Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival, review of a survival horror with too many problems and too little bite

The universe born from Clive Barker's fertile and disturbing mind has always exerted a perverse, dark, and magnetic fascination, outlining a labyrinth of carnal horror within which the line between absolute pain and transcendental pleasure merges until it becomes completely indistinguishable. I candidly admit that I have never thoroughly explored the original literary works, but to prepare for the arrival of this Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival, I opted for a dutiful and methodical cinematic review: I have watched the first three films of the franchise, with a fresh, analytical rewatch focused especially on the first two, invaluable, foundational chapters. I particularly wanted to be prepared for the encounter with the Cenobites, ready to cross the geometric threshold of the Labyrinth and gaze upon the features of Leviathan with the right amount of mythological awareness.

However, controller in hand, the work developed by the guys at Saber Interactive (releasing October 8 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, and Switch 2) takes some liberties from the very first moments that, in hindsight, I would define more as a "curious deviation" than a true sacrilegious betrayal of the source material. The core of this unexpected conceptual shift lies in the practical and narrative use of the Genesis Configuration: unlike the well-known Lament Configuration, which in the films served as a mysterious and lethal conduit to summon the Lament Configuration to the presence of those who knowingly (or through a kind of tragic, inexorable addiction to thrill) deciphered and opened it, here the Cube transforms into a true multi-purpose weapon.

During the game, we are indeed equipped with devastating telekinetic powers and direct offensive abilities which, inevitably, bend and force the canonical logics we are accustomed to, subservient to a pure and simple gameplay necessity for progression and defense. Yet, it must be admitted without reservation that this poetic license possesses its undeniable and macabre charm, especially because this interactive novelty tangibly modifies even the formal attitude of the Cenobites themselves towards us, particularly altering the interactions and interferences of key figures like the woman from the famous quartet composed of Pinhead, Chatterer, and Butterball.

Being, after all, a first-person survival horror leaning towards action, this specific structural compromise is therefore not only digestible but at times genuinely intriguing. The real drama of this Revival unfortunately unfolds elsewhere, far from the intuitions related to the Cube. The entire framework of the game seems to rest on the lazy and short-sighted idea that it is enough to grotesquely and continuously overdo it to appear "mature" and disturbing at all costs. The result is a markedly unbalanced experience, which makes unmotivated sexual excesses, rivers of blood spilled without criteria, and the most exasperated and plastic body horror an overly cumbersome battle horse.

All of this soon manifests as a clumsy attempt to mask a narrative that, in practice, proves dramatically weak, artificial, and superficial even in addressing the adult themes it so desperately wants to dissect. Finally, to worsen an already compromised general picture due to the script, there is an suffocating plethora of gameplay and structural problems, which end up making the protagonist's journey a true interactive torment. And, unfortunately for us, it is not the kind of ecstatic torment that Pinhead would have approved of.

A marathon of excesses without decompression

The core of the horrific experience in Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival ironically founders on what should be its unshakeable hallmark: excess. While it is true that Barkerian mythology is founded on the indissoluble and morbid link between the spasmodic search for pleasure and the unfathomable abyss of pain (from which the interference of the Cenobites inevitably arises), Saber Interactive's production launches into a constant, suffocating visual and thematic exposition, devoid of any filter or balance. I admit to having a solid tolerance for the macabre and grotesque, and I serenely accept that some deviations may subjectively offend specific sensibilities (for example, I struggle to tolerate the sight of removed nails or extracted teeth as a method of torture), but here the problem is structural.

For the first time, I felt a visceral and suffocating sense of rejection towards the incessant bombardment of extreme sex, liters of blood, and plastic body horror that the title vomits at us regularly. There is a complete lack of breathing room, a moment of narrative decompression. In an adventure that took me a good eighteen hours to fully explore – by meticulously searching every nook, picking difficult locks, and scavenging for resources, although the save counter officially stops at just under twelve – the redundancy of this self-serving horror ends up anesthetizing the tension, transforming the descent into hell into an exhausting marathon.

It all begins with narrative premises as simple as they are direct. During a night of extreme sex, protagonist Aidan Lynch and his "companion" Sunny (the nature of their bond remains deliberately, and perhaps confusingly, ambiguous) decide to use a mysterious artifact, the Genesis Configuration, to push their physical pleasure beyond all limits. In the heat of passion, Aidan wounds Sunny in multiple places, triggering a violent and arcane reaction from the Cube that culminates in the appearance of the Cenobites. The sequence follows a dogmatic process: the Lament Configuration asks the canonical ritual questions of the girl and, once the pact is sealed, Sunny is torn apart by hooks until she is brutally dismembered. Aidan's attempt to intervene to stop the massacre shatters against Pinhead's authority, who knocks him out with one of the infernal chains.

