I don’t even know where to begin with Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival. The game just about starts with the lead character and his girlfriend, whom you will spend half the game trying to rescue, b-b-b-banging, segueing so very seamlessly into an S&M club, and puzzles with Kama Sutra positions on them. I spend half the game asking how this was a game released on PlayStation 5, and the other half wondering if the cenobites destroyed all the clothes in the world. It cannot be comfortable patrolling your cult’s base in leather straps, nipple pasties, and literally nothing else.
Now, I’m not a big horror movie guy; I get scared when spooky monsters crop up. I’m a coward, sorry. That said, I do actually enjoy the Hellraiser series. Sooooo, I know it has this bizarro sex thing going on; Robot Chicken even did that Girls Gone Wild parody with the Cenobites when I was a kid. This was expected, but it is still this jaw-dropping moment to wander into a club and actually be gatekept from progressing by needing to find (and I am quoting here) the biggest, thickest dildo and spank a woman in a full latex suit. Complete with real ass jiggle physics!
Then you bring in the actual Cenobites, do what they usually do, and serve as this background threat to the interpersonal problems on screen. They do not really serve to threaten the player but to promise that the game has such sights to show you. As they rip apart the lead protagonist’s girlfriend with hooks in like 5 minutes after starting the game, after their overly kinky sex, the game manages to convey to the player that you should expect two things from this game: sex and copious amounts of brutal violence. And maybe a disturbing combination of the two.
To this effect, I actually enjoyed the narrative, for what it was, though to a fault. It was true to its nature, and if we are putting this in the grand scheme of the Hellraiser series, it is actually among the best. For the most part, we see Aiden fighting against a sex cult… A really kinky sex cult… In doing this, he is actually attempting to revive his girlfriend from that brutal death in the first 5 minutes, with the help of the people who did it. Pinhead, to that effect, is a looming presence who gives Aiden some help. As everybody involved in some sort of deal of the flesh with him, he shows up to provide some guidance and be an all-around imposing immortal being, rather than something you fight against.
This is something that didn’t sit as well with me. The female Cenobite also appears from time to time for prolonged dialog about Aiden’s nature before going away and leaving him to contend with what is ahead of him. The only Cenobite that poses some form of real threat is the Chatterer, who serves as an enemy the player needs to flee from at several points, though these segments are fairly formulaic chases through the labyrinth. Of course, these also give you some of the best showcasing for the engine running the game. The Chatterer teleports as paths quickly open and chains fly across the screen as you need to run as fast as you can to the nightmarish audio of the Chatterer walking slowly but having 700 footsteps. Butterball, who is in this game, serves literally zero purpose and would affect nothing if omitted.
This is annoying because the labyrinth makes for the absolute best segments in the game. They are structurally the most linear segments to explore, but they serve as the showcase for what the game is capable of and the genesis configuration as a whole. Some parts are just M.C. Escher-esque, with you exploring only for the paths to quickly shift. In others, though, you are navigating a path with spinning, spiky death diamonds blocking your way, targeting the wall to turn the platform you are on to continue forward progression. These moments are mostly exactly that: puzzles you need to work out. Not that it hurts the game, but I would have loved to see the Ceno bites play more of a master of this domain role, but they don’t.
My bigger issue with the narrative is that Aiden is just a boring protagonist, and I do not say that lightly. You introduce mounting his girlfriend on a table in a scene that feels reused to oblivion; instead of giving him a personality, you spend much of the experience in first person, with much of his dialog reserved for being angry at his situation, which is understandable given the brutality of it all. This said, being six hours in and getting that, and how much he needs his girlfriend, starts to wear him thin. And that’s most of the narrative.
In the few flashbacks we do get, we learn really two things about Aiden, both kind of established in that first scene. His girlfriend Sunny was abusive, and he was in prison. That first bullet point might have been an interesting thing to explore if only they did, but there are a few scenes that are similarly repeated that add very little to that initial reveal. They use his time in prison as a metaphorical prison in the labyrinth occasionally, but again, the thing is never fleshed out in any meaningful way. We get occasional glimpses at some deeper character, but they are skin-deep, and in a game about deeper pleasures than the flesh, it feels like wasted potential.
