The announcement of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival, made utilizing Unreal Engine 5, alerts we’re having a horror recreation renaissance. There’s a purpose Hellraiser’s Cenobites have endured; they weren’t born to be slashers or jump-scare dead-ends regardless of first stalking our nightmares when Freddy Krueger was playfully turning our beds into blenders. The Cenobites had been designed, crafted as icons of horror’s extra disturbing, seductive facet.
With Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival, the primary official recreation set on this nightmarish mythos (I actually would have beloved the cancelled NES recreation as a child), that inventive legacy ought to discover a new voice on consoles. A minimum of, that’s the hope.
This single-player survival horror title from Saber Interactive and Boss Staff Video games seems to be like a feast for followers of visceral visible design. However it’s additionally navigating a tough line: how do you protect the methodical, dreadful magnificence of Hellraiser whenever you’re constructing a recreation that should preserve gamers doing one thing, on a regular basis? Fortunately, the dev is dropping its penchant for multiplayer ( Boss Video games made the Evil Lifeless: The Recreation) to place Hellraiser: Revival as a single-player story, however will outright motion do service to the Cenobites’ torturous design?
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(Picture credit score: Sabre Interactive)
Horror you are feeling, not simply see
Let’s begin with what Hellraiser: Revival will get proper: the Cenobites look incredible. Doug Bradley’s return as Pinhead, almost 20 years after his final outing, grounds the sport’s visible path. His presence has all the time been theatrical, much less serial killer, extra baroque thinker.
The early paintings, screens, and gameplay trailer present a world drenched in obsession. There is a return to the symmetrical, sculptural qualities of Clive Barker’s unique imaginative and prescient, flesh as canvas, metallic as ritualistic, spiritual id. It seems the developer has studied not simply the unique movie, however Barker’s novella ‘The Hellbound Coronary heart’, and the visible language to, at the very least attempt, and create a visible design to scare, but in addition to inform a narrative.
The Genesis Configuration, the sport’s riff on the notorious puzzle field, is without doubt one of the extra intriguing additions. Moderately than a easy plot system, it turns into a tactile gameplay mechanic, a factor to govern and toy with. It is visually attention-grabbing however importantly conceptually intelligent (the press launch hints at this system remodeling weapons and strategies of assault). It is also a tool that hints at a deeper pressure between the supply materials and the sport’s design – how far can participant company be supported earlier than it disrupts the franchise’s very premise? In spite of everything, Hellraiser has by no means been about empowerment, however slightly give up.
(Picture credit score: Sabre Interactive)
A combined design message
That is the place the primary doubts start to creep in. In accordance with the official press launch, Hellraiser: Revival isn’t simply survival horror; it’s additionally motion. The gameplay footage reveals fight – weapons, knives, takedowns – and whereas this feels fast and enjoyable, it is presumably stepping too removed from the books’ slower, insidious tone.
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Will the concentrate on motion dilute the strain? Clive Barker’s horror works finest when it lingers, when the horror occurs to a protagonist, not after they battle their approach by means of and out of it. If Hellraiser: Revival ideas too far into conventional first-person shooter territory, there’s a threat it might really feel like another darkish, grim motion recreation, with spikes and demons. We’ve that, it is known as Doom: Everlasting, and it is fairly good. Going all-in on motion would really feel like a waste of the franchise’s uniquely unsettling premise.
The Cenobites, in spite of everything, aren’t bosses however manifestations of our trauma. Their horror isn’t in what they do to you; it’s in what they signify. That’s a tough factor to show into moment-to-moment gameplay with out sacrificing ambiance.
But I am reminded of previous video games, equivalent to Condemned from the Xbox 360 period, a forgotten gem that empowered you but in addition made you worry each shadow, mirror, and model. One space the place the sport’s dev workforce might discover a stability is in who and what we are able to confront, and which horrors are off limits.
(Picture credit score: Sabre Interactive)
Right here, Boss Video games is cracking its inventive knuckles and increasing the Hellraiser visible canon. Alongside the long-lasting Cenobites, gamers will face off in opposition to twisted cultists, infernal creatures, and what we’re being instructed are ‘deviants’ who serve Pinhead’s philosophy. This may very well be an excellent transfer, providing contemporary antagonists, weird new rituals, and world-building by means of enemy and creature design.
Or, it might grow to be visible noise. Pinhead and the Cenobites might withdraw to the background, fade from focus, and their impression diminished. A part of the attraction of Hellraiser lies in its restraint; a single sharpened chain and hook, a whisper from Pinhead, methodical and cruel, was typically sufficient to ship shivers down my backbone. Overloading the sport with grotesque enemies might backfire for a franchise constructed on mechanical, exact horror. If every thing is a monstrosity, nothing really shocks. The sport wants distinction; in any other case, the horror may drown in its personal blood.
(Picture credit score: Sabre Interactive)
Motion and horror can work
I am again to remembering video games that discovered the stability – Lifeless Area, Silent Hill 2 Remake, Alan Wake 2 – and the way Hellraiser: Revival seems to be to be embracing the world-building and design of the collection, with Clive Barker’s steering. It’s onerous to not be impressed by what the dev has to date teased, together with the mist-strewn environments, brutalist temples, hellscapes of bone and geometry.
The lighting, color tone, and creature design all trace at a visible workforce that understands that horror needn’t all the time shout and scream. That is the place Hellraiser: Revival might really shine, if it might distil the look of Hellraiser away from a common aesthetic and decide from the iconography of the movies, the place each Cenobite is a perception system in flesh, each demise a metaphor. If that may be translated into stage design, pacing, and encounters, Revival may very well be the proper Hellraiser recreation.
(Picture credit score: Sabre Interactive)
I am already in Hell
I am waxing and waning on how a lot I just like the look of Hellraiser: Revival; we’re lastly getting a recreation, it is shaping as much as be a visually assured horror making good use of Unreal Engine, and Clive Barker is providing notes, however it’s a first-person motion recreation with brutal takedowns and crowd-pleasing gunplay.
If the motion is simply too dominant, the worry may fade, and if the Cenobites grow to be simply one other fight encounter, they’ll lose what made them iconic within the first place: the calm, unrelenting struggling. Hellraiser: Revival is not even completed but, and I am torturing myself over it, so the indicators are literally good in spite of everything.
Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival is obtainable to wishlist as we speak on Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Collection X|S. Go to the sport’s web site for extra particulars.
