Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival review: visually inventive, risky and authentic, but has its limitations

Content warning: this article discusses graphic violence, disturbing imagery, and mature themes in an 18+ game.

I expected a game about pleasure and pain to lean towards the pain. Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival leans the other way, and not only because it gets under the skin of the themes and imagery of Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart (and the first two films). It hides those very adult ideas inside something accessible and familiar, a bit BioShock in its core mechanics, and a bit Condemned in its brutal melee combat and love of leather-bound mannequins, so somewhere around the second hour I stopped noticing the dildos (everywhere) and body parts strewn across the scenery and started enjoying how the systems work.

It's a trick, and a clever one. By the time I realised what I'd been wading through, what I'd just seen as our hero's girlfriend was opened up, torn apart and remade vein by muscle in graphic detail, I was already hooked.

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Love in the time of Cenobites

Revival's story is original but inspired by Barker's original book. Set 20 years after the first film in the town of Clairport, north of Detroit. Sunny opens the Genesis Configuration, summons the Cenobites and meets her sticky end. To paraphrase Patrick Stewart, her lover Aidan Lynch sees everything, because they were Netflix and chilling at the time. He makes a deal with the Hell Priest (Pinhead, to most of us), enters the Labyrinth to free her soul, and sets about rebuilding her body.

It's a neat and very games-y setup that challenges Aidan to gather the hearts of three people marked by the box: Charlotte Strauss, an ex-dominatrix known as the Sister of Mercy, and Colin Marlowe, leader of the Scarlet Church, a cult of Leviathan worshippers who want to make Cenobites on Earth. It's a love story of obsession and bad bargains, and feels right at home beside Barker's novella.

So yes, it's very Hellraiser: unapologetically sexual, risqué, bloody and grotesque. Machete swings dissect bodies; past torsos lie on tables, hang like ghoulish wall art, and a late-game ability lets you tear enemies apart with Hellchains that hook and lash in from every direction. It's horrific, often inventively so, the kind of spectacle that demands to be seen and then you kind of want to unsee it, and then look again. So, yep, very Clive Barker (the included digital art book reveals how it was made).

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Welcome to the Labyrinth

The game's 'real' world is bold, garish and caricatured, violent and more than a little perverse, but it never lets me forget I'm playing a video game. Then you step through a teasing, glowing crack in a wall into Leviathan's domain, and Unreal Engine 5 drops the cartoon for stark photorealism. That divergence never stopped jolting me and makes the Cenobites' world so much more terrifying: this is the space that looks real, and the real is the space that feels like a game.

The Labyrinth itself is the kind of pain and pleasure Clive Barker would be proud of: puzzling, disorienting and, when the Chatterer (fans know him as the Child) is on my heels, properly terrifying. I found racing down narrow Brutalist concrete canyons, dodging spinning spiked traps and ducking sprouting chains among the best horror I've played this year. Here Aidan is vulnerable and afraid. These escape-meets-walking-sim sections add texture, make you think, and, when you're being hunted, make you feel something genuine.

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Outside and back in the sex club, cult mansion and cemetery, Revival dresses up as a light immersive sim, and combat flows freely. A shotgun blast ignites a barrel, fire leaps from one enemy to the next, another steps on a carefully placed bear trap, and the group is dealt with until only body parts remain. The Genesis Configuration piles on top of that. Banishing an enemy with a finisher sends their soul back to the Labyrinth and earns Suffering, a currency you spend on the box's powers. Telekinesis lets you grab sawblades and steel pins from the environment and hurl them at leather-clad cultists, and pyrokinesis lets you pull fire from lamps and shoot it. A revolver, pistol, SMG, assault rifle and a mix of breakable melee knives and bats fill out the earthly arsenal, with upgrades, plus ammo and health you craft from scavenged junk.

It's solid and often a lot of fun, but it stops well short of reinvention. This isn't BioShock, Dishonored or Prey, and it never pretends to be. The Genesis Configuration, for example, never goes as deep as BioShock's Plasmids, though it could really have been developed further and even layered on obsession and pain debuffs and buffs. But no, it's a two-power cube that can occasionally be manipulated as a puzzle to open narrative-dependent gates.

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What saves Hellraiser Revival is its structure. The game weaves in and out of Aiden's real world and the Labyrinth, merging the two elegantly in later stages, and the hunt for the three Marked Ones means lots of exploration, Resident Evil-style puzzling and maps that double back on themselves. They're elegantly rendered too, with ornate but grim paintings, statues and reflective surfaces to dwell upon.

It isn't flawless. Combat is at its best when it stays in immersive-sim mode, because boss fights can drag, and controlling Aidan under pressure can feel stiff and unresponsive. When the game asks for subtlety, it fumbles.

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Never lets me settle

What lifts Hellraiser Revival is its refusal to sit still. A boss is teased in a stealth section that had me scurrying around a collapsing nightclub while the wraithlike Sister of Mercy hunted me, and then it never happened again. One Labyrinth sequence has you pushing and pulling the environment itself to line up stairs and paths. There's an actual cabin in the woods full of zombies – a fraught survival challenge. And a moment where you have to keep columns erect to hide from Leviathan's Gaze, the beam that exposes people to the darkest parts of their own psyche, is perfectly, gloriously Hellraiser and just on-the-nose enough to be appreciated.

These ideas arrive, get used once, and the game moves on, and that generosity is why the Hellraiser Revival never feels like a retread, even when its bones are familiar.

But those bones are familiar. Scrape away the meaty, fleshy shock value and impressively stylised Labyrinth and underneath is a streamlined immersive sim with very little original in what you do, even if what you experience in its world is refreshingly horrific. And what a world it supports. The Labyrinth is brilliant design, and the Cenobites are horrific and oddly seductive – each scene they're in just feels right. The game embraces its source with total commitment and isn't afraid to get filthy about it, too.