Upon his awakening, the script makes its first real misstep in terms of internal logic. Aidan finds himself chained to a chair, a prisoner of the Scarlet Church fanatics; he has been deprived of the Cube and is tortured for the pure and simple sadism of his captors. There is, in fact, no real narrative motivation for this imprisonment, beyond the pretext triggered by Sunny's activation of the artifact. From this point on, the protagonist is left to his own devices in a desperate escape attempt, which will soon turn into a personal crusade to save his companion from her eternal torment.

From here, the story takes a drastic and limping change of course. Aidan is granted a sadistic opportunity by the Cenobites: to use the Cube's devastating powers to hunt down the members of the Scarlet Church – who have no direct connection to Sunny's fate – all in exchange for the promise of bringing the girl back. Predictably, the terms of this pact prove vague; however, the real flaw lies in a dramatically weak and fragmented narrative. Many crucial plot points and intermediate sequences lack genuine internal cohesion, giving the distinct impression of existing for the mere and trivial necessity of dragging the player to the next arena.

Even the work's most ambitious and theoretically "mature" thematic core, namely the psychological examination of the fine line between genuine love and a morbidly selfish need, is trivialized, wasting the opportunity to evolve into a noteworthy reflection. Ultimately, the story is reduced to a mere and limping expedient to support the gameplay; however, drawing from a complex, layered, and philosophically perverse imaginary like that conceived by Clive Barker's mind, it was absolutely legitimate, if not imperative, to demand a narrative fresco of a much higher caliber. Barker played on the perverse and psychological elegance of the grotesque, not on a relentless meat grinder.

A survival horror running on empty

On the gameplay front, Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival dons the mantle of a first-person survival horror, showcasing a clear action-oriented drift. A drift that, I'll clarify right away to avoid false hopes, collapses under the weight of fragile and miscalculated foundations. Aidan's path follows predetermined tracks: first, escaping from the clutches of his tormentors, then finding the courage to retrace his steps and save Sunny from eternal torment. To accomplish such an arduous task, the game provides us with a hybrid arsenal, an amalgam ranging from conventional earthly weapons, useful for containing minor threats, to unleashing the lethal Genesis Configuration. However, being a survival game, the gameplay system places a strong emphasis on raw survival, demanding careful resource management. I want to start precisely with exploration and gathering, because even on Normal difficulty (out of a total of four selectable options), a punitive and illogical imbalance stands out.

Throughout the adventure, Aidan has the ability to craft healing items and offensive resources – bandages, medkits, assorted ammunition, and lockpicks – provided he finds and purchases the relevant operational manuals from a mysterious merchant known as the Hermit. This juncture triggers a chain reaction capable of sinking the game's pace: the distribution of raw materials within the scenarios is incredibly scarce. This is no small obstacle given the brutality and frequency of encounters offered just a few hours in, exacerbated by a strict inventory limit that caps capacity at a maximum of ten units per single resource type. Crafting costs always appear exorbitant, lacking sensible balancing compared to the loot recovered in dark corners or by rummaging through the corpses of fallen enemies; a structural flaw that is suffocatingly felt on the healing front, turning every encounter into an irrecoverable drain.

The lockpicking system, then, deserves a separate analysis for its intrinsic nature devoted to frustration. The basic mechanic entirely mirrors the well-worn minigame seen in Skyrim: controller in hand, you rotate the lockpick left or right in search of the point of least friction, forcing the lock in the absence of resistance. The root problem of this gameplay hurdle lies in the extreme, incomprehensible fragility of the tools, combined with their scarcity and the high resource cost required to craft them yourself (once you have the manual to do so). We witness disproportionate wear and tear compared to the attempts required to find the exact angle, a factor capable of draining meager supplies in the blink of an eye. To make matters a farce, the reward system intervenes: after sweating cold and sacrificing precious tools to pick a locked cabinet, the loot lottery can dispense generous provisions as well as empty, unrewarding compartments or trinkets of little value useful only to sell to the Hermit for a few pennies. The search for materials thus transforms into a tedious hunt, a vicious cycle incapable of offering a fair ratio between the risk undertaken and the reward obtained. A game design anchor that, without much surprise, clashes glaringly as soon as the action enters the thick of combat.

