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.

” 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.

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