Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival is exactly what the witch doctor ordered this spooky season. It's gory to an extreme, the scent of blood and latex almost palpable as I guide protagonist Aiden Lynch through a kinky pansexual death cult's hideout, into a pulse-pounding BDSM club, before evading The Chatterer in The Labyrinth's chambers of torment. Peppered with nods to survival horror titans and off-kilter Xbox 360 games like Condemned alike, I think our Hellraiser Revival review score is fair: This might not the freshest kill on the chopping block, but it's definitely a delight for genre sickos (and sickos in general, ya sadists). That said, I cannot get on board with its first-person perspective. Like, at all.

I can tell what developer Saber Interactive was gunning for. Much like Silent Hill Townfall, the new game takes notes from the first-person terrors of Resident Evil 7 to create an oppressive, immersive environment that implicates you, The Player, as its main character. However, it doesn't succeed. I think Hellraiser Revival would have been a better third-person action game than a first person one, and it all starts with one simple question.

13 Hellraiser: Revival Easter Eggs and references that even hardcore horror fans may have missed

A smart survival horror game understands the importance of perspective. It's what makes Resident Evil's Ethan Winters such a powerful everyman figure, his face always obscured in gameplay, cutscenes, and promotional materials (until the third-person Resident Evil Village update) to reinforce the notion that who he is doesn't matter as much as what he thinks, feels, and does.

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