A combat system that leaks (and bleeds) everywhere

If inventory management and resource recovery already represent an insidious obstacle, it is when the action explodes that Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival shows its most worrying cracks, revealing a crude and dramatically unbalanced hybrid combat system. Aidan's offensive approach bifurcates into two distinct paths: on one side, close-quarters melee combat with bladed (or blunt) weapons; on the other, ranged engagements relying on firearms and the telekinetic use of the Genesis Configuration. Both fronts, however, collapse under the weight of structural naiveties that are difficult to forgive.

The core problem of melee combat lies in the paradoxical fragility of our arsenal, combined with a set of overly erratic hitboxes. Each melee weapon has its own integrity indicator that drops sharply with every single impact; while bladed weapons prove decent at severing heads (provided the collision is accurate), they are completely ineffective against heavily armored opponents, who demand the massive use and consequent sacrifice of blunt instruments. The gameplay friction arises when one realizes that the durability of these weapons is simply ridiculous compared to the bulk, and passive resistance, of the enemies on screen. To make matters worse, a flawed repair system intervenes: dedicated kits are rare, and as if that weren't enough, the more valuable variant of the two only increases the damage dealt by the chosen weapon, but freezes its integrity level to the original. Such a missed opportunity forces one to watch their armament shatter after a handful of exchanges, condemning Aidan to rely on a crude basic knife (which I assume is affected by a bug as it suddenly appeared in my hand) with infinite durability and non-existent offensive potential. This triggers an exhausting waltz of cumbersome backward or lateral dodges – forward dashing is, for obscure reasons, precluded – praying that the enemy AI offers a flank to lucky hits and the surrounding environment allows us to manage everything.

On the gunplay front, the situation doesn't improve at all. The ballistic arsenal (pistol, magnum, shotgun, SMG, and AK-47) appears paradoxically undersized compared to the destructive potential of a club, even against the human cultists of the Scarlet Church. Only the shotgun, especially when equipped with incendiary ammunition, provides a tactile sense of real impact. This sense of inadequacy is exacerbated, once again, by deficient hitboxes that cause inexplicable missed shots: I've lost count of the bullets, accurately aimed at the monsters' skulls or limbs, that vanished into thin air without any effect. The shotgun partially mitigates the problem thanks to the natural spread of the shot, but the feeling of unreliability remains constant, reaching its peak of frustration with a machine gun that feels terrible and lacks even the slightest gratifying recoil.

To complete the picture, there's the Genesis Configuration. Its offensive use is limited to predefined environmental scripts, allowing specific objects to be manipulated and hurled at enemies at the cost of a certain amount of "Suffering" (Aidan's arcane resource). Although the premises are appealing, the on-screen effects are inconsistent: throwing a heavy circular saw at a monster produces entirely random ballistic outcomes and actual damage, dampening the impact of a power that should have been the core of the experience. Furthermore, its uses remain restrictive unless one interacts with specific Pillars during forays into the Labyrinth to increase the energy pool.

All these flaws loudly collide with the original sin of the entire game design: the merciless balancing of encounters and the suffocating level design. The most striking and exasperating example materializes in the inevitable siege sequence inside a cabin in the woods (Cabin in the Woods, I caught the reference). With a clear, albeit failed, intent to replicate the claustrophobic dynamics of the Resident Evil 4 siege, the game throws a disproportionate horde at us compared to the inadequacy of our weapons and the narrowness of the floor plan. Three different access points converge on a room too narrow to properly utilize firearms, nullifying defensive positioning options; even improvised barricades give way under the weight of rapid and senseless attrition, leaving no escape from a frustrating trial-and-error process, regardless of any careful planning up to that point.

At one point, my room was filled with fifteen enemies, occupying its entire width. Without, of course, considering the absurdity of the front door and the back exit which, from being wide open, suddenly lock. In Resident Evil 4, the logic was that, fleeing and hunted, Leon and Ashley would escape and barricade themselves in this small house, whereas here there is nothing to justify the impossibility of simply running away. And this is just one, the most grotesque, of the numerous tactical blunders that Hellraiser: Revival scatters along its tortuous path.

The Labyrinth: fascinating geometries, suffocating rhythm

If the terrestrial plane proves to be a jumble of torn flesh and monotonous corridors, it is by crossing the threshold of the Labyrinth that Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival flexes its muscles on the purely artistic front. From an artistic and visual perspective, the Cenobites' dimensional realm undoubtedly represents one of the most successful and inspired glimpses of the entire production. Abandoning organic derivations, one finds oneself trapped in a nightmare made of rigorous geometries, oppressive architectures, and an icy aesthetic, even when these are alternated with more yielding and bloody areas. The balance, in this case, is excellent. Clive Barker's creative interference, who provided precise directives to delineate the appearance of this astral plane, emerges in every corner and every abyss, restoring a magnetic charm to a place that exudes hostility from every crack, conveying that sense of divine desolation and inscrutable order that perfectly aligns with the dictates of his horrific cosmology.

