Hellraiser: Revival Brings The Franchise To A New Dimension Of Pleasure
Saber Interactive's single-player survival horror experience is the best installment in the series since the original two films.
Since the release of Dead by Daylight in 2016, the landscape of horror video games, particularly IP adaptations, has existed in the long shadow of the asymmetric multiplayer game. One killer, four survivors – it’s a formula that has been applied to Friday the 13th, The Evil Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween most recently, and now even Saw is joining the party. And while there’s no denying that there’s a certain charm to hacking up your friends as Jason Voorhees or the Killer Klowns From Outer Space (yes, they have one too), it is a shame that so many varied and eclectic horror franchises have all been forced to fit into such a stale recipe, like a square peg forced into a round hole.
When Hellraiser: Revival was first announced last year, fans waited with bated breath to see exactly what kind of game it would end up being – after all, Pinhead’s first and last appearance in a video game was in Dead by Daylight. But with each trailer and gameplay clip, it became increasingly clear that Revival was hearkening back to the peaks of the survival horror experience, combining the franchise’s grotesque, erotic texture with a gameplay loop not all that dissimilar to Resident Evil or Silent Hill. And while it’s not as groundbreaking as those two instant classics, Hellraiser: Revival is still maybe the best licensed horror game since Alien: Isolation, because both are nerve-shredding single-player nightmares that shower their respective franchises with love while also daring to do something new with the sandbox.
From the very first installment, long before increasingly bad sequels turned the Cenobites into two-bit slashers, Hellraiser was a horror film about sensuality and lust as a gateway to self-destruction. Hellraiser: Revival follows in the footsteps of those first two films, taking place two decades after the original and following the story of Aidan Lynch, a former biker gang enforcer whose reckless, insatiably curious girlfriend Sunny accidentally opens a puzzle box named the Genesis Configuration during the heat of passion. Anyone who has already seen any of the films immediately knows what’s coming next: otherworldly hooks and chains ensnare Sunny, skinning her alive and spiriting her soul away to the Labyrinth (the dimension from which the Cenobites hail), leaving Aidan to rescue his lover all while being pursued by a maniacal cult as well as Pinhead and his acolytes themselves.
Much in the same way that the first movie pushed the boundaries and blurred the lines between pain and pleasure, so too does Revival. The game’s story, on which Clive Barker himself consulted, implies early on that Aidan is a former drug addict and ex-con, and his codependent relationship with Sunny merely takes the place of his other vices – like Frank and Julia in the original Hellraiser, the Cenobites function as a twisted, extreme mirror of what happens when desire is taken to excruciating lengths, and they’re not the only antagonists reflecting that idea. When Aidan’s not running in terror from the Chatterer or exploring the hellish maze that is the Labyrinth, he’s fighting off the Scarlet Church, a depraved and homicidal BDSM cult that worships the Cenobites, trying desperately to use the Genesis Configuration to transcend their earthly flesh like the deities they idolize.
Hellraiser: Revival isn’t shy about playing up the integral fetishistic roots of the franchise.
One of the most lovingly realized aspects of Hellraiser: Revival is its level design, which is deeply indebted to the leather bars that inspired Barker’s original novella The Hellbound Heart, as well as the surreal, M.C. Escher-adjacent production design of Hellbound: Hellraiser 2. The first level of the game, which takes place immediately after Sunny opens the box, allows the player to explore the tight, dizzying, maze-like corridors of the Labyrinth (a nightmarish locale Aidan is frequently forced to return to), with Eldritch abominations lurking around every corner. The real-world locations are just as terrifying and unique; after Aidan is kidnapped by the Scarlet Church early on, he fights his way out of a decaying underground torture dungeon, only to emerge into a neon-lit fetish club that serves as the cult’s public-facing front – and the only way out is through a minigame that more than likely sent the ESRB into a pandemonium.
While at first it seems as if Aidan is incredibly vulnerable to the cosmic beings trying to eternally torture him and the madmen trying to kill him, he doesn’t stay that way for long. The game follows a standard survival horror progression route, with Aidan starting off with bladed and blunt-force weapons before slowly earning an arsenal of different firearms, all necessary to fight off the Church and their army of corrupted monsters (the result of their attempts to create their own Cenobites). Of course, it wouldn’t be survival horror without an intense focus on resource management, which is why the game switches up combat with Aidan’s other weapon – the Genesis Configuration, a puzzle box similar to the Labyrinth Configuration in the films, but one that bestows its user with a host of convenient powers such as the ability to shoot flames, manipulate objects in the game’s many puzzles, and even banish non-human enemies back to the Labyrinth.
Aidan Lynch is certainly more equipped to handle himself than most Hellraiser protagonists.
While Aidan’s quest starts out with noble intentions, the game’s narrative takes a surprising (and familiarly bloody) turn which forces players to confront head-on the same terrors they tried desperately to escape from, beckoning our main character and the player to embrace the suffering they inflict on their enemies in a way not unlike the Cenobites. Hellraiser: Revival isn’t the most original survival horror game ever made; its influences are all over its sleeves, but where it shines is its ability to succeed where so many sequels failed – by actively working the franchise’s central dichotomy of agony and ecstasy into every inch of the project, from the characters to the levels to the ebb and flow of combat. It’s a welcome return to form for a franchise that has long been misunderstood by those who approach it, and hopefully it’s a reminder to the video game industry that horror games have much more to offer than the party game standard that has remained in place for ten years now.
