From the opening scene of Hellraiser: Revival, in which an intimate moment of sexual fetishism goes horribly wrong for its hero and his lover, this survival horror adventure inspired by Clive Barker’s bloodsoaked ode to BDSM makes it painfully clear that it’s not for the squeamish. So graphic is its ebb and flow between blasting gory holes and bathroom glory holes that the greatest moments of tension I felt playing it were not when I was fending off its hordes of gimp-masked cultists, but rather when I was nervously looking over my shoulder just in case my wife happened to walk in the room. However, peel back the sordid surface layer and Revival doesn’t have much meat to go along with its many buckets of blood. Heavy-handed storytelling, repeated chase sequences, and uninspired boss encounters meant that no matter how many meatsacks had their skin pierced and flayed by chains that tightened onscreen, Hellraiser: Revival never managed to properly get its hooks into me.
We play as Aiden, a one liner-spouting everyman with some troubling addiction problems who’s on a quest to bring his newly murdered girlfriend back to life the only way he knows how: by making a pact with pale-skinned series poster boy, Pinhead (voiced with trademark unnerving eloquence by original actor Doug Bradley), to slaughter several members of a local death cult and feed their hearts to her partially reanimated remains. It’s a disturbing premise that’s pretty faithful to the first (and best) two films in the Hellraiser series, but I wish its plot was presented in a more dynamic fashion. The exceedingly gory scenes that featured Pinhead and his cenobite pals always had me glued to the screen, but so much of Revival’s roughly nine-hour story is otherwise delivered in drawn-out exposition dumps spouted by secondary characters, and I never really felt too invested beyond the broad strokes. It’s not a great sign when the chatty in-game merchant is doing most of the heavy lifting here, and I’m not just talking about her ammo crates.
Still, at least the shooting is pretty solid, albeit fairly stock standard for the survival horror genre. To be honest, if Revival’s weapon and inventory system borrowed any more from the Resident Evil series you could probably squint and spot a Capcom logo watermarked somewhere onscreen. However, its assortment of upgradeable pistols, shotguns, machine guns, and breakable blades and bats facilitate some fun ways to decapitate and dismember the hedonistic hordes that stand in Aiden’s way, and ammo is scarce enough that I was forced to make use of absolutely everything at my disposal.
I admittedly had to toggle off the overzealous aim assist since it would regularly snap to a single enemy when I was trying to target an explosive barrel in the middle of a group, and I also lamented Aiden’s inability to vault over obstacles. This became particularly ludicrous in one instance where I could clearly see a room full of precious items through a wide open window, but instead of simply jumping through the gap, I had to stop and hunt around for a key to the locked door in order to access them.
Even so, Revival’s mixture of slash-and-sidestep melee encounters and skull-shattering shotgun blasts makes for some gory good times, even if the variety of enemy types is somewhat limited. Beyond the machete and gun-wielding cultists, it’s mostly the same gaggle of gangly ghouls, suicide-bombing beasts, and legless creatures crawling after you that you have to mow down.
There are ample opportunities for stealth, too, with bricks and bottles to throw for distractions and violent stealth kills to pull off. Although I wish there were controls to peek around corners like in the recent Silent Hill: Townfall, because too often I’d be spotted ever-so-slightly stepping out from cover and be forced to go in all-guns-blazing anyway. It was even worse during the occasional instant-fail stealth sections with stalker enemy types, who could sometimes spot me through bushes even when I was standing still.
What elevates Revival’s combat slightly above the norm is the introduction of the Genesis Configuration, a powerful reimagining of the series’ iconic puzzle box that gives Aiden the ability to grab objects like conveniently placed nails and sawblades from his surroundings and hurl them at enemies with forceful blasts of telekinesis. Use of these BioShock-style superpowers is tied to his ‘suffering’ bar, which must be continually topped up by staggering enemies and performing a grisly execution move that jams the hellraising Rubik’s Cube into their mouths and blasts nine inch nails directly into their skulls like they’re front row at Coachella.
I like that the limitations of the suffering bar means these supernatural abilities don’t make you feel too overpowered, and how the short timer on keeping an object suspended in stasis means you can’t confidently wander around with a fanblade ready to launch like you could in Dead Space. Eventually these powers are expanded to let Aiden play with fire, which allowed me to shoot explosive barrels to take out one group of enemies, before hoovering up the resulting flames and hurling them at other monsters hustling over to provide backup. There’s even a bar-draining super move that shackles clusters of creatures together and tears them all apart at the same time, chaining your attacks in a gruesomely literal sense. It’s just a shame that this devastating option for crowd control doesn’t arrive until much later in the story, giving you relatively few opportunities to really put it to use.
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