Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival Review – An Angel To Few, A Buggy Demon To Many

Reviewed on:
PlayStation 5

Platform:
PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch 2, PC

Publisher:
Saber Interactive

Developer:
Saber Interactive

Rating:
Mature

Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival lives up to the horror franchise’s name by delivering indescribable suffering. Unfortunately, it’s inflicted on the players, and there’s no ecstasy to be found in what’s often a miserable experience. Despite boasting an alluringly dark, faithfully gore-filled presentation and borrowing from a successful first-person survival horror blueprint, the game stumbles both intentionally and functionally thanks to a litany of bugs.

Aiden Lynch is the uninteresting lead at the center of this tale. He must rescue his girlfriend, Sunny, after she unlocks the series’ dreaded puzzle box and is whisked away into the hellish Labyrinth by the Cenobites, led by the iconic Pinhead (with Doug Bradley reprising the role and unsurprisingly killing it). To restore Sunny’s mortal body, Lynch must navigate the Labyrinth’s dangers while battling a Cenobite-obsessed cult in the human world. This decent story is one in which the bland protagonist is the least memorable part, and has interesting things happen to and around him; he reminds me of an edgier version of Resident Evil’s Ethan Winters.

The story is propped up by a few solid scares and plenty of unsettling moments, plus neat callbacks for fans while remaining an accessible entry point for newcomers. Hellraiser: Revival commendably doesn’t skimp on the franchise’s disturbing gore and sexual content while never crossing a truly problematic line for the latter. Unfortunately, any entertainment the story elicits is hampered by cinematic and in-game cutscenes that frequently suffer from poor lip syncing, subpar audio mixing that muffles quieter voice lines, and subtitles that sometimes don’t match the dialogue or fail to appear at all.

The first-person blend of gunplay and melee lacks weight, with shooting feeling particularly bad thanks to unwieldy aiming. While basic combat is unremarkable, weaponizing the puzzle box adds some cooler wrinkles, like using telekinesis to grab and toss environmental objects (like dismembering foes with saw blades) or absorbing torchfire to lob at targets like I was X-Men’s Pyro. Quick-turning by pressing the left stick downward is awful because it’s so easy to trigger accidentally while sprinting. Many times I’d run to or from something only to whip around in the opposite direction because my thumb slipped, and there’s no option to remap the input.

Combat and stealth can be an uninteresting breeze since the sadomasochistic cultists have more sex drive than brain cells. They shoot at walls, occasionally blow themselves up with their own grenades, take cover infrequently, barely pursue when I flee, and lack any real tactics. I know they get off on experiencing pain, but they should have some sense of urgency or self-preservation. Other encounters are often nightmarish due to the game’s habit of flooding players with mobs of aggressive, mutated humans called Unworthy while frequently providing insufficient resources to survive. The resource economy is completely off. I found abundant ingredients to craft certain items, like basic bandages, that suddenly became nigh impossible to find/craft in the later hours despite searching just as thoroughly. Surviving by the skin of your teeth is a pillar of the genre, but I’d go long stretches unable to craft anything.

Money to purchase goods is just as limited, so I was ill-prepared for several battles. The store also frustrates, as certain items are on sale one moment and randomly unavailable the next. I have no idea why that is or what it adds. Saving up for an AK-47 before a big fight, only for the store to not sell it when I need it, is flat-out dumb. Things have a habit of being absent when you need them most, whether battling armored enemies without the blunt melee weapons ideal for fighting them or entering boss fights with a sliver of health. These instances didn’t make me think, “What a fun challenge!” Instead, I would groan, “Seriously, what do you want from me here?”

A lack of polish further spoils the experience. I once beat one of the primary antagonists by routing him around a table and filling him with bullets as he slowly chased me around without any deviation from his doomed strategy. Enemies trap themselves in geometry; the biggest example was witnessing a major boss get completely stuck and glitch out on a car it climbed onto in what I can only assume was supposed to be a scripted moment.

The only relative reprieve from combat is exploration-focused segments in the Labyrinth, where you dodge traps or awkwardly guide blocks to solve navigation problems using the sometimes finicky telekinesis. The Labyrinth areas have the strongest art direction and mood of Hellraiser: Revival; the macabre visuals look great. Since they lack combat, trips to the Labyrinth are consistently decent, but even these segments aren’t bug-free. A chase sequence with the Chatterer lost all of its tension when he became stuck behind what I guess is the Cenobites’ greatest weakness: a stone block. To “reset” him, I had to turn around, walk under the suspended block he was stuck on, and backtrack a good distance before the sequence fixed itself and we resumed our chase. It felt like going through a shoddy haunted house where the animatronics keep breaking down, and the lights come on to reveal the rusted machinery running everything.

There’s no way around it; Hellraiser: Revival is a technical mess, and it falls apart more and more as the roughly 10-hour adventure progresses. The most recurring issues are bad environmental pop-in and characters and objects constantly flickering in and out of existence, as if the game itself is prepared to collapse at any moment. I often fell through floors when knocked down, giving me glimpses of the hidden skybox below it before I stood up. I once hit an enemy through a solid wall, robbing me of any potential loot. Audio sometimes drops out completely, such as when I executed a large threat in silence when it should have sounded like a mess of gore. A subtitle once lingered on screen long after a conversation finished. The healing animation froze midway during a fight, leaving me vulnerable to enemies and leading to a cheap death. A combat encounter while waiting for an elevator to arrive failed to recognize that I killed everyone, forcing me to reload a save and do it again.

After watching Hellraiser: Revival’s finale stumble through the same visual and audio potholes plaguing the rest of the journey, I was angry. But upon taking time to cool down and reflect, my ire shifted to disappointment and relief that I didn’t have to play more. During the rare moments Hellraiser: Revival isn’t on fire in some way, it’s a halfway respectable take on the popular horror franchise. I just wish playing it didn’t so often feel like enduring the twisted machinations of Pinhead himself.