I don’t know exactly when it changed—when I changed—but over the last half decade, I realized I really like horror movies. Before that I thought I mostly liked movies that leaned harder on suspense than jumpscares, or horror comedies that poked fun at the dumb slashers of the ’80s. But it turned out my love of Scream and Cabin in the Woods was just a gateway drug to unabashed enthusiasm for the camp, costuming, and incredible practical effects of a Nightmare on Elm Street or Scanners or Exorcist. I now think Possession is right up there with The Thing as one of the best films ever made and oh my god, why did I wait so long to watch The Blob? Every October I put a few more cult classics on my watch list and find a new horror favorite I never thought I would love but absolutely do.
Anyway, Hellraiser sucks.
Terrible movie! Amazing, flesh-tearing makeup and special effects. Those Cenobite designs? Immaculate nightmare stuff. But every scene in which characters talk is more painful than the kinky BDSM stuff the hell dimension creatures get up to. “This is a movie without wit, style or reason, and the true horror is that actors were made to portray, and technicians to realize, its bankruptcy of imagination,” Roger Ebert wrote about it at the time in a withering review.
As a noted lover of videogames, I’m sure Ebert would agree with me that Saber’s singleplayer Hellraiser: Revival is already better than the film the second it hands you a shotgun.
I had a great time playing about 40 minutes of Hellraiser: Revival, most of which I spent thinking “Oh this game is like, nasty nasty.” The level I explored, set in a cult’s fetish club, was littered with BDSM flyers and sex toys, bear traps (the metal kind), and cultists in kink suits that doubled as effective armor plating. I chopped one’s arm off with a Jagged Messer, a giant machete the in-game tooltip notes is “a perfect weapon for disembowelment.” Another kept knocking me off my feet with shotgun blasts until I used the magical capabilities of the Lament Configuration, Hellraiser’s iconic puzzle box thingamajig, to suck the fire essence out of a lit brazier and blast it out like a flamethrower.
I don’t want to exaggerate Hellraiser: Revival’s complexity by calling it an immersive sim, but at a surface level it feels very BioShock. There are tight environments littered with details to look at, drawers to open for ammo and other scraps, audio diaries scattered about, light puzzles gate your progress from room to room, and the Lament Configuration’s ability to temporarily take on certain powers doesn’t feel too far off from BioShock’s elemental plasmids. Unlike BioShock, however, Hellraiser is full of ball gags, vibrators, and what is definitely the first time I’ve seen the words “face fuck” written in a videogame.
It’s absolutely not shying away from the horniness of Clive Barker’s film. Thankfully, the game does not take place almost entirely in an attic: after shooting my way through the cultists I got teleported to the hell dimension, where I ran through spooky transforming corridors until I could use the Lament Configuration to rotate the walls and floors of an Escher-like room to arrange a walkway to a pedestal awaiting the cursed cube. What followed was one of the best button prompts I’ve seen in years: Press F to Increase Suffering.
Maximum Suffering Increased? I’m not sure what more you could hope for from a horror game, really.
Saber is calling Hellraiser: Revival “survival horror action,” which feels apt: it fits somewhere in between the horror and action flavors of Resident Evil. I never had more than a magazine or two of spare ammo for my pistol and shotgun, encouraging me to use the Lament Configuration to kill enemies instead of bullets, or to sneak through a vent to get behind one and stick my machete in their skull. It’s got some of the grunginess of a 2000s horror game like Condemned: Criminal Origins, though I think its over-the-top sex and drugs tone might prove so edgy that it’s actually closer to The Darkness by the end.
It’s not scary horror, at least to me, and I expect tropes more than breaking new ground. In one less fun bit, I played through a looping nightmare in my character’s house, where I had to go looking for my missing girlfriend (now a captive of the Cenobites) again and again, repeatedly resetting the room until I found the right interactive bits to move the sequence forward. Not the most creative bit of horror game design—then again, Hellraiser: Revival is the first time I’ve ever seen ASCII dick and boobs drawn on an old Nokia phone, so I have to respect its commitment, even if it ends up lacking much of the original’s queer themes. Games are never this horny.
If not outright scary, Hellraiser: Revival does deliver a constant supply of “well that’s fucked up” and guns that kick hard, which is enough to put it on the level of a fun ’80s slasher in game form. I’m not sure it’s a B movie-style cult classic just yet, but I did chop a cultist’s legs off with a bear trap after he yelled “I’m gonna nail him from cover!” so I’d say the odds are, at least, in its favor.
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