Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival Demo Is Resident Evil After a BDSM Incident
The free Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival demo is worth playing, mostly because Saber Interactive seems to understand the one thing you absolutely cannot fuck up with a Hellraiser game:
It needs to be deeply unpleasant.
Not bad unpleasant. Hellraiser unpleasant.
The demo released on Steam on September 17 and contains the full Prologue and part of Episode 1. You get the Labyrinth, the Scarlet Church, puzzles, crafting, combat and an introduction to what the Genesis Configuration will eventually become. This is explicitly a pre-release build, progress doesn't carry over, and it's nowhere near enough game to review the thing.
But it is enough to answer the question I actually care about right now.
Did Saber make a Hellraiser game, or Resident Evil wearing Pinhead's skin?
So far, surprisingly, it looks like Hellraiser.
Want more horror where touching the obviously cursed object remains an important gameplay decision? Head into our Horror Games coverage and see what else is trying to ruin your evening.
Thank Christ they didn't make Hellraiser respectable
There are several ways to completely misunderstand Hellraiser.
The easiest is to think it's about Pinhead.
He's obviously the face everyone recognises, but Hellraiser is much weirder than “scary bald man with nails in his head.” It's pain, pleasure, obsession, flesh, curiosity and people opening things that quite clearly should remain fucking closed.
Seriously.
Look at the puzzle box.
Nothing about it says complimentary chocolates.
Yet here we are again.
Revival follows Aidan and his girlfriend Sunny after they get involved with the Genesis Configuration. Sunny ends up in the Labyrinth, Aidan follows her, and the evening deteriorates from there.
More importantly, Saber doesn't seem interested in sanding the franchise down until it becomes acceptable mainstream horror.
Steam's own content warning reads like somebody lost control of a particularly worrying shopping list: strong violence, gore, torture, consensual mutilation, sexual content, BDSM themes and suicide. Earlier hands-on coverage also pointed towards the game embracing the grotesque, erotic and sadomasochistic side of Barker's universe.
Good.
Because you could very easily make a mechanically decent Hellraiser game that has absolutely nothing to do with Hellraiser beyond the licence.
Put Pinhead at the end of a corridor. Give me a shotgun. Scatter some keys around a hospital. Maybe have somebody whisper something about suffering every fifteen minutes.
There.
Resident Evil: Extremely Uncomfortable Leather Edition.
Revival appears to have bigger ambitions than that.
Underneath all the flesh, there is quite a lot of Resident Evil
This is where I become slightly more cautious.
Strip away the Cenobites, chains and inadvisable puzzle-box ownership and there's a very familiar survival-horror game underneath.
You explore. You find locked areas. You solve environmental puzzles. You collect things. There are firearms and melee weapons. There is crafting.
Earlier hands-on coverage compared parts of it quite directly to modern Resident Evil, right down to searching rooms for items and figuring out how to get into places the game currently doesn't want you entering.
And that's fine.
I actually think “Resident Evil but Hellraiser” could be fucking magnificent.
The problem is if the Hellraiser part ends at the wallpaper.
Which is why the Genesis Configuration interests me more than Pinhead does.
Saber says the full game expands its powers alongside weapons, upgrades and more complicated puzzles. We've also seen it used as an actual mechanic in earlier hands-on builds, manipulating the environment and even pulling fire from nearby sources to throw at enemies.
Now we're getting somewhere.
I don't want the most famous object in Hellraiser to become a fancy key.
This thing has spent decades demonstrating that interacting with it is a catastrophic life choice. Using it should feel useful enough that I want to touch it and questionable enough that some small surviving part of my brain is going:
Maybe stop touching the evil sex-dimension Rubik's Cube.
That relationship could be the thing that makes Revival its own game.
Because shotguns are shotguns. We've done shotguns.
A supernatural puzzle box that gives you power while belonging to a universe where “pleasure” and “having most of your skin attached” are apparently negotiable concepts?
More of that, please.
If Hellraiser has you wondering what other games let terrible people make even worse decisions, enter our Playable Villains hub. Morality has already left the building.
The Labyrinth could also become a massive pain in the arse
There is one thing I'm watching carefully.
Earlier GameSpot hands-on found a Labyrinth chase sequence confusing and frustrating. The environment shifts around you, navigation becomes difficult, mistakes can kill you and a Cenobite can apparently turn up ahead of you.
Which is wonderfully Hellraiser.
It's also potentially fucking annoying.
There is a very small distance between:
THIS PLACE DEFIES HUMAN COMPREHENSION
and
WHERE THE FUCK DOES THE GAME WANT ME TO GO?
The first is cosmic horror.
The second is me staring at the same wall for the fourth time wondering whether I've missed some yellow paint.
And this is exactly the sort of thing that can work beautifully for ten minutes and become unbearable if the game keeps reaching for it. The Labyrinth should make you feel lost. It probably shouldn't make you feel like you've arrived late at IKEA and they've started rearranging the building around you.
Combat raises a similar question.
Earlier hands-on impressions found conventional weapons could leave enemies feeling a little too durable. If that's deliberate because the Genesis Configuration is supposed to become the interesting tactical option, I'm listening.
If Cenobites eventually just require fourteen shotgun shells because somebody increased a health value, I'm considerably less interested.
There's only so long something remains terrifying while you're repeatedly shooting it in the face.
Eventually you're doing accounting.
People seem to be responding to it
The early Steam reaction is very strong.
At the time we checked, the demo was sitting at 95% positive from hundreds of user reviews.
That's encouraging. It is also a free demo that has existed for about five minutes, so I'm not building a cathedral around the number yet.
There are already criticisms around combat, AI and the chase design, alongside praise for the atmosphere, body horror and Labyrinth. That's useful to know, but it's nowhere near mature consensus.
And I think the bigger question only becomes answerable after several hours anyway.
Can Revival keep being Hellraiser?
Making twenty or thirty minutes of Hellraiser is relatively easy.
Make everything disgusting. Put chains everywhere. Have something walk into frame that would cause an immediate investigation at any normal hospital.
Done.
Keeping that feeling alive across an entire videogame is harder.
Eventually I understand the controls.
Eventually I know what the monster does.
Eventually the horrifying corpse becomes that corpse beside the room with the ammunition.
And eventually, because videogames cannot help themselves, I will probably start looking at some nightmare creature from beyond human understanding and wondering how many crafting materials it's worth.
That's the real danger here.
Horror games slowly teach us how their horror works.
Hellraiser really shouldn't become comfortable.
From serial killers to supernatural nightmares, CRIMENET’s Horror Games coverage is where we keep the things that probably shouldn't be allowed near daylight. Continue at your own psychological expense.
So, does Hellraiser: Revival actually feel like Hellraiser?
Yes. From what we can judge right now, it does.
More importantly, Saber seems to understand that Hellraiser has to exist in the mechanics as well as the art direction.
The imagery is there. The Labyrinth is there. The weird collision between pain, pleasure and curiosity is there. And the Genesis Configuration looks like it could become something you actually build your play around instead of a famous prop somebody occasionally holds up for the trailer.
Underneath all of that is a much more familiar survival-horror game.
That's the bit I want to test properly.
Because if those two things fuse, this could be one of the more interesting horror games of the year.
If they don't, we'll have Resident Evil wearing Pinhead's skin.
Which, admittedly, I would still play.
But I'd know.
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