Just over a year ago, I had my first-ever taste of Hellraiser media at Gamescom 2025. I went into the preview knowing that the Hell Priest, AKA Pinhead, was the series’ iconic figure, and that was it. However, I wasn’t privy to Hellraiser’s excessive use of graphic imagery and over-the-top masochism and proclivity for sexual deviancy.
Hellraiser: Revival‘s content shocked me in ways I never expected. Seldom do games stretch violence and nightmare-inducing sights to this degree. This might just be me, but I was utterly captivated, and equally as impressed by Hellraiser’s take on survival horror.
10 hours and a wild ride of a campaign later, and I have such sights to tell you about.
Dark, Depraved, and Deceptively Great
The Hellraiser universe is centered around magical boxes capable of summoning the Cenobites—a disfigured and bizarre race of demons. These otherworldly entities can’t differentiate between pain and pleasure, and if someone from Earth comes into contact with and activates a box, the Cenobites appear and whisk away the unwitting subject to a lifetime of torment and perpetual punishment.
Hellraiser: Revival is an original story set 20 years after the first movie (Hellraiser, 1987), and puts lovers Aidan and Sunny at the heart of its hell. They inadvertently summon the Cenobites during a particularly intense love-making session; one thing leads to another, and Aidan winds up being tied to a chair with nothing to protest his modesty, let’s put it that way.
Aidan is obstinate in his quest to save Sunny, so begins Saber’s vivid vision of a beloved franchise. Hellraiser is not an asymmetrical multiplayer title like most other horror franchises. This is a dedicated single-player experience that will make you squeamish at every given turn. The first hour of the game is a morbid museum of mutilation and madness-inducing sights and sounds which I simply can’t spoil—did no one ever tell you that seeing is believing?
It’s nice to see how much Saber embraces the Cenobites cast, from Aidan’s philosophical interactions with the wonderfully named Deep Throat to terrifying chase sequences with The Chatterer—a teeth-tapping terror, and my most feared of foes.
The whole game has the mentality of: ‘If we only get one shot at Hellraiser, let’s make sure we raise hell!’ Revival would make a great Hellraiser movie! Cutscenes and revelations throughout highlight that not everything is as it seems in the story, making it intriguing until the end, although progression becomes a bit too formulaic as the climax approaches, as each chunk boils down to ‘go through this chapter, get the item at the end of it,’ and rinse and repeat.
I can forgive this as the action and atmosphere never lost my attention.
A Configuration Box of Tricks
The crisp lighting, the chilling music, a well-timed jumpscare here and there; Hellraiser: Revival has the classic hallmarks of a survival-horror game. Your hopes are contingent on your ability to search every square inch of the game, look high and low for supplies, utilize them to the fullest effect, and find clues to locked safes and lockers: Gateways to much-needed supplies.
Hellraiser: Revival doesn’t walk through the languishing depths of the abyss on its own, as it has Resident Evil looking over its shoulder. The HUD, the inventory management screen, how puzzles and key items are presented—it’s clearly all influenced by arguably the greatest survival-horror franchise. Even the greats have borrowed here and there, and it’s not so egregious that I felt insulted.
If you do love a Resident Evil game, then you need to be all over Hellraiser. Aidan’s arsenal is the usual punch of Pistols and powerful melee weapons. Different enemies react to certain weapons, with armored enemies needing blunt, bludgeoning tools, whereas less-covered threats are susceptible to a nice slice and dice. You need to be mindful of what you’re using, how to look after them with the craft and repair system, and it helps conserve ammo for the game’s bosses and mini-bosses.
I found the pacing refreshing, as in one stretch, I was allowed to walk around and explore the Scarlet Church, a sordid nightclub whose contents you wouldn’t believe me if I explained it to you, before being thrust into a chase sequence with a large, menacing creature that wants nothing more than to turn my insides into a tendon tapestry.
Pacing is also balanced out with real-world sections, featuring monsters and humans, and The Labyrinth—a vast, void complex of nothingness and eternal damnation—where you’re weaponless, overcoming parkour and puzzle sections. Alongside conventional weaponry, you have the Genesis Configuration, which grows in power throughout the game. It starts out as a plot device, before becoming one of Aidan’s most powerful tools. It’s a unique selling point that further exemplifies how Hellraiser brings plenty of its own ideas to the table, along with some teething issues.
As I said, it peters out slightly toward the end, and even the end boss fight left me disappointed. Additionally, whilst I’m sure many issues will be remedied, I encountered my fair share of bugs: From audio drops to weird pixelated blood pools to corpses and bodies behaving rather abnormally post-mortem. There are times Hellraiser: Revival lacks that top-class polish, but does that stop the whole from being wounded by some of its parts?
Hellraiser: Revival Review Verdict
Quite simply, I was torn between an 8 and 9 for Hellraiser: Revival.
Survival-horror games are just as easy to get wrong as they are right. Admittedly, not everything is perfect in Hellraiser: Revival, and there might only be so much nudity and mangled bodies you can stomach. But for a first-time Hellraiser game, encapsulating the demonic delights of the Cenobites’ insatiable lust for new pleasures, and player panic through abject horror, I enjoyed every minute of my journey and didn’t want it to end.
I think Saber has done an unbelievable job with Hellraiser, and while I don’t know if we’ll get as many games as movies, I’m craving at least one more Cenobite.
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Hellraiser: Revival
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Hellraiser: Revival
Andy is Insider Gaming's Senior Evergreen Editor and has been in the games journalism sphere in one way or another for over 7 years. His video game taste is as…
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