Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival is Absolutely Terrifying Survival Horror — Until You Pick Up A Weapon
In nearly a decade of attending gamescom, I haven’t sat down for an appointment and been met with a sick bag. I’ve also never seen a gameplay demo kick off with a tantric sex scene, but this is Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival, after all. It’s quite possibly the most NSFW game I’ve ever had the pleasure of previewing, and while there’s plenty to get excited about, there are some caveats, too.
For those out of the loop, this is a licensed first-person survival horror game in the vein of post-reboot Resident Evil, but it’s based on the Hellraiser movie franchise, which revolves around a group of mutilated interdimensional beings known as the Cenobites. They explore the boundaries of pain and pleasure through torture — and can be summoned with a dinky little puzzle box sought by human sadomasochists.
In Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival, a new puzzle box called the Genesis Configuration is introduced. In the game’s opening scene, the protagonist, Aidan, uses it on his partner, Sunny, during their dalliance, which in turn activates the box and summons the Cenobites. Sunny becomes trapped in the Labyrinth, the Cenobite’s dimension of untold depravity, providing you with a rescue mission to orbit the game around.
Initially, you chase her through a brutalist maze full of suggestive crevices and Beksinski-esque sights, spotting enormous crawlies and corpse-hewn mattresses soaked in blood. The material and lighting work here is astonishing, and the atmosphere quickly got its hooks into me, if you can excuse the cliche-come-unintended-pun. With nothing to defend myself with, the agoraphobic hellscape of the Labyrinth made me feel vulnerable and afraid — the repeating rooms and confusing architecture ensured I was completely disoriented.
The Labyrinth bleeds into Aidan’s sense of reality, with dreams of faceless beasts jolting him between worlds. After a while, you run into the Cenobite gang, who explain that Sunny had solved the configuration and, therefore, clearly wanted to receive these eternal pleasures. In due course, Sunny is hooked up and flayed in such a disturbing manner that I sincerely hope Saber Interactive are contracted to work on the next Silent Hill game.
After a cinematic whirlwind of “delicious torment,” Aidan is spat back into the real world and wakes up in the buff, his skin hooked to a chair at various unsightly points. You’re soon introduced to your captor, a kind of BDSM Sauron clad in a sharp mask and plenty of leather. This fellow seems to worship the Cenobites and their noble pursuit of pleasure-pain experimentation, as his den is full of goons carrying naked carcasses from point to point, and subjecting them to lip-wobbling butchery.
With significant damage to his skin, Aidan escapes the chair once his captors leave and sets out to escape the hideout. Hand on heart, this was one of the most terrifying half-hours I’ve had in the gamescom business centre, and I had played Resident Evil Requiem the day before. You creep and listen like you’re playing Dishonored, walking past hanging corpses that have been flayed on the bottom half to resemble a ballerina’s tutu.
I can only respect the way in which Clive Barker’s Hellraiser Revival is prodding at the boundaries of mature content in video games — here is a horror game strictly for adults, with sights that evoke the Team Silent days, and make Mortal Kombat fatalities feel unnecessarily garish by comparison. Unforgettably bleak vistas of gore hide through each porthole as you skulk past cells replete with sadists and their victims. Meanwhile, it is slowly revealed that some of the captives are, understandably, drawn to and seek out this sort of thing. This conscious sense of agreement between the parties — even though it just looked like abject torture to me — got right in my head and unsettled me even further. Now, how the hell do I get out of here?
After some standard environmental puzzles, I received my first weapon, which I acquired by stealthily removing it from the body of a hanging victim. This catches the eye of one of BDSM Sauron’s goons, who heads over to teach you how to remove the knife in a way that would make the victim enjoy it — before you engage him in a bladed duel. It’s a graphic sequence, but so unnerving in its cinematic delivery.
Unfortunately, it was what followed this flashpoint that brought me crashing back to reality. Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival gets so many things right — it is an enrapturing survival horror experience with singular, brain-searing visuals. But then you pick up a weapon, and a clunky combat system overcomplicates matters. That feeling of unique helplessness Hellraiser: Revival had been conjuring quickly faded away as I started looting corpses and comparing a wide range of graded blunt and bladed weaponry.
In Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival, Melee brawls don’t feel adequately desperate or offer the right kind of crunching, recoiling feedback you might expect. You chop until the enemies drop and move on to the next room. No longer was I hiding with my heart racing, and soon enough, I had a pistol that reduced the fear factor even further, allowing me to pick off enemies at range and engage in dull gunplay with less kick than a Tesco Fajita kit. When the moment-to-moment ambience is this strong, and I was already so enthralled by it, it really wounded me to see Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival indulge a combat system that clearly hasn’t been given the same amount of care as the art direction.
There’s a scene in the demo where you have to sneak and steal a key from one of the sadists as they work on a woman with a broken jaw. Her mandible swings haplessly as he carves and taunts at her like an evil artist. It’s such an eerie moment, like watching Sander Cohen in Bioshock, and it made me wish the whole game was wandering around helplessly, working on puzzles and counteracting enemies you can’t reasonably defeat without wit, traps and tactical nous.
After another weaponless chase with The Chatterer that helped bring me back onside, the closing trailer hinted at a secondary system, where Aidan can wield the powers of the Genesis Configuration in his left hand while holding a weapon in his right. This might iron things out a bit, but I’m still concerned about how the unnecessary complexity of this game’s combat will affect its pervading sense of atmosphere. I completely understand the need to have a combat system, but in survival horror, it either needs to be completely airtight or so deliberate that it heightens your heart rate. Let’s see if Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival’s combat can fit into one of those boxes, as beyond this troubling aspect, the game is a spine-tickling peach.
Saber Interactive's licensed first-person adventure learns nearly all the right lessons from Capcom's post-reboot Resident Evil games.
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