Hellraiser: Revival splits the critics three ways

Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival is out, and the reviews read like three people walked into the same Labyrinth and came back with three different maps. Saber Interactive launched the first-person survival horror game on Thursday on Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2, with Doug Bradley back as the voice of Pinhead. One major outlet calls it a love letter to the original movies. Another gives it a 4.5 out of 10. I have spent a lot of my life defending the first two Hellraiser films to people who only know the sequels, so I read every word.

I have not played it. This is a read of the launch details and the published reviews, and I am keeping the story to the setup.

The facts first, from Saber's launch announcement. The Standard Edition is $39.99, digital and at retail. The Deluxe Edition is $49.99, digital only, and adds the Nailer melee weapon, a Cenobite shotgun skin, a Punisher baseball bat skin, a Leviathan weapon charm, an '80s horror movie filter, a digital art book, a digital novella called Bleeding Hearts, and the soundtrack. There is a free Steam demo. You play a man trying to rescue his girlfriend from the Labyrinth after a certain puzzle box does what puzzle boxes in these movies always do, and the box itself, the Genesis Configuration, becomes your toolkit: pyrokinesis, telekinesis, and the hook chains.

Hellraiser has always been about people who opened the box for different reasons. Fitting, then, that the critics did too.

Three reviews, one box: where they split

The table comes from GamesRadar+'s review, Game Informer's review, and Kotaku's review. What jumps out is how much they agree on. All three say the shooting is weak. All three say the Labyrinth is the best part. All three love what Bradley does with Pinhead. The disagreement is almost entirely about two things: whether the bugs ruin it, and whether the Hellraiser stuff is good enough to carry the Resident Evil stuff.

Here is my read on that, and it is an opinion, not a finding. Game Informer is the only one of the three that reviewed on a console, and its review is the one built around technical failures. I am not going to claim the PS5 version is worse, because nobody has published a side-by-side and I would be guessing. But if I were buying on console, I would watch for a patch note or two before paying full price. If I were on PC, I would download the free demo tonight and let my own machine decide.

The 17-hour figure from Kotaku is the other number I would not skip past. Kotaku's run took nearly twice as long as GamesRadar's. Some of that is just how people play, but Game Informer complains about a stingy resource economy late in the game, and stingy economies make you slow down, search every drawer, and replay fights. A survival horror game that is either 9 hours or 17 depending on how it treats you is worth knowing about before you start.

Who should open the box, and when

• You love the first two films: this sounds like the most faithful Hellraiser anything has been in decades, and Bradley alone might be worth the $39.99. Start with the Steam demo if you are on PC.
• You are on PS5, Xbox, or Switch 2: there is no console demo in Saber's announcement, and the harshest review came from a console. Waiting a couple of weeks costs you nothing but a Halloween deadline.
• You want a great shooter with a horror skin: all three reviews say this is not that. Look elsewhere.
• You are squeamish: GamesRadar calls it one of the most explicit games its reviewer has ever played. Believe them.
• Standard or Deluxe: the extra $10 is weapon skins, a filter, and some digital extras. The novella and soundtrack are nice, but none of it changes the game. Standard is fine.

It is a crowded October for horror on the games desk. We already flagged Netflix and Supermassive's Conjuring game, which arrives October 13 and takes the opposite approach: no shooting at all, just a phone in your hand and a haunted inn. And it is a funny week for Saber specifically, a studio its own press release credits with producing The Witcher 3 for the original Switch, the same game that just got its Remastered release on Switch 2.

My bottom line: Hellraiser: Revival sounds like a flawed thing made by people who actually get Hellraiser, which is more than the franchise has had in a very long time. I can forgive weightless guns. I can forgive a sewer level. Whether I can forgive a boss stuck on a car depends on what the first patch looks like.

How we made this: researched and drafted with AI assistance. Sources are linked in the piece.