Angels to some, demons to others
Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival opens with a spicy scene of lovemaking between the protagonist, Aidan Lynch, and his girlfriend, Sunny. After trying many ways to combine pleasure with pain, the couple decides to experiment with a mysterious box that delivers electric shocks and leaves cuts on the body. But this is not a sex toy at all, but the Genesis Configuration — an artifact capable of opening gates to the Labyrinth, the otherworldly realm of the Cenobites, whose ideas of pain and pleasure go far beyond human comprehension.
The uninvited guests don't keep them waiting. The Cenobites offer Sunny, who opened the box, a reward — “eternal pleasure.” The girl agrees, after which she is hung on hooks and literally torn to pieces. Aidan, horrified, rushes to save his beloved, but a blow from one of the signature hooks sends him into oblivion.
Waking up, the hero finds himself captive to the followers of the Scarlet Church — a sect of deranged fanatics who are also hunting for the Configuration and yearn to comprehend the secrets of transcendent sensations. Escaping their clutches, Aidan resolves to get Sunny back at all costs, making a deal with the Cenobites themselves. Thus begins his journey through the most vile corners of human and otherworldly realms.
When the creators of another film adaptation or game adaptation announce the participation of the original author, it often means only one thing: they were given a stack of crisp bills, their name was placed in the credits, and that was it. However, with Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival, it's different. Clive Barker's name is prominently displayed right on the cover, and the writer himself helped the team determine the creative direction of the game in the early stages of development.
And the result is evident! Saber Interactive carefully recreated and developed the aesthetics of the first Hellraiser films, showing in full detail what filmmakers of the eighties could only dream of.
You can see this in the very first minutes of Aidan's stay in the Labyrinth — the otherworldly realm of the Cenobites, over which a giant rhomboid Leviathan towers. The brutalist architecture is striking in its scale, and the endless, constantly reconfiguring corridors of cold stone, entwined with vines and strewn with deadly spikes, cause bouts of claustrophobia.
At the same time, if you don't count the traps, the Labyrinth is relatively safe. At least, until you have to run from the Chatterer — an unkillable Cenobite who, even after rebirth, retained the habits of a teenager and therefore loves to play tag with Aidan.
In addition to the Chatterer, other iconic Cenobites from the first Hellraiser films appear in the game: the bulky Butterball with stitched eyes hidden behind black glasses, the former nun with a “deep throat,” and, of course, Pinhead himself, for whose voice acting the incomparable Doug Bradley was once again brought in.
His deep, imperturbable voice literally presses you to the ground, making you feel your own insignificance before this majestic being. When Pinhead utters the iconic phrase “Demons to some, angels to others,” explaining to a bewildered Aidan who the Cenobites are, the tone alone makes it clear: these creatures have become so enlightened in their understanding of the universe that it's as if they have lived for a hundred trillion billion years... In short, for them, our mortal world is simple and clear, and human perception of reality is constrained by the scarcity of imagination and fear of the unknown.
Although the followers of the Scarlet Church would probably argue with the latter: in their attempts to comprehend transcendent pleasures, they show enviable ingenuity. When Aidan is captured by them, he is nailed to a chair and his right hand is sewn to his stomach, and then the player has to tear the stitches himself to free him. Just the sight of this makes you involuntarily cringe, but for the local craftsmen, such torments are just a light warm-up.
In the sect's domain, dirty slums and cluttered warehouses coexist with medical offices and torture chambers, and living quarters resemble dens. Everywhere you look, there are bodies sewn together, human remains used to construct bizarre art objects, and stumps of limbs sticking out of a giant meat grinder.
Of course, all this meaty aesthetic coexists with carnal pleasures. While making his way through the catacombs of the Scarlet Church, Aidan at some point opens “the wrong door” and finds himself in a BDSM club, where life is in full swing: someone is vomiting in the toilet, someone is secluded in private rooms, and on the dance floor, to the otherworldly beat of a remixed track “Sexual Purity” by The Room, silhouettes in latex suits writhe.