The thing is, there probably isn’t a ‘likeable’ character among the bunch. Aiden, I think, actually has the potential to be one, though. He is the juxtaposition of the ‘tough guy’ and the ‘fragile man’ who desperately needs his girlfriend because he fears life without her. This isn’t because she is good for him but because he is scared, lacing everything he says with vitriol to disguise that. This would have been something fascinating to explore, but it just never is. In a movie, you get two hours to introduce your cast of characters, then the threat, while still making time for a graphic kill or two. In a video game, you have a 6-8 hour runtime, and Aiden gets all the screen time, meaning these building blocks are far more necessary in this format than the other.
I would also point out that character models are mostly good, with one exception: Hellraiser: Revival. You only see Aiden’s actual model a few times in the game, though it feels like there was never any intention to do so. Mainly because his face has the least amount of detail. What’s more hysterical is that the game makes multiple references to Resident Evil 4, with an older woman merchant who pops up from time to time. Your first interaction gets you the “What are you buying?” trophy and hooks you (pun intended) for the rest of the game. Not only did they become my favorite character, but they also had a great character model; same with the Cenobites. There is a mixed bag in crowds full of people in gimp suits.
Now, people have made a big deal about games being linear this year, and I am going to point out that Hellraiser: Revival is pretty linear. In the course of my first playthrough, I completed around 70% of the trophy list, and that was me just following the pathway. As I stated above, the labyrinth, which was a stunning and creepy set piece complete with the best traversal puzzles, was VERY LINEAR, with walking forward being almost the entirety of it. There are a few points where you move in a bigger area, but the end point is always obvious as to where you are heading, with the game funneling you into one area.
What the game does to try to break this is offer a less linear world in the real world. These segments also pull from the Resident Evil games, giving you set pieces with keys that you need to locate and use to unlock the next room and progress. This is mixed with the first-person perspective that makes some parts of the game feel almost like Resident Evil: Biohazard, in particular, except with the looming threat, which, again, would have been a great use of the Cenobites. The game also employs an inventory grid, and THANKFULLY the game knows how to keep key items and crafting materials separate, something I swear I have complained about multiple times this year; see my The Sinking City 2 review for an example.
While these areas are more explorable and, for my part, were easy to get lost in, they were fairly small overall. One area that stood out to me for this was a park in which you needed to unlock a well by finding multiple keys. Once you enter the park and check the map, you will notice here that the park is roughly divided into three humps, with each having a piece and one having the well. It’s a bigger space, but Hellraiser: Revival pretty cleanly maps your exploration.
This is part of a much larger area overall, but each does this similarly. The thing I’m not sure about is that a few times in these areas I got lost just blatantly because I walked up to the right thing to interact with and then realized I was correct, such as one key in the park I just didn’t see when looking EXACTLY WHERE IT WAS. This could be bad interfacing or my stupidity; I’m still unsure. What Hellraiser: Revival does particularly well, though, is borrow elements from other games and incorporate them.
The only time I don’t feel this worked is when you have to collect a statue piece in a cabin, and the doors lock, and you are trapped. For the ONLY portion of the game you can do this in, you can barricade windows with planks. Two guesses what this moment is supposed to feel like. The cabin is too small, a space to fight what becomes a massive hoard of enemies that can pin you in a corner and just smack you to death, which happened to me many times; this was probably the segment that gave me the most trouble, and when the setup happened, I was so very excited. I wanted to love it so badly!
Overall, the combat was a high point, though by the end the overwhelming rush of enemies that charge straight at you could be very annoying. You are introduced to melee combat first, but you do get a decent mix of guns to use as well, though the game can be punishingly scarce with ammo, given how many bullets some enemies take to go down. Then you are fighting these heavily armored people that can both eat ammo and go down quickly, depending on how it goes down. The melee weapon types are mapped onto this, though, offering some interesting shake-ups to how situations are best handled.
