Hellraiser: Revival is the perfect addition to horror writer Clive Barker’s boundlessly horny franchise because it’s also disgusting. Like the 1986 novella “The Hellbound Heart” and the several movies full of nipple-ripping and blood-suckling it inspired, developer Saber Interactive’s new action game is sexually depraved in a way that flies past Freud and into a pile of soiled underwear—and I’m grateful. I’m scared that the art of video games will be lost to major corporations’ mass layoffs in pursuit of untenable growth and live-service shooter after shooter, but I think Hellraiser: Revival can keep us safe in its big, flayed arms for now.
The game follows protagonist Aidan Lynch, who is revealed to have a urethra piercing within the first 15 minutes of gameplay, as he tries to save his girlfriend Sunny from the extra-dimensional Cenobites—including the illustrious Pinhead clad in supple black leather, voiced by original actor Doug Bradley. This is a game that bows to its source material’s freak factor, and it also often uses the very ’80s, dense science-fiction logic of movie sequel Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988) to explain its unique Genesis Configuration puzzle box, the franchise’s monster god Leviathan, and the degenerate cult that wants Aidan shaved over rice.
Nothing about Hellraiser: Revival can be mistaken as having “mass appeal.” As I play it, I often find myself in pleasant disbelief about this. Its first-person combat feels as lubricated as the best Call of Duty, and its sickeningly realistic graphics could easily slot into a fancy EA sports thing, if those games ever decided to feature people’s congested intestines falling out of their butts. Saber could have easily made an expensive, generic horror shooter that won’t get demonetized on YouTube, but it didn’t.
Hellraiser: Revival is easygoing about this. The game’s executive producer, Nenad Tomic, said in a 2025 Xbox blog that Clive Barker was “deeply involved with the game from the very beginning,” and it shows. As a writer and director, Barker tends to deliver disgusting news with cheerful energy, like reapplying glitter lip gloss.
“It smelled of soured milk and fresh meat. When she was flung down the boards beneath her were wet and warm,” Barker writes straightforwardly in “The Hellbound Heart.” “Her belly wanted to turn inside out.”
Hellraiser: Revival, likewise, isn’t preoccupied by its gore—there aren’t really any anguished screams or music cues to command you to be scared. (Light spoilers to follow). Instead, its developers seem to want players to witness all the ways the human mind and body can be corrupted. When I pause to take stock of all its details, I find Revival has everything: curved needles slid through taut skin, pregnant women parts sewn to other women parts as a grotesque statue, a meat grinder halfway through extruding pearls of a fatty human thigh…
Since the Hellraiser franchise’s thesis is that pain and pleasure are indistinguishable, characters in Revival are also vulnerable, naked, and perverted whenever possible, presenting their shiny latex breasts to you at a party, encouraging you to use the girthiest dildo, and so on. Enemy cult members taunt you with how much they want you to plunge your little knife into their side, twist it until they burst. They wear tiny shreds of latex around their pubic bone and not much else.
Cult members have this wrong idea that their devotion means anything to the Cenobites, so they cut up each other’s faces and vaginas hoping that their favorite demons will notice them as worthy of sweet suffering. I witness a torture scene in which one special cult member has the honor of getting her jaw removed and tongue extended, and I recall Hellraiser: Revival devs telling me offhand at Summer Game Fest that one of their gameplay demos made people puke.
So, Hellraiser: Revival is not only alienating a broad consumer market, it is actively off-putting. Relatedly, Bulgarian-French theorist Julia Kristeva wonders in her 1980 treatise Powers of Horror, “In these times of dreary crisis, what is the point of emphasizing the horror of being?”
She observes, “We prefer to foresee or seduce; to plan ahead, promise a recovery […] or make art not too far removed from the level of the media.” In the 2026 video game landscape, these more flattering kinds of art appear as AAA titles featuring burly men with an infinite capacity to be heroes, wield sniper rifles, and be replicated easily by generative AI.
But we are not in a world that needs congratulations. Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft and other major corporations like feeding us sycophantic chatbots and hagiographic protagonists to encourage us to buy increasingly expensive, worse consoles. The more stuff we buy, the more distracted we are from the layoffs eroding every layer of the video game industry, since corporations assume we are like spit-soaked babies always focused on a new toy. But “abjection, when all is said and done, is the other facet of religious, moral, and ideological codes,” Kristeva says. Ad-friendly cleanliness isn’t the whole truth of our existence—we need vomit, blood, piss, and pus to be human. Therefore, we need repulsive art.
And, as much as behemoth corporations try to dissuade me, I believe that AAA games are art. Hellraiser: Revival is our best, bleeding example to date, and it’s come at a perfect time. It counteracts cynical marketing and job loss across the industry with torture, a woman with the skin on her back torn up like butterfly wings, and it’s the only mainstream game to make me feel like my brain is working. Blood is flowing, and I am alive. The industry doesn’t need more artificial intelligence, but arterial incisions.
