I want to try something a bit different with this one.
My wife does not play games. She sits next to me while I play them, on her phone, half watching whatever is happening on screen while she does whatever it is she does on there. Candy Crush probably. I have never asked. But Hellraiser Revival pulled her attention away from the phone within about thirty seconds and kept it there for the rest of the evening, which tells you quite a lot about what kind of game this is.
So here is our review. Mine from the controller. Hers from next to me on the sofa gradually putting her phone face down.
The setup is exactly what you want from a Hellraiser game. Dark, oppressive, deeply unpleasant in all the right ways. You are navigating a world that the Cenobites have been quietly pulling apart for a very long time, with notes and environmental details scattered around filling in a history that raises its own questions. One sermon in the collectible notes is dated 2002, which made my wife look up and ask how long this cult has actually been operating and when exactly any of this is set. I did not have a good answer. The lore is deliberately murky and I think that is mostly intentional but it does leave you with a nagging sense of confusion about the timeline that never fully resolves itself no matter how many notes you collect.
The world itself though. Gorgeous and horrible in equal measure. Every environment feels like it was designed by someone who genuinely loves the Hellraiser mythology and wanted to honour it properly rather than just slap the license on a horror game and call it done. There is a section where you crawl through what I can only describe as intestines and my wife, without looking up from her phone at that precise moment, heard my reaction and looked up and said “well that fits doesn’t it” and went back to whatever she was doing. She is right though. The gore in Revival is extreme and completely relentless but it never feels gratuitous the way cheap horror games do. Pain and flesh and transformation are what Hellraiser is about at its core and the game commits to that without apology or embarrassment. If that is not for you this is not your game. If it is, the world building here is extraordinary.
The stealth is where things get properly interesting. The enemies, cenobite foot soldiers in their gimp masks, are essentially blind as long as you are crouching which gives the whole experience a tension that works brilliantly once you understand the rules. My wife clocked this before I did. She watched me get spotted twice and then said try crouching and I tried crouching and the problem was largely solved. Appreciated. The stealth kills themselves are the real standout and genuinely the thing I was least expecting to be impressed by going in. This is not a swift throat slit animation that plays and then you move on. There is a struggle. A real one. Different enemies react differently, some go quietly and some absolutely do not, and the savagery of every kill feels completely in keeping with a world where suffering is the whole point. It is one of the more unsettling things Revival does consistently and it does it well every time.
Being chased by the actual Cenobites is an entirely different thing and the best the game has to offer. When a proper Cenobite is hunting you the clunkiness that exists elsewhere in the combat suddenly does not matter at all because your only thought is putting distance between yourself and whatever is behind you. Revival completely understands what the movies knew about these creatures, that they are not just monsters, they are something older and more deliberate and more patient than that, and having one bearing down on you in a dark corridor is as frightening as anything I have played this year. My wife had fully put the phone down by this point. Make of that what you will.
The AI outside of the Cenobites themselves is genuinely not great. I want to be honest about this. Regular enemies make decisions that do not always suggest a sophisticated internal life. There were several moments where something that should have been tense became briefly comedic because of how badly an enemy processed my presence. It is the most significant mechanical weakness in the game and it is hard to fully ignore.
The map situation caused a mild domestic incident where I spent several minutes complaining loudly that there was no map in this game, this is terrible design, how am I supposed to know where I am going. My wife looked up from her phone, said is that not a map in the corner, and went back to her phone. It was a map in the corner. This is not the game’s fault.
The subtitles were out of sync throughout which bothered her considerably more than it bothered me. She mentioned it twice. The trophy situation made her laugh, the first one arriving so early and so generously that she looked up and said are you sure you deserved that. There are a lot of trophies in Revival. A lot. The game is essentially handing them out at the door like party favours.
The gameplay has a clunkiness to it more broadly that I noticed and mostly did not mind because everything else is doing enough to carry it. This is a game built from atmosphere and genuine love for the source material outward, and the mechanics are in service of that vision rather than the other way around. When it is all clicking, crawling through horrible places, hiding from things that should not exist, surviving encounters with creatures that feel properly mythological and terrifying, it is one of the most authentically Hellraiser things you could hope for from a game with this license.
My wife picked her phone back up at the end credits and said that was quite good actually. High praise. I agree with her completely.
Savage and sexy and occasionally a bit stupid. Pinhead would approve.
8/10