Hellraiser Revival Review: Sex, Sawblades and Plenty of Suffering

Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival review — 'Thoroughly average'

Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, PC The secret sauce for Hellraiser has always been its interplay between sex and death – or rather, pleasure and pain, with creator Clive Barker infamously being inspired by extreme BDSM clubs, then taking that dichotomy to even greater extremes through a horror lens. However, video games, as a medium, are notoriously awful at handling sex, so can any attempt at bringing Barker’s sadomasochisti…

Hellraiser Revival review: Sex, sawblades and plenty of suffering

"Insufficient suffering". That may sound like something your boss would say in your performance review, but it's actually Hellraiser Revival’s way of telling us we can’t throw saw blades around anymore.  In the new game, suffering is a resource for using the Genesis Configuration, Hellraiser’s otherworldly key/weapon/sex toy, and it’s also the ethos of the whole experience.  That’s something we mean both positively and negatively, because while …

Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival review

Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival takes one of horror’s most disturbing fictional universes and turns it into a first-person survival horror adventure that is every bit as interested in human depravity as it is in supernatural terror. Developed and published by Saber Interactive, the game introduces an original story within the Hellraiser mythology, following Aidan as … Continue reading "Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival review"

The Moment ‘Hellraiser: Revival’ Made Me a Believer

I’m really enjoying the old-school mechanics of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival. There’s a very Resident Evil-like simplicity to progressing through […]

How Hellraiser: Revival Hopes To Deliver Significance To Its Sexuality And Violence

Sex and the pursuit of pleasure is at the forefront of so much of Hellraiser: Revival, we spoke with the developers on making it matter.