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If a horror game gives its own director a physical reaction, it’s probably doing something right. While researching the images people find hardest to look at, game director Emil Esov discovered he has trypophobia – a fear of clusters of small holes. Rather than tone the scary images down, he fed them straight into Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival.
The forthcoming first-person action-horror game drops players into a new story in Barker’s universe. Aidan Lynch must use the Genesis Configuration puzzle box to rescue his girlfriend from the Labyrinth as Pinhead, his Cenobites and a cult close in. But Revival is not built around jump scares. The team at Mad Head Games began with one question: what should players feel? The answer was discomfort.
“That’s a key emotion,” says Esov, “You know when you are looking at something, but you cannot look away?” Early in the game, players must push a hand inside a grotesque sculpture to retrieve an item – it’s all about feeling extreme unease. Even a stealth kill is drawn out rather than instant, he explains: “There is struggle. There is sweating, moaning. It’s really, really stressful.”
That does not mean simply filling every room with blood and bodies. Esov likens Pinhead to a monk rather than a traditional slasher villain: calm, imposing and “almost trolling you”. The horror comes from what he might do, but also the unnerving way he talks about doing it.
Clive Barker himself helped shape the characters, themes and rules of the universe, before staying on as an adviser as the story became a game. His feedback could move from big questions to one wonderfully specific request, which Esov recalls as: “Can you make the sky more purple in the Labyrinth?” Esov loved that “level of detailed nit-picking”, which showed that Barker was still watching over the world he created.
Doug Bradley also returns as Pinhead for the first time (except for a few lines in a time-limited chapter of Dead by Daylight) in the two decades since his last appearance in a Hellraiser film. Recording took place remotely, and Esov soon realised the actor needed little coaching. “You don’t have to direct him,” he says. “He actually is Pinhead!”
As for the Cenobites, they get more individual roles and screen time, but won’t be ordinary targets; their undeniable power had to survive the move into an action game. “You cannot fight them,” Esov says, “They’re not a gameplay aspect that you get to beat.”
Elsewhere, the first-person combat has drawn comparisons to Resident Evil and BioShock, while Condemned influenced the unpredictable melee fights. Around a quarter of the game takes place in the Labyrinth, and the Genesis Configuration works as both a key part of the story and a tool for the player. The difficulty settings include a highest level named after Hellraiser itself, which is how Esov prefers to play. His hellish serving suggestion of sorts: “It should be discomforting even to play.”
Esov hopes Revival will introduce a new audience to the mix of violence, sex, beauty and pain that sets Hellraiser apart. He wants a game “that doesn’t hold back”. If players come away disturbed, they will not be alone: Revival got under its own director’s skin before it ever had the chance to get under theirs.
