Saber Interactive and Boss Team Games have been hitting marketing for Hellraiser: Revival quite hard since it was revealed last year, and each new trailer and developer diary has been more revealing than the previous one.
Today, 11th March, Saber has shared a new 6-minute dev diary video that elaborates on quite a lot. It’s spearheaded by Pinhead actor Doug Bradley, who’s returned to voice the horror icon and leader of the Cenobites once again, but we also get to learn more straight from Boss Team Games’ developers. You can get the quick rundown below, but here’s the video if you want to watch it all (spoiler: it’s adequately gory and sexual):
Bradley does a pretty good job of setting the tone, reminiscing about his long tenure as Pinhead and how it all started for him over 30 years ago, but he’s sincere when he says expectations going into Hellraiser’s first-ever video game was that he’d be “retreading the greatest hits.” He, of course, did deliver the many of the character’s most memorable lines again, but the surprise was the protagonist “may be going to find that things are not quite so simple.” Most plot details are being hidden for now, but so far, we know Aidan ends up in a slightly different “work” relationship with the Cenobites from what we’re used to.
Antony de Fault, narrative director of Hellraiser: Revival, also underlines that, as many fans as the development team had well before Boss Team Games was approached to take on the Hellraiser IP, it was important to “focus things.” There might be references to most corners of the universe and the on-screen canon, but ultimately, it’s Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart (the fantastic original novella) and the first two movies that define the tone and narrative the game is using as jump-off point. “Those are the things that really resonated with people.”
On the gameplay front, we’d already seen Aidan sneaking around dangerous individuals and running away from monstrosities and the Cenobites themselves, with small clips teasing very brutal melee combat, finishers, and the Cenobite powers gained through use of the Genesis Configuration. The developers aren’t ready to unveil everything it can do yet, but needless to say, its pain-inflicting and destructive potential is huge, and we have to wonder how they’ll be balancing it versus more earthly tools like guns, which I believe we hadn’t seen in action yet.
The rest of the preview borders spoiler territory at times, so if you have reached this point of the article without taking a look at the dev diary, you might want to skip it if you hate cheeky teases and want to jump into Hellraiser: Revival when it launches later this year on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
