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Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival Is The Best Entry In The Franchise Since The Original Film
Let's get the obvious out of the way: Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival is a grotesque game. It puts sex and extreme depictions of human mutilation front-and-center in its first-person perspective, and asks you to face it–even stick your hand in it. It's uncompromising in bringing Clive Barker's vision to a level of fidelity that not even the movies could dream of matching. It looks incredible.
While salacious in its nature, it can be easy–even forgiving–to fixate on Hellraiser: Revival for its lurid subject matter and blaze past its more considered themes of desire, abuse, and the darkest realms that linger in the human mind. But beyond the sensation of Revival's violence is a game that dares to be ambitious in both its gameplay and narrative.
Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival can feel like it's wearing the skin of other games at times. Each of its inspirations feeling like a Frankensteined limb attached to another. But by the end of this horror-action survival game, Revival becomes a beast all its own. Although it stumbles through an identity crisis in the early hours of its 10-hour runtime, it is unabashed in its display of grotesqueness and sexuality, and ascends as a game worth seeing through to the end.
Rooted in Clive Barker's original novella,The Hellbound Heart, and the first two films, Hellraiser: Revival takes place 20 years after the first movie. But don't worry--no prior knowledge of the franchise is required to engage with Revival's story. It focuses on Aidan Lynch and his girlfriend, Sunny–two folks from affluent families whose paths crossed in their joint journey to seek taboo and fringe forms of stimulation, by way of sexual desires and substance abuse. Sunny has a particular taste for collecting occult artifacts and manages to get her hands on the Genesis Configuration: one of the many mystical puzzle boxes that opens a gate to an eldritch realm of a neverending concrete labyrinth hellscape, home of the Cenobites–demon priest-like beings who seek to harvest souls and entrap them in an eternal hell of pain and pleasure.
Aidan, ignorant of the Genesis Configuration's otherworldly powers, uses the cube as a toy to evoke (consensual) pain on Sunny while making love, and in the process, triggers the box to summon the Cenobites, who mutilate Sunny in front of him and drag her away into The Labyrinth. Genesis Configuration in hand, Aidan marches into hell to get Sunny back.
It isn't long until Aidan finds himself at the center of the Scarlet Church, a cult of murderous psychopaths who worship the Cenobites and their god, The Leviathan, and seek ascension to become servants of its power. But on his journey, Aidan is haunted by much more than the terrors of the Cenobites, the monsters the realm produces, and the Scarlet Church itself. His own troubled past and vices, torment him too.
The setup for Revival paves way for myriad gameplay styles and design philosophies, and Revival attempts all of them, with the game's opening hours functioning much like a game-design tasting platter.
As Aidan, you'll find yourself stealth-killing cultists one moment, fighting tooth-and-nail with Condemned-like melee combat the next, and, soon after, shooting a machine gun at a horde of monsters, launching sawblades and performing Doom (2016)-esque glory kills. Oh, and there's Resident Evil 4 inventory management. The good news is that it all feels great, but I could also feel the game straining to pace its gameplay ambitions as it ushered me through scenario after scenario.
Sections often felt like self-contained miniature set pieces of what you'd expect in a Resident Evil-esque mansion, involving exploration and backtracking to find several keys in order to progress. But in Revival's case, most of it is confined to smaller spaces like finding toys for a dominatrix in a sex club in exchange for a key to the VIP lounge, or a literal mini-mansion that saw me unlocking one room at a time, each one revealing a key item to the next location. This scaled-down approach works in favor of the game's linear pacing to keep its narrative going over the game's tight runtime. It also demonstrated a clear understanding of classic RE design in a way that pleased my RE veteran brain.
It's all woven into a loop of stealth and white knuckle gun fights with capable and murderous cultists, until the power dynamic shifts as you face off against hordes of spongey Unworthy (zombie-like monsters). Going toe-to-toe with mobs of Unworthy better showcases the Genesis Configuration by using the environment in battle, along with kiting monsters into booby traps. Or, in later sections of the game, using the Configuration to move giant spinning propeller blades around an arena and turn enemies into mincemeat.
At first, the Configuration functions much like the gravity gun from Half-Life 2–a device that can pick up and hold items from the environment and launch them as a weapon–albeit much more limited in the items it wields, ranging from saw blades, railroad spikes, and metal propellers, which are more like prescribed opportunities to pick up and use, rather than something as dynamic and freeform as the gravity gun. The saw blade, in particular, calls back to Half-Life 2's Ravenholm, and there's even a severed torso propped up on a saw blade in a wall as a direct nod.
With the Configuration's telekinesis gravity-gun-like ability, you can grab deadly items and launch them at enemies, cutting through a crowd and removing limbs, leaving a few poor saps to crawl your way instead. Eventually the Configuration can absorb fire, allowing you to hurl fireballs; move select structures around to solve puzzles or unleash them as deadly hazards against enemies; and unleash Hellchains, an ultimate ability that wraps a mob of enemies in hooks and rips them to shreds. It rules.
This frequent shift from offensive to methodical gameplay involving stealth and considered shots is not unlike the game's motif of power exchange that's hand-in-hand with BDSM culture. And regardless of the role the game puts you in, it feels good.
Revival offers a lot of tools in a fight, and when played well, can lead to a great synergy of violence. Objects like gas cans can be equipped, allowing me to pour trails of gasoline around an arena, strategizing for a fight I anticipated to come, and lay a trap of my own for unsuspecting cultists. In one case, I Home Alone'd a room with bear traps and gasoline, and the result was a satisfying display of dismembered legs, charred bodies, and used shell casings on the floor.