And of course the whole thing is graphically violent, so using a bladed weapon can mean cutting limbs and heads off. Eventually, you get a move that allows you to summon hooks and just rip entire groups of enemies to shreds. WHAT EVEN IS THIS GAME!? The thing is, while there are horror elements here, I would classify Hellraiser: Revival as more of an action game than anything else, with combat in part having glimpses of classic titles like Condemned and Alan Wake. Your typical battle will happen after you find a key item and then hear the noises and watch them come wandering onto the screen and charging at you.
The game has a pretty useful dodge, though I genuinely wished that you could do a forward dodge, as you can often get surrounded, and the way the dodge works just sort of pushes you into a wall and makes you a sitting duck. There is no block, which I find odd given my recent playthrough of Silent Hill: Townfall, which lacked the dodge but had a block. In this case, the Genesis Configuration takes up some of that, working on the buttons you usually expect for a block, so I do understand. That said, I do like to have both options.
What the Genesis Configuration adds is a type of magical ability so that the player dual-wields a gun in one hand and some magic in the other. I do have a minor gripe, but using the configuration as a telekinetic throw was among my favorite things. This is tied to finding items like saws or even fire that you can use it with. Why this matters, though, is the game then curates where and how you can use it, and in certain moments, like against bosses, I was out of ammo running around trying to find something akin to an item I could throw. It would have been useful to have a standard attack with it not requiring these set-piece items.
The big fights in general were an annoyance, as I tend to have this problem a lot with survival horror games; you often feel unequipped for moments you can’t run and must shoot them nonstop. One of the first bosses I had to fight had the ability to jump and grab you. The thing is, just before this, I learned that I can throw fire from the configuration, and there are two very flammable cars here. That becomes the obvious way to fight, but if the enemy jumps and grabs you on fire, you are basically set to die now on fire yourself. You have to fight this way given bosses; even with ammo pickups, it will drain the entirety of your ammo by the end of any first phase.
They also all have annoying phases where you have one option that can be difficult to implement. In another fight, the room goes red, and the enemy, this floating psycho, appears and charges you for a hurtful grab. It can be stopped by throwing an item at them, but you can barely see, and those items are so spread out, making it hard to get them in place in a way that you can react in the right way to stop it. In fairness, there are some highlights in these fights as well, such as a well-placed fireball into those cars while the boss is stacked on top. That was fun.
There are mixes to this too, and I found the stealth segments pretty good as well. They are few and far between, which is a shame given that I enjoyed them. One thing that really won me over was that your flashlight can give away your position, which many games overlooked in a lot of these games. They also start with the ability to stab a person to death two feet away from another and not get caught. Not really needed, but I loved it all the same. A lot of these points can be hard to fully succeed in or distract enemies, but worst case you get an enjoyable shootout in place of these.
I was thoroughly enjoying the game, but unfortunately, the second half became far less polished than the first, affecting my score overall, which is the greatest strategy. There was popping of textures to the point that they fully vanished, and I even got stuck during a boss fight after hitting the run button, where my character could not escape the animation. There was also a crash or two, though that wasn’t as egregious as some of the other stuff. The full game is playable; nothing prevented my progression, but it was very noticeable at certain points.
Verdicts
Well, talking about certain things, I like to use the word stupid. Not in a bad way; sometimes you want to just have some stupid, uninhibited fun. Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival is just that, stupid fun. It’s campy, it’s over the top, and it’s off its rocker, but it doesn’t have a moment in it where I wasn’t enjoying myself or what I needed to do to progress. The story could have used more focus on our protagonist, given that he needed to anchor the whole experience, and there are definitely gripes with gameplay to be made. As a B-movie horror adaptation. It absolutely gets the job done to become endearing despite its faults, and possibly because of them.
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Reviewed on PlayStation 5, also available on Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC via Steam
*A code was provided by Saber Interactive for the purposes of this review.
Developer/Publisher: Saber Interactive
Release Date: October 8, 2026
Pros
+A fairly engaging narrative that lives among the best in the series.
+Good mix of both melee and gun play that remains fun throughout.
+Stealth segments were few but welcome change of pace.
+Good looking, albeit fairly linear stages
Cons
-Aiden is a bland protagonist that is barely fleshed out.
-Boss fights weren't the highlights I was hoping they would be.
-Second half of the game was plagued with more frequent bugs and glitches.
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Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival
