Hellraiser: Revival Review: Wooden Shooting, but the Best Hellraiser in 30 Years

Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival is an AA game that can genuinely surprise you with how raw and how bold it is. My score is 7.5 out of 10, and for fans of the series it's a full 10: no sequel in the last thirty years has got this close to the spirit of the first films. The mechanics are a solid C, the shooting is wooden and some bosses are clumsy, but the atmosphere and its respect for the canon carry everything. It came out on 8 October 2026 and costs $39.99 on Steam.

Read next:

I was afraid of a hide-and-seek simulator

My biggest fear was that Revival would be yet another walk-and-hide game: corridor, wardrobe, monster walks past, corridor again. We've had so many of those lately that the genre has nearly fused into one game. That didn't happen. You get weapons, dodges and melee, and you can't always hide from a problem. Sometimes you have to cut it open.

And it starts surprising you right away, without half an hour of warm-up walking. GameSpot puts it at about ten hours, and not many of them are empty.

The video loads from YouTube (Google) when you press play. Privacy policy

Barker is happy, and you can tell

Saber Interactive made the game, and this time Clive Barker wasn't the writer, as he was on Undying or Jericho, but an adviser: PC Gamer says he helped shape the world and advised on the story. He's clearly pleased with the result. Talking to Dread Central, he admitted he'd feared heavy censorship and said he was "genuinely astonished by how far they've been able to push it". Revival is a direct sequel to the first two films and simply ignores everything after Hellbound: Hellraiser II.

You feel that everywhere. The Lament Configuration, the Cenobites, the way they talk, their idea of pleasure and pain, the look of the Labyrinth: it's all where it should be, with no reinvention for its own sake. And Pinhead is voiced by Doug Bradley again, which alone is worth a couple of points to anyone who grew up on the films.

More Resident Evil 7 than Silent Hill, and that's a good thing

Revival borrows from a lot of places. First-person view, cramped houses, resources you have to count and enemies that are easier to kill than to avoid: that's Resident Evil 7 and 8 through and through. It flirts with Silent Hill a lot too. I'm not sure the team aimed straight at it, but after the recent remakes the parallels are hard to miss: fog, warped spaces, a house that behaves like it's alive.

And in a couple of places, especially the endless corridors with one lamp and a door left ajar, there are nods to a certain Kojima game that never came out. If you know, you know. I liked the mix: the base is the most successful horror formula of recent years, and the Silent Hill side adds the thing Resident Evil usually lacks, dread with no monster in the frame.

Graphic, and unapologetic about it

What sets Revival apart from most horror games is nerve. It hides nothing behind a cut or a dark corner. It shows you everything. Flesh, hooks, chains, what the Cenobites call pleasure, all of it looks the way it did on film in 1987, only bigger and closer. If you're squeamish, stay away, and the game doesn't pretend otherwise.

This is gore that serves the story rather than shock for shock's sake. Hellraiser has always been about the body and where pain ends and something else begins. A softened version would simply have been a lie.

Labyrinths from the films, and places worth staring at

Every corner is interesting. It never feels like levels stitched from identical rooms. Each location has a hook: an ordinary house with blue wallpaper, a prison cell, a dead forest with a burning tree. The labyrinths from the films are here, and the first time you step out to endless stone walls under a purple sky, it's that shot from Hellbound.

In places it looks genuinely beautiful, even if the budget clearly isn't Capcom's. Where polygons run short, light and colour do the work: red, blue and a lot of deep dark.

Wooden shooting, clumsy bosses

Now for where the points went. Every mechanic is merely okay. The shooting is wooden: guns have little kick or weight, and hits barely register. Melee and dodging are there and save you in tight rooms, but they're nowhere near Resident Evil 4. Some bosses are clumsy, with a couple of fights boiling down to running in circles and waiting for an opening.

Critics are split, by the way. Metacritic has it at 69 from 42 reviews, GameSpot gave it 8 out of 10 and called it the best entry in the franchise since the original film, and Game Informer gave it 4.5, mostly over bugs. I didn't hit anything game-breaking, but there's plenty of rough edges.

Performance: an Unreal Engine 5 game that doesn't stutter

This was the pleasant surprise. Revival runs on Unreal Engine 5, and after everything we've seen from that engine I expected stutter and streaming hitches. Instead the performance is excellent: smooth, no hitching, no waiting on shaders every five minutes. Maybe that's because it skipped the trendy heavy features and leaned on lighting and staging instead.

Those Steam requirements are modest for 2026, and here's how it runs on a budget RTX 3050 at 1080p:

The video loads from YouTube (Google) when you press play. Privacy policy

Who should buy it

It's a very brave project. If you're a Hellraiser fan, buy it without thinking: it's the best thing to happen to the series since the late eighties, and for you it's an honest 10. If you just like horror in the vein of Resident Evil 7 and can forgive wooden gunplay for the atmosphere, it's a solid 7.5. And if you want a flawless action game, Revival isn't that. Its strength is the world, not the mechanics.

The video loads from YouTube (Google) when you press play. Privacy policy

Our verdict

7.5

Atmosphere 10

Faithfulness to the films 10

Performance 9

Graphics 8

Story and delivery 8

Melee 6

Bosses 5

Shooting 4

Good Stuff Atmosphere and respect for the first two films, Doug Bradley back as Pinhead Bold, uncensored body horror Interesting locations and the Labyrinth from the films Excellent performance on Unreal Engine 5

Bad Stuff Wooden shooting Clumsy bosses Every mechanic is merely okay

Summary

An AA game with a bold approach and the best grasp of Hellraiser since the original films. The mechanics are average, but the atmosphere and the canon carry it. For fans of the series it is a 10.

Read also

Every Clive Barker game, from Nightbreed to Hellraiser: Revival, and what happened to them

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