Here, for the first time in a long time, no one tries to kill the hero. On the contrary, the developers offer a small respite: to move forward, you need to find a spreader, a paddle, and other accessories for the very specific entertainment of one of the visitors. Although, compared to the cultists who promise to copulate with Aidan's entrails as soon as he is killed, the amusements of this lady seem, shall we say, completely harmless.
The developers masterfully throw in one memorable scene after another, especially in the first hours of the adventure. Moreover, the entire effect is often achieved solely through competent direction — I must admit, I did not expect such attention to the staging of individual episodes. For example, Aidan crawls under the floor when someone above his head throws a corpse onto a grate with monstrous force. It cannot withstand the impact, and blood floods the hero's face, and the entire screen.
In another episode, we watch a maniac dismember a tied-up girl. While Aidan cautiously moves from one cover to another, the tormentor finishes his bloody work, throws severed hands right at the hero's feet, and then begins to waltz around the room, giving him the opportunity to discreetly approach the victim and retrieve the necessary key.
Of course, all this is scripted. But how well it works! The maniac doesn't just finish his animation and go around the corner, clearing the way for the player, but continues to play out the scene while we act within it. Such details create a sense of continuity of what is happening, and at the same time fuel curiosity: what else will the developers come up with?
Of course, such directorial finds are not found at every turn. Revival does not try to turn into a continuous cinematic horror adventure, and the plot here, let's say, is uncomplicated. The story is presented in ways familiar to the genre: through dialogues, notes, audio diaries of deranged cultists, and flashbacks that shed light on the unsavory pages of Aidan's past and the details of his relationship with Sunny. But even if all this ultimately serves only as an excuse to go in search of another monster to kill, it should not be forgotten: the first Hellraiser films were also loved by viewers not for the intricacies of the plot.
A junkyard of familiar ideas
While Revival's splatterpunk and body horror aesthetics are perfectly fine, the gameplay raises many more questions. At its core, it's a traditional survival horror game, with a particularly strong influence from Resident Evil 4. Aidan explores locations, searches for keys and passwords, solves puzzles (so primitive that I don't even want to dwell on them), collects supplies along the way, and periodically fends off local inhabitants who don't miss an opportunity to remind him what they're going to do to him after death.
Found items have to be placed in a limited inventory, turning them this way and that to fit more loot. To increase capacity, you need to find additional bags, and unwanted valuables can be sold to Zora Beckett — a local merchant whose assortment gradually expands with new weapons, upgrades, consumables, and crafting recipes. A familiar scheme? There's more to come! Revival even has an episode where Aidan is trapped in a house besieged by monsters and has to hastily board up windows to hold them back.
But the developers' sources of inspiration are not limited to Resident Evil 4. Such borrowings themselves don't bother me at all, especially when it comes to some of my favorite games. The only question is how cleverly the developers use other people's ideas. Revival already has problems with this: sometimes it seems that they decided to cram everything the authors ever liked in other horror games into this one, without always paying enough attention to the implementation of these ideas.
The local combat system is based on a combination of gunfights and melee. Aidan can wield knives, clubs, and other improvised means, dodging enemy attacks with sharp dashes. The choice of melee weapon plays an important role — bladed weapons cut flesh well and cause bleeding, but are poor against armor, which local enemies clearly don't disdain. Therefore, it is advisable to always have something heavy and crushing with you to first break through the defense, and then switch to a blade and finish off the poor fellow. It would seem a simple system, but it at least makes you think before indiscriminately swinging the first piece of iron you find.
The only problem is that heavy clubs take up an indecent amount of space in the cramped inventory and break easily, forcing you to carry a repair kit or a spare weapon. And then there's firearms! A shotgun with a pack of cartridges alone takes up 16 cells — a quarter of the inventory even after maximum expansion, and even more in the early stages. And that's not counting first aid kits, bandages, and other good stuff. At the same time, you can't limit yourself to one weapon: shooting armored enemies with a submachine gun is expensive and stupid, as is wasting a shotgun blast on a monster that only needs one pistol bullet.
As a result, the inventory is constantly packed to the brim, and the game constantly presents you with idiotic choices: abandon found treasures that can be profitably sold, or throw away something useful. And I haven't even mentioned how much time I spent on fascinating manipulations with cartridges.