Even on the gameplay level, the Labyrinth imposes a clear paradigm shift. In this dimensional plane, Aidan is brutally stripped of any offensive ambition and even the very concept of health: earthly weapons are unusable, and every mistake against the lethal environmental traps results in instant death, forcing a reload from the nearest checkpoint. The only allowed interaction revolves around the Genesis Configuration, here demoted to a mere logistical tool for moving platforms or displacing obstacles. A design choice that, ultimately, proves consistent and even appreciable: after all, we are guests in an alien realm where our brute force has no weight or meaning. Progression thus relies on solving environmental puzzles, rather simple and centered on precise timing in movements, abandoning the abuse of the Cube's three-dimensional manipulation (required only once and, conversely, for solving puzzles on the terrestrial plane).

On paper, this deconstruction of survival mechanics could have represented an excellent outlet to break the redundancy of gunfights, but Saber Interactive once again stumbles on pacing issues and structural naiveties. The first obstacle is represented by some chase sequences modeled on a rigid and frustrating trial-and-error approach. While intuitive in reading on-screen obstacles, encountering a single millimeter error forces a repeat of the entire escape from the beginning. This relentlessness clashes evidently on a narrative level: the Cenobites absolutely need Aidan to honor his part of the agreement, being dogmatic and truthful creatures, yet their own dimensional domain seems designed to grind him down at every turn without any real underlying logic.

The final blow to these sections is dealt by poor distribution throughout the entire campaign. The descents into the Labyrinth are almost always placed at the culmination of already adrenaline-fueled phases, fitting into junctures where the story would demand a necessary emotional decompression. Emerging victorious from an exhausting boss fight, reached after a grueling crescendo of tension, only to be thrown without warning into a deadly obstacle course, ends up snapping the cord of patience. The sense of anxiety and helplessness sought by the developers turns into a sensory and tactical overload, an excess that exasperates rather than frightens. If only these geometric deviations had been distributed more carefully along the adventure's timeline (perhaps by purging the deadly obstacle courses), they would have guaranteed valuable gameplay variety. As they have been implemented, however, they end up adding further frustration to an already faltering game system.

A carnage undermined by bugs and bad taste choices

On the visual and technical front, the work proves to be faltering: the in-game polygonal models are crude, with a clear quality gap compared to the cutscenes where, above all, the care given to the Cenobites stands out. Being a production far from the exorbitant budgets of triple-A titles, these aesthetic imperfections are met with a certain leniency. What does not admit discounts, on the contrary, is the dense and random array of bugs and glitches that infest the gaming experience. These range from the already mentioned "infinite durability knife" that appeared by chance in my hands, to commands with imprecise responsiveness, up to environmental interactions blocked by abstruse logic. Emblematic is the farce of some lockers towards the end of the game: placed in front of three of them, one locked and two open, the interface allowed the opening of the latter only after having picked the first (which, moreover, turned out to be filled with a trinket to sell for a few coins). Add a couple of occasions where Aidan caught fire for no apparent reason, burning for a long time through the scenario without taking damage, and the grotesque picture is complete.

The artificial intelligence, for its part, even debases basic stealth mechanics. From a certain point in the adventure onwards, the possibility of throwing stones or bottles to distract enemies clashes with non-existent logical routines: monsters ignore the point of impact, get stuck against invisible obstacles or, by pure clairvoyance, trace a straight line to the player's position. While not completely halting progression (except for a single, unpleasant soft lock incident), these technical flaws cripple a gameplay structure already deeply undermined by questionable design choices.

On the artistic front, the discussion picks up where we left off. The Labyrinth stands unrivaled as the most valuable setting in the entire package. Conversely, the earthly scenarios oscillate between disappointing extremes: the outdoor areas suffer from anonymous flatness, while the cultists' lair collapses under the weight of out-of-control visual exaggeration. It is difficult to appreciate hypothetical attention to interior design when every single room is plastered with dismembered corpses, sex toys, and continuous references to the most unrestrained gore. Although the source material inherently thrives on these themes, Barkerian horror finds its driving force in the literary medium and the suggestion of the written word; translating the same sensations into a video game demanded a very different conceptual balance. Instead of unsettling or disturbing with mature connotations, this aesthetic bombardment quickly saturates the viewer, making the excesses cloying and lacking real bite.