Hellraiser: Revival demo is out on Steam and 94% of players like it

The free demo for Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival went live on Steam on September 17, and in four days it has collected 1,335 user reviews, 94% of them positive. The full game launches October 8 on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S at 39.99 euros on Steam. Saber Interactive and Boss Team Games are making it, Clive Barker himself worked on the story, and Doug Bradley is back as the voice of Pinhead for the first time since 2005. At FramesGames we looked at what the demo shows and why people are praising it.

What is in the demo

The demo covers the prologue and part of the first episode. You play Aidan, who is trying to get his girlfriend Sunny out of the Labyrinth and runs into the Scarlet Church cult along the way. Your main tool is not a gun but the puzzle box, here called the Genesis Configuration. According to CGMagazine it grows into fire, telekinesis, chains and the power to bend level geometry. The rest is first-person horror in the classic mould: stealth, a machete, and firearms with never quite enough ammo. The download is 32 GB.

It is not only Steam users who like it. CGMagazine calls it uncomfortable "in exactly the right ways" and made by people who clearly wanted to make it. Tom's Gaming singles out the difficulty balance and a Cenobite chase through the Labyrinth. There are complaints too: fail a segment and it restarts from the very beginning, and weapons break sooner than you would like. For FramesGames the bigger question for the full game is different: can it hold this tension across a full campaign, not just a half-hour slice.

The films' signature is intact, and uncensored

Barker's trademark mix of pain and pleasure has not been sanded down. The content warning on the Steam page reads like an inventory of the first film: torture, consensual mutilation, drugs, sex, and in story scenes suicide and BDSM. Reviewers confirm it is not set dressing. Blood, nudity and skinless Cenobites are shown head-on. Tom's Gaming even thinks it tips over into excess and starts to look almost cartoonish in places.

The approach already has a price. Germany and Brazil rate it 18+, and Indonesia's age rating system IGRS has refused it outright: Steam's own data for Indonesia carries a BANNED flag. By all appearances the developers chose not to tone the game down for that market.

Will your PC run it

Saber does not say what resolution or frame rate these specs target, so the demo itself is the best way to judge performance. It costs nothing to try.