When there's no space in the inventory, to pick up found ammunition, you first have to drop your weapon on the floor, then pick up the cartridges, reload, and only then return the dropped item to its place. Couldn't they have allowed you to load an empty magazine immediately, without all this circus? The problem is far from unique to the genre, but I don't think I'll ever get tired of complaining about it.
If you distract yourself from the endless fuss with inventory, the battles themselves turned out to be quite tolerable. This is not the case when throughout the game you want to spit from the mere necessity of engaging in combat. Melee skirmishes are quite lively: Aidan's stamina is unlimited, so you can dodge attacks as much as you like. True, hitboxes don't always match what you see on the screen, and weapon strikes sometimes don't feel at all as expected.
Gunfights also don't reach for the stars — especially when you encounter an armored opponent with only a pistol in hand — but they can't be called frankly boring either. At least because enemies sometimes try to simulate having brains: cultists don't mindlessly rush into bullets, but take cover, cautiously shoot from doorways, and try to get out of the line of fire. Losing Aidan from sight, they can even send one of their own to check the situation or try to flank the hero, instead of rushing in a crowd to search.
If desired, most battles can be avoided altogether by using stealth. It's basic here: Aidan can crouch, hide in the dark and bushes, and distract enemies with stones, bottles, and kicks to red barrels — explosive ones, of course. Cultists react to the crunch of broken glass underfoot and discovered corpses, and in general often demonstrate keen hearing. For example, if you quietly finish off one opponent while another is in the same room, the latter will hear the commotion and rush to attack. But the artificial intelligence works inconsistently: sometimes you can kill one enemy after another, and no one will even bat an eye, which gives the impression that the intelligence was distributed to the local perverts randomly.
Suffering and a little “Delight”
So far, we've mostly talked about cultists, but they're not the only enemies. There are also the so-called unworthy — people who, in their attempts to partake in the pleasures of the Cenobites, have turned into mindless, rotting pieces of flesh. These charge head-on, completely disregarding their own safety. In battles with them, an additional mechanic appears — banishment using the Genesis Configuration. To do this, you need to stun the monster, approach it, and plunge the box directly into its body, thereby finishing off the creature and restoring Aidan's health. The problem is that when the unworthy attack in a crowd, it's not always convenient to get close to a stunned enemy — more often I just finished them off with regular attacks.
For most of the playthrough, the developers skillfully shuffle gameplay situations, keeping things interesting: a little exploration of locations, fending off enemies, sneaking past cultists, solving a simple puzzle, watching another gruesome scene — and so on in a loop, with varying proportions and combinations.
But closer to the finale, this balance is disrupted: the game literally starts to suffocate with the number of enemies, artificially prolonging the playthrough. Ammunition and resources for crafting them are often insufficient to shoot down this entire horde, so you have to run around the arenas like crazy, trying to stab another creature with a knife or use anything from the environment.
And yet, the developers even tried to diversify battles by interacting with the environment, creating a kind of BioShock on minimal settings. In addition to banishing the unworthy, the Genesis Configuration allows Aidan to use telekinesis, throwing objects at enemies, flinging fire at them, and even shackling entire groups of enemies in infernal chains, tearing them apart.
Using abilities consumes a resource called “suffering,” but the irony is that it's primarily the player who suffers here: telekinesis only works with certain objects, which may not be nearby, and fire can primarily be drawn from braziers. As a result, these abilities have to be used not when you want to, but only when the developers deign to provide such an opportunity.
In addition, Aidan can find or craft gasoline canisters and bear traps, giving enemies a warm welcome. However, setting up traps takes so much time that it's often easier to die in combat first and remember where enemies will come from, so that on the next attempt you can set everything up in advance. This approach seriously breaks the pace, so after a couple of experiments, I decided it was easier not to bother with traps at all.
And the longer I played, the more I wished the developers had focused on aggressive action. It would have been enough to remove the need to repair melee weapons after every second monster killed and allow Aidan to instantly close in on stunned enemies for banishment, much like in DOOM: The Dark Ages — and the battles would immediately become much more dynamic. And if the Genesis Configuration's abilities didn't depend on the presence of suitable objects in the environment, it would be absolutely wonderful. You could boldly rush into the thick of battle, hack monsters, and restore health with spectacular finishers, leaving gunfights and cautious stealth for encounters with armed cultists.
