Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival [Preview] Keeping a healthy distance from the cube

Hands on with the horror IP’s latest game

I’m not often made to feel uncomfortable when playing games. Sure horror games might want to make you tense and to release some of that tension with a scare, but they want you to enjoy yourself at least to the extent of finishing the experience and maybe suggesting it to others. My brief time with Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival at Summer Game Fest made me want to put as much distance between it and myself as I possibly could.

Gameplay wise things are pretty standard. Moving quietly through corridors, I was able to use a mixture of melee weapons and guns to dispatch bondage laden foes. Players can also use the familiar Hellraiser cube, the Lament Configuration, to absorb elements or powers from the environment, to turn the tides of the fight. It felt very Xbox 360 powers based shooter accompanied by the same enemy AI issues. There were a few interactable puzzles requiring the Configuration to move things like pieces of the environment.

This is all to service the story and decor of the environments including Hell, which I’m sure Hellraiser fans will be excited by. Where things got uncomfortable though was a section building towards the end reveal of the demo. This hallway loop, reminiscent of the now famous P.T. demo, alluded to the game’s protagonist and partner’s dark sexual fantasies. This culminated in finding the partner torn open on a bed, displayed like a preserved school animal dissection, in an implied sexual pose. I quickly understood why most of the game’s trailers needed to have any uncensored versions hidden behind an age checker on the game’s website. It was all too much for me, something I think the Hellraiser brand identity aims for. I would think that if what we were shown at SGF is to stay intact, it may even have difficulty achieving an M rating from the ESRB. I’m not the one to lead the conversation, but it might be worth discussing if something like the Hellraiser series is just a semi interactive snuff film disguising itself amongst horror titles. 

Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival will be reviving the discussion around the series’ complicated past when it releases October 8th 2026 on PlayStation 5, Xbox, and PC