Hands-on: Hellraiser Revival is disgustingly depraved, and therefore on the right track

A few days before my appointment at Gamescom to see Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival was set to take place, I received an email from a PR warning me about it.

“We wanted to make you aware of the strong content you’ll see in your Hellraiser: Revival demo at Gamescom,” her email said. “Please note the demo heavily features explicit scenes of sex, nudity, violence, body horror and gore.”

As someone who’s been covering games professionally for nearly two decades, I think this is the first time I’ve ever been sent a content warning in advance, so in that respect Hellraiser: Revival is already breaking new ground.

I’m a massive horror fan who knows the Hellraiser movies inside-out, so I’m already well-versed on how themes of sadomasochism, torture and big pointy spikes going into flesh run through all 11 films. But was the game really going to be as graphic as its source material?

Dear reader, let me put it this way by paraphrasing my PR chum – please note this hands-on preview article heavily features descriptions of explicit scenes of sex, nudity, violence, body horror and gore.

Seriously, that’s a genuine warning.

As I chatted to the PR before my appointment she noted again that I was in for a fairly graphic demo. I asked her how she’s coped with spending her entire Gamescom watching people playing through the same gory demo all day.

“Oh, I’ve pretty much become desensitised to it by now,” she cheerfully replied. Have some of that, Pinhead.

She guided me into a darkened room, where two of its friendly associate game directors stood next to a PC running the game. They once again asked me if I was familiar with the films, and whether I knew it was quite a graphic franchise. I assured them I did, and got started.

Right away, the warnings made sense. Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival – Saber Interactive insists on using the full title where possible to make it clear that the legendary horror author has been overseeing the story here – opens with a rather steamy sex scene which quickly turns more than a little ouchy.

As it turns out, the game’s protagonist Aidan has shacked up with a lady friend called Sunny who’s into the more dangerous stuff, which is promptly demonstrated when she pierces a big hook through his nipple (which is shown in full detail, naturally).

She then takes out the Lament Configuration, the iconic puzzle box that features in the Hellraiser movies, and starts messing around with it. Keen to show he can do kinky too, Aidan grabs the box and starts cutting Sunny with its corner – don’t worry, she’s apparently into it, so that’s fine I suppose.

Eventually all this box-fiddling leads to the inevitable conclusion, which is the arrival of the Cenobites, a group of S&M demons from an extra-dimensional realm who like to appear before any humans who summon them, and offer to bring them back to their realm for a bit of the old How’s Your Father. And by that I mean an eternity of torture until they can no longer tell the difference between pleasure and pain. Like being a Star Wars fan, basically.

Naturally, Sunny jumps at the chance, so when the four ‘main’ Cenobites – affectionately known by the Hellraiser community as Chatterer, Butterball, Deepthroat and the leader Pinhead – offer to take her away, she willingly accepts. And, since she has no need for her physical body on Earth any more, it’s ripped apart by big hooks in a wildly gory fashion.

Rather than phoning the police – how could you explain that anyway – a naked Aidan decides to wander into the big dimensional rift that’s now appeared in his wall, in an attempt to find Sunny. Because despite what just happened to her body in the Earth realm, in this dimension she’s still very much alive, well and rather unclothed. A lot of things are naked in this game, it turns out.

So begins the game itself, which is played from a first-person perspective. The start of my demo session felt a bit like Outlast, as I made my way through a bunch of creepy corridors – all of which are perfectly designed to look like they came out of the two ‘80s Hellraiser movies – as various grotesque creatures and other unpleasantries appeared around me.

Eventually the demo moved on a bit and I found myself captured by a cult, whose leader wants to find the Lament Configuration and use it to summon the Cenobites for himself. I was nailed to a chair by the wrists (apparently cults don’t use duct tape) and had my arm stitched to my stomach.

When the leader left the room I had to escape by pulling my hands up to remove the nails, then using the nails to cut the stitches. It was the sort of sequence that made me appreciate the NHS even more.

At this point the game suddenly changes from a corridor-based horror maze game to more of a first-person survival horror with stealth-like elements. Think Resident Evil 7, except every time you look down you can see your willy in graphic detail.

In this section you can find weapons and gather resources to craft things like bandages and ammunition, because every game needs to have crafting in it by law these days. Putting aside the fact that a few bandages is unlikely to heal having nails driven through your wrist, I made my way through the various rooms, taking out the cultists in a suitably gory manner.

Even the puzzles in the game are dodgy. At one point you have to find parts of a key, one of which is lodged in the head of a corpse. You can’t really reach it from above, so you have to basically dig your arm into its chest area and pull the key out from below, like that bit when Mr Bean lost his watch in a turkey. But with corpses.

“At one point you have to find parts of a key, one of which is lodged in the head of a corpse. You can’t really reach it from above, so you have to basically dig your arm into its chest area and pull the key out from below, like that bit when Mr Bean lost his watch in a turkey. But with corpses.”

Another especially grim key-related puzzle has you trying to stealthily get past a demented scientist, who has a naked woman tied to a big canvas and is dancing around, cutting at her with a scalpel. Once you work your way around the room without being spotted and get to the next room, you realise you can’t use the fingerprint scanner.

As ‘luck’ would have it, the mad doctor has cut off one of the poor lady’s fingers, so you have to stealth back into the room, pick up her severed finger from the floor and use that to open the door. The whole thing gives off ‘escape room devised by Charles Manson’ vibes.

Eventually I ended up in the game’s last main section, where I was back in the other dimension and being chased by Chatterer, so-called because of his huge chattering teeth. This was a basic chase section where I had to run down corridors, dodging giant chains and choosing the right direction to turn.

At times Chatterer would spawn right in front of me, meaning I had to do a quick 180 and run in the opposite direction. Often the path I had just run down had completely changed when I turned around, making it feel almost like a fast-paced version of the PT demo at times.

This section led to a few deaths until I figured out the sequence of corridors to take, and even though I quite enjoyed the trial-and-error approach, if there are more moments like this in the full game I get the feeling these will be the more divisive sections because not every player will be so forgiving.

As my demo ended with another brief exploration section, I decided I was happy with what I’d played so far. This is the first major Hellraiser video game – Pinhead has been in Dead By Daylight, but who hasn’t at this point – and there can be no denying that Saber Interactive and Boss Team Games aren’t shying away from the subject matter.

There will almost certainly be stories written about the more controversial elements of the game, but fans of the movies who know that depravity equals authenticity will understand that anything tamer wouldn’t be Hellraiser. What’s more, the return of Doug Bradley as the voice of Pinhead is a blood-soaked cherry on top of a cake made out of… I don’t know, cheek skin and entrails or something.

As the demo ended, I turned in my chair to see the PR and the game directors, big smiles on their faces, eagerly staring at me for my reaction to the rather extreme demo I had just played.

“So just to check,” I asked. “It’s rated PEGI 7, yes?”