Hellraiser: Revival: forty years waiting for a good Hellraiser game

Hellraiser reached cinemas in 1987. Since then there have been ten films, most of which nobody defends, and roughly zero video games worth the name.

That is an anomaly. Because if you are looking for a horror licence built for video games, you will not find better: there is a puzzle box at the centre of everything. An object you handle, rotate, solve, and which opens a door you would have been better off leaving shut.

That is literally a game mechanic. It has been waiting forty years.

The game is out later today, at 39.99 euros. No score until somebody has finished the campaign.

The story

You are Aidan. Your girlfriend Sunny is stuck on the other side, in the Labyrinth, and the only thing that can get her out is the Genesis Configuration, the box.

Except that using it means striking a bargain with Pinhead, and that along the way you unwittingly kickstart a ritual meant to unleash more pain and pleasure than ever. There is also an entire cult devoted to the Cenobites, who do not take kindly to people handling their property.

Saber Interactive announces a new chapter in the series' canon, not an adaptation of an existing film. That is the right call: Hellraiser on screen collapsed from remaking the first one over and over.

Why I am watching it

Two concrete reasons, and neither of them is the trailer.

First: Clive Barker said yes. By the studio's account, he took some convincing, and once reassured that the developers had a grasp of what his series is about, he gave them the freedom to tell their own story in that universe.

Barker is not an author who lends his name easily, and he has seen enough failed adaptations to know how to say no. That is not a guarantee, but it is a signal.

Second, and this one stopped me: the content warning list on the Steam page.

The studio declares depictions of strong violence, gore, torture, consensual mutilation, drug and alcohol abuse, and narrative sequences touching on suicide, domestic abuse, BDSM practices and addiction.

Read that properly: consensual mutilation and BDSM. Those are not words you put on a Steam page by accident, and they are not words you put there if you plan to ship a shooter with pin-headed monsters.

All of Hellraiser rests on an idea almost nobody dares adapt: the Cenobites are not torturers, they are explorers who decided pain and pleasure were the same sensation, and who do not understand why you are screaming. The bad films are the ones that turned them into bogeymen. The good ones kept that unbearable ambiguity.

Seeing that list on the store page is seeing a studio with no intention of softening the subject to widen its audience. In an era when everything gets sanded down, that is almost brave.

How it plays

Journalists who got hands on before release describe a structure that looks a great deal like classic Resident Evil: locked doors, plenty of puzzles, resources to manage, and things trying to kill you in between.

That is reassuring. Survival horror has a grammar that works, and grafting the box onto it is smarter than inventing a system from nothing.

The game promises to combine the Configuration's hellish abilities with an arsenal of earthly weapons, to inflict on masochistic enemies a pain which, as the store page puts it with some elegance, may well be pleasure.

Pre-release impressions are good. One journalist writes that after forty minutes, Saber might be the first studio to understand what it is holding. Another says he already prefers the game to the last film. And the demo released in September went down well on Steam.

None of that is worth a finished game. Forty minutes of demo is the moment when every horror game is good.

The three things that will decide it

The box has to be a real system. If the Genesis Configuration amounts to a power button with a cooldown, everything else collapses. If it is an object you handle, configure, and whose every use costs you something, then there is a game here that exists nowhere else.

Length. First-person survival horror has a recurring flaw: the first two hours are terrifying and the next three become a shooter, because you acclimatise and end up well armed. That is the classic trap, and it is where most of them fail.

And the technical state. Saber knows how to ship games that run, and their recent catalogue proves it. But we have watched too many October releases arrive in pieces this year to take that as given.

I want this to work, which is not a very professional sentiment. Hellraiser is one of the few horror creations to have invented something rather than recycling an existing fear, and it has been treated with remarkable contempt for thirty years.

A box, a bargain, a price to pay. If Saber genuinely understood, we have the game this licence has deserved since 1987.

We will come back with a score once the campaign is done.

Got a fond Hellraiser memory, or a lasting grudge against one of the ten films? Both get shared on the InsertCoins Discord.