Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival Demo Is Resident Evil After a BDSM Incident
Updated: Sep 23
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.
We now have a much better idea of how much machinery is hiding underneath all the exposed machinery. Saber’s latest gameplay overview shows a proper survival-horror loop built around melee weapons, firearms, dodging, scavenging ammunition and healing supplies, laying traps and bartering for upgrades. There are also different enemy types including Cultists, Runners, Bursters and the Unworthy, so this doesn't appear to be a case of repeatedly feeding shotgun shells into Greg from Hell until he agrees to fall over.
None of those systems individually reinvent survival horror. In fact, assembled on a table they look suspiciously like Resident Evil has emptied its pockets at airport security.
But they make the Genesis Configuration considerably more interesting, because the box now sits inside an actual combat economy rather than floating above the game as the Special Licensed Franchise Button.
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.
We already knew Saber intended it to be more than a fancy key. Now the shape of the system is much clearer.
The box can hurl objects at enemies and pull fire from the environment to burn them. Killing and executing enemies generates Suffering, which feeds its supernatural abilities, eventually letting Aidan unleash the Hell Chains.
So there's an actual loop hiding inside the expensive Rubik’s Cube from Hell:
hurt horrible thing --> collect its Suffering --> use suffering to perform increasingly unreasonable supernatural violence.
That is much more interesting.
Because suddenly the box isn't merely another weapon competing with the shotgun. It's potentially the thing tying the combat together. Guns, melee weapons and traps keep you alive, while the Genesis Configuration turns the suffering you create into another resource.
Which is also magnificently Hellraiser when you think about it. Most videogames reward murder with XP, ammunition or seventeen identical wolf pelts. Hellraiser apparently looks at the entire concept of human agony and says: yes, but could we make it a currency?
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 increasingly looks like the thing that could make Revival its own game.
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 still raises a question, although it isn't quite the same question I had before.
Earlier hands-on impressions made me wonder whether ordinary enemies were simply going to absorb too much conventional damage. The new overview makes the intended structure look more tactical than that. You have dodging, breakable or limited resources, traps, different enemy types, firearms, melee weapons and the Genesis Configuration all competing for your attention.
That's encouraging because survival horror becomes considerably more interesting when “shoot it again” stops being the solution to every administrative problem.
We've also seen that encounters don't necessarily have to become straight fights. Earlier preview footage showed stealth kills, environmental hazards and simply avoiding enemies as possible options. Meanwhile the box can turn nearby objects and fire into weapons.
The unanswered question is whether all of that remains genuinely tactical once you've learned the rules.
If Cultists, Runners, Bursters and the Unworthy actually make me change how I fight, excellent.
If they're four differently dressed gentlemen requiring slightly different quantities of ammunition, we're back to supernatural bookkeeping.
I want Hellraiser to make me uncomfortable.
I do not want to become Pinhead's accounts department.
People seem to be responding to it
The early Steam reaction is very strong.
At the time of this update, the demo is sitting at 93% positive from 1,484 Steam reviews.
The percentage has dipped slightly since launch, but the much larger sample is arguably more useful than that original 95%. Nearly fifteen hundred people have now wandered voluntarily into Hellraiser's basement and the overwhelming majority apparently left a thumbs-up on the way out.
That's encouraging. It is still a free pre-release demo rather than the finished eight-to-twelve-hour game, 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 increasingly 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. But now the Genesis Configuration also has a clearer mechanical identity: manipulate the environment, weaponise fire and objects, create Suffering through violence and feed that suffering back into supernatural abilities like the Hell Chains.
That's the bit today's gameplay overview makes much more convincing.
The box isn't merely something Aidan occasionally points at a puzzle until a door develops better manners. It increasingly looks like something the rest of the combat can orbit around.
And that is exactly what Hellraiser: Revival needs.
Underneath it all is still a recognisable survival-horror game with guns, melee weapons, healing, ammunition, traps, upgrades and locked bloody doors. But the Genesis Configuration may be the system that contaminates all of that familiar machinery with something properly Hellraiser.
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