There are a lot of options, and thank the Leviathan that there's no skill tree or perk system to further complicate it. Combat skills evolve with the narrative's progression, and considering the snappiness of its length, Revival uses The Labyrinth to, once again, shakes things up. The Labyrinth often comes in as pacing speed bumps, shifting the focus away from combat encounters and more on traversal and puzzle-solving, functioning as breathing room between fights (despite being suffocating and claustrophobic in its own right). It adds yet another flavor of horror and gameplay, often introducing chase sequences that utilize Aidan's ability to sprint and slide under spiked chain obstacles.
These parts work in what they're trying to accomplish, but their linearity is so cut-and-dried at times that they feel too literal in their purpose–to slow the player down, or act as routine opportunities to dump exposition on the player to add some color to the Cenobites, explain what they are, and reveal their motivations.
Like many things in the game, however, the game's clunkiness fades more and more as it progresses, especially as Aidan's world collides with the eldritch realm: the cold stone interweaving with the human world; the once neon BDSM club laced with the grey walls of the suffocating Labyrinth. Worlds mesh, allowing me to see earlier areas now wrapped in chains, flesh, and far-off sights of a fantastical maze.
Among its many balancing acts is how it weighs its depiction of BDSM culture and kink. The taboo subculture is handled with consideration and care, never blurring the lines between people who part take in fetish practices and the murderous cultists who seek to torture and murder others for pleasure. It's emphasized by posters on the wall about consent and respect, as well as the game's dialogue. In one particular scene, Aidan is corrected by the merchant Zora. Upon entering a BDSM sex club, he claims he needs to get away from these maniacs (referring to the cultists), only for Zora to reply, "Careful now, most of these patrons are innocent maniacs, just yearning for something to satiate their desires."
Furthermore, Revival's reliance on sex and explicit nudity–while plentiful, especially in the game's early hours–doesn't feel gratuitous. The display of sex is used with deliberate purpose, often to paint an image of those who seek physical desire, or, in Aidan and Sunny's case, to develop their characters as well as their motivations.
Despite being an action-horror romp, the core of Revival is about the relationship between desires and needs, and it's the crux of Aidan's entire journey to go through hell in order to bring his companion back. But as the story progresses, Aidan's motivations are challenged in the process. "I love her, I need her," he claims to Zora, to which she replies, rather matter-of-factly, "Those are two different things." It's a throughline that anchors his arc from start to finish, and pays off well.
Aidan is a well-realized character that's teetering on camp, but it's a camp that I welcome. Aidan is in ways something like an Ethan Winters from Resident Evil Biohazard and Village–a joe-schmo tossed into the deep end, who is a regular guy one moment, and then a gun-wielding, machete-slashing, herbalist self-healer the next. The difference between an Aidan and an Ethan is that Aidan's skills are explained, being a medical-school dropout seeking an elevation of life's offerings, by turning to a life of crime and joining a biker gang where he learned to use guns and get in fights. Like I said, it's campy, but I'm all for it. It also works because Aidan's backstory plays a part in his journey through Revival, often using his goody-two-shoes-turned-bad-boy nature to inform how he got here. It's the characterization that made me genuinely care about Aidan, his faults included.
Hellraiser: Revival consistently walks a fine line of never taking itself too seriously, without completely derailing its more serious and touchy themes of abuse, both with drugs and in relationships. Most of that heavy lifting is done by its larger-than-life villains who are eccentric cornballs (welcomed cornballs), especially Bruno, the "artist" whose art is mutilating corpses into absurd spectacles of flesh and bone. Revival is colored with a wide array of varied antagonists, including the leader of the Scarlet Church, Marlowe; his companion, the Sister of Mercy; or Charlotte, a young woman who volunteered herself to ascend as experiments to the Cenobites, and turns into a horrible creature that acts as the game's stalker, a la Resident Evil's Nemesis enemy, who terrorizes Aidan.
Each character, and often the one they surround themselves with, have a surprising amount of depth and characterization. By the end, I knew and understood every villain I fought.
The most grounded and compelling of these characters is Zora, the merchant who keeps tabs on Aidan. She also serves as Aidan's devil's advocate, questioning his motives around every corner, and forcing Aidan to sometimes question himself in the process. She is an anchor in the narrative, and is as vital to the story as Sunny, the villains, and the Cenobites themselves.
Everything the game attempts to accomplish synergizes so well by the end, that I wanted to start it all over again, which is why I'm let down that Revival doesn't offer a New Game Plus mode. I hope it's added in a future update, especially because the game's harder difficulty feels unbalanced and unfairly punishing. After completing the game on its normal difficulty, which presented a moderate, albeit, approachable challenge, I still yearned for an increased amount of pain to fulfill my pleasure to have my survival skills tested.
The game's Hard difficulty, however, does not complement the game's existing design. Hard doesn't feature quick saves and has fewer save points, with those save points sometimes being located far apart. The difficulty is altered with the addition of more enemies in any given area, and alerting one will send all of them running exactly to your location. One area involved a lengthy stealth section where one wrong move could send me back 15 minutes, making the experience feel less rewarding of my skill, and more tedious to repeat over and over again. I wouldn't recommend Hard on a first playthrough, or even a second (unless you're truly seeking some masochistic ascension).
By the end, Hellraiser: Revival stood more confident and self-aware than its early hours, shaking off the imposter syndrome for an outfit that fits it just right. And damn, it looks good in it, too.
In a moment where conversations around modern audiences are becoming more averse to sex scenes, and mainstream video games are taking fewer and fewer risks, Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival feels like a statement piece in both sex and violence. While explicit, Revival suspends these real-world topics to such fantastical extremes that I find it hard to view it literally. But the topics it tackles, from abuse to sexual exploration, still somehow remain tasteful when wrapped in its otherwise over-the-top depictions. But, hey, that's what made Clive Barker's original novella and the original Hellraiser film so compelling. And Hellraiser: Revival is a well-deserved addition to the Hellraiser legacy.
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