the 1987 horror classic Hellraiser for other reasons. Let’s quickly go over the most important new features of the game and its background.
What is Hellraiser: Revival?
So, there was a time when Hellraiser was one of the biggest names in horror cinema, shoulder to shoulder with Halloween, Friday the 13th, Freddy Krueger, and Evil Dead. The first film, released in 1987, was adapted from a novel by Clive Barker and catapulted Pinhead straight to the pedestal of horror icons, even though the cult character with nails in his head only had a supporting role at the time.
Pinhead is the leader of the Zenobites. Roughly speaking, they are followers of pain who are so eager for torment that they use occult powers to achieve it. That’s why Zenobites are usually completely disfigured, stapling their own lips to their cheeks and so on. And the main characters in the Hellraiser stories always end up on the end of meat hooks somehow.
It’s no different in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival. Here are the most important facts about the game:
- You take on the role of a guy named Aidan who has to rescue his girlfriend from the depths of hell.
- Aidan uses the powers of the mysterious puzzle box, which in all the films in the series is actually used to summon the Cenobites.
- In the trailer, Aidan also fights with more traditional melee and ranged weapons, so we’re dealing with survival horror where you do more than just run away.
- The legendary Doug Bradley returns to the role of Pinhead, having last played the character in 2005. Super cool!
Hellraiser: Revival will be released for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5, but there is no specific release date yet. The first trailer definitely doesn’t promise horror for the faint of heart, but in my opinion, it captures the aesthetic of the original very well, which is a pretty unique mix of occultism, 80s fantasy, and BDSM subculture.
I’m very curious to see whether Hellraiser will get the sequel we were denied in the cinema in the form of a video game. There’s a frustrating reason why the series is almost irrelevant today: the ten or so sequels are so bad on average that even Pinhead can’t save them.