How do you revive a series like Hellraiser? When your source material spans four decades and multiple mediums, all with wildly differing tones (and fans), what stays, what goes? Where would you even begin? It's a question developer Saber Interactive seems to struggle with throughout Hellraiser: Revival and the result is a messy, uneven, but earnest, and often fascinating sort of tribute that, boldly, goes back to the start.

Clive Barker's 1986 novella The Hellbound Heart, the genesis of the Hellraiser series, is a queer horror classic; a story of obsession and addiction, loosely inspired by the gay BDSM scene. Later Hellraiser movies would see the series devolve into silliness, iconic villain Pinhead (played by Doug Bradley, who briefly returns here) becoming a quipping counterpart to the Freddies and Chuckies of the time. But Saber seems to have more literary ambitions, drawing heavily on Barker's original themes for its tale of two lovers and their encounter with the Cenonbites; extradimensional beings from a realm where agony and ecstasy are interwined.

It's a story that starts with sweaty softcore sex and soon descends into flesh-ripping violence, setting protagonist Aiden against a quasi-religious extreme BDSM cult as he desperately attempts to rescue his girlfriend Sunny back from Hell. Unfortunately, their relationship is so immediately toxic, it's hard to get emotionally invested in this critical narrative throughline.

Tonally, Hellraiser is a very strange game. Instead of artfully orchestrated scares, Revival's horrors rely on a grim procession of fused and rended flesh, as relentless as it is effectively offputting.

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