Squeamish about blood, BDSM, and the occult? Then Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival isn't the game for you.
Hellraiser: Revival doesn't hold back. There's more explicit sex and gore packed into the first hour of the game than anything else I've ever played. As someone who experienced it on the Switch 2, I wondered how Nintendo even allowed all these uncensored body parts when Dispatch needed to be censored. It's easily one of the most explicit games out there, complete with full-frontal intimacy, leather-clad BDSM cult members, stomach-churning flesh statues, and skin-ripping body horror.
In this game, you play as Aidan Lynch, a guy with an ambiguous criminal history and a serious addiction problem. He lives with his girlfriend Sunny, who happens to bring home the Genesis Configuration - a puzzle box tied to the Cenobites. As they fool around with the mysterious item, it starts zapping Sunny. Soon, Pinhead and his crew appear in their bedroom and literally tear Sunny apart piece by piece. Now, Aidan must do everything in his power to bring Sunny back.
How? By making a deal with Pinhead (who was played amazingly by Doug Bradley, the original actor of Pinhead). Kill the members of a local death cult and feed their hearts to Sunny's reanimated remains.
Story-wise, it's definitely one that hooks you. Whenever Pinhead and the Cenobites were on screen, I was totally glued to what was happening. However, it takes a while for the story to actually progress, and you have to fight your way through plenty of long, dry exposition dumps from enemy NPCs. Combat often felt repetitive, and sometimes, the only fun I'd have was when I would come across in-game merchant Nora Beckett, who was probably the most endearing character by far. Oh, and it helps that you can sell her occult items to stock up on ammo, bandages, and better weapons.
Getting through different areas requires a lot of crouching and staying quiet, although some occasions allow you to take down enemies silently or go all-out instead. When you get your hands on a gun, you can use aim-assist, but I opted for the default settings as it was just easier for me. During the first few hours of the game, it's straightforward to get around by crouching, keeping a low profile, and waiting for enemies to be out of sight. Unsurprisingly, it starts getting challenging the further you progress. You'll start having to watch out for broken glass so you don't make noise, or throw a bottle to distract cultists and slip past them.
While I found that being stealthy was easy, combat definitely provided more of a challenge. If you're fighting just one or two enemies, it's fine - you have enough time to dodge, swing your melee weapon, or shoot them. Heck, you can even set a bear trap. But when a whole horde comes at you from all angles, it can be brutal. Melee weapons break surprisingly fast, and you don't get to hold onto them or use a repair kit. You lose them entirely, and it switches to another one in your inventory. If they all break, you're left with a knife, a very blunt one too!
Because of that, you need to hoard gunpowder and scraps to craft ammo - and trust me, you need a ton of it. Later in the game, Aiden uses the box to summon weapons in the area or activate deadly puzzle boxes. This is handy because it lets you eliminate enemies to farm health and "suffering points," and you need the latter to use the Genesis Configuration. Using these powers is fun, but when a horde of enemies is right in my face, it can be difficult to take the time to summon a random spike and throw it at a single enemy. You end up relying on your weapons a lot, which means running out of ammo and cowering in fear as you're left defenseless.
Boss fights were incredibly difficult. I had to retry almost every single boss battle multiple times. They each have different armor and weaknesses, and I've wasted plenty of ammo shooting at a spot that doesn't actually affect them. What made these boss fights so frustrating is that there are no checkpoints between phases. The fights drag on for way too long, and if you die near the end of a multi-phase battle, as I did with Sister of Mercy, you get sent back to the start. I retried Sister of Mercy's boss battle more times than I would like, and I was genuinely malding as I played. Full-on rage mode, to be honest with you.
Hellraiser: Revival is a horror game, but I never felt scared in a traditional way. Instead of jump scares, it makes use of squeamish body horror, and if you can't stand blood or mutilation, then you'll find it hard to digest - they literally hammer nails into your body at the start. That said, as someone who loves horror games and movies, I liked the atmosphere. Since it's a first-person POV, I felt fully immersed in the cult's world. It looks great, in a dark, twisted way, especially when you're in the Labyrinth. The eerie music and audio design also did a great job of building suspense.
Unfortunately, overall performance wasn't the smoothest. Playing on the Switch 2, I noticed textures loaded late, and I experienced frame rate lag during boss fights. The game even crashed on me twice. During Sister of Mercy, it decided to freeze altogether, leaving me in fear that I'd have to replay from the start. Thankfully I didn't, but since it had already happened two times before that, it was a reasonable concern that stuck with me for the rest of my playthrough.
Another major gripe, meanwhile, was the save system. I don't know if it's a bug, but at one point, I had my save files become completely inaccessible. During the Hunt Marlowe quest, I remember saving my game at the 15-hour mark. After I died from a horde of enemies, the game reloaded me to a point that felt a little too far away. I tried to open my save file and could only access save points from 13 hours in - which is weird, because I literally died near a save spot.
Saving my game in new slots didn't work because dying would spawn me further back, even if I saw the game auto-save at points after that area. It felt completely unfair and almost ruined the whole experience for me.
Overall, Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival is a dark, unapologetic horror game that really captures the BDSM themes, grotesque visuals, and magic of the original movies. The environments are great, using the Genesis Configuration is fun, and Doug Bradley did amazingly as Pinhead. However, the game often felt like a chore thanks to its dragged-out boss fights and some really annoying technical bugs that hold the experience back.
If you loved the movies and are a die-hard fan of the franchise, there's definitely something for you here. You'll just need a lot of patience to get through it.
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