But these are ideas for a sequel, and for now, let's talk about the most intense episodes of the game. Chapters conclude differently: sometimes you have to fight bosses, sometimes hide from invincible monsters, and sometimes flee. Among these episodes, there are both successful and frankly tedious ones.
For example, the endless skirmishes with the armored Squeezer, whose arms you have to shoot off, got quite tiresome, especially in the final third of the game. Battles with Bruno, who transforms into a pool of blood, also didn't evoke much delight. However, the fight with the Nurse turned out to be engaging, and the final battle doesn't boil down to the usual shooting of growths according to Resident Evil's tenets. In addition, you have to actively use the environment: telekinetically move rotating structures with spikes and collapse structures suspended from the ceiling onto the boss.
There were also three episodes with mandatory stealth. The best of them is the last one, where you have to use the Genesis Configuration to hide from the all-seeing eye of Leviathan. In the other two, it's enough to throw bottles and wait for the boss to get distracted.
But my favorite episodes — who would have thought — were the ordinary chases through the Labyrinth, during which the Chatterer hunts Aidan. This bastard can teleport right in front of your nose, forcing you to instantly turn around, slide under chains on the run, and sometimes even control structures with telekinesis to clear your path. Some chases were so intense that I wanted to pause the game and catch my breath. At the same time, the developers stopped in time: as soon as I thought that there was enough running, the game itself found a plot explanation for why there would be no more chases.
The devil is in the details
But where the developers managed to surprise me no less than with the visual aesthetics and atmosphere, it was in optimization. On my PC with a GeForce RTX 4070 Super, Ryzen 5 7500F, and 32 GB of RAM, the game with DLSS in “Quality” mode delivered over 120 frames per second at 1440p resolution even without frame generation. And throughout the twelve-plus hours of gameplay, I didn't encounter a single bug!
If that hasn't impressed you yet, I'll reveal my cards: the game runs on Unreal Engine 5 and looks great. Not AAA blockbuster level, of course, but very decent. Moreover, the modest budget reveals not so much the quality of the graphics as the repetitive environmental elements, primitive physics, and less detailed models of ordinary enemies — but the Cenobites and main characters are worked out perfectly.
And, of course, the music! Oh, that infernal music! Almost every significant location, like most bosses, boasts its own recognizable theme that firmly embeds itself in your subconscious. I still get shivers from the Chatterer's theme, even when I listen to it separately from the game: the sound of his footsteps immediately comes to mind, and — what's much scarier — the ominous clacking of his jaws. The soundtrack masterfully builds anxiety, making you nervous even in relatively calm moments, and in combination with Clive Barker's impeccably embodied aesthetics, it creates an atmosphere you don't want to leave, no matter how disgusting everything around you is.
Verdict
Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival is a game I'm willing to forgive much more than most modern horrors. Everything it offers in terms of gameplay we've already seen in other horrors, often with better execution. And there's plenty to criticize: simple linear locations, puzzles just for show, an inconvenient inventory, questionable economy, and a combat system that clearly could use a bit more “breathing room.”
But I wouldn't call Revival bad or, God forbid, mediocre! In terms of gameplay, in my opinion, it's several heads above Silent Hill: Townfall, and it costs one and a half times less, and it delivers much more impressions! After all, the developers from Saber Serbia and Saber Bosnia and Herzegovina managed to do what, it seems, no one in the modern industry would dare to do: embody the aesthetics of Hellraiser in all its disgusting beauty, uncompromising cruelty, and twisted understanding of pleasure. In my opinion, this is not only the best interactive adaptation of Clive Barker's universe but also the best thing that has come out under the Hellraiser banner since the first two films. Moreover, if someone asked me today where to start getting acquainted with Hellraiser, I would unhesitatingly recommend the game.
The art team at Saber Interactive created a true masterpiece, and the game designers were just a little short of bringing the gameplay up to the same level. Now I sincerely want to see what the studio will achieve if next time it devotes as much attention and creative ingenuity to gameplay as it does to all sorts of ways of tormenting human flesh.