Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival is so grotesque it unsettled its own director
Studio Mad Head Games is releasing first-person horror game Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival, whose director Emil Esov discovered his own fear of small hole clusters while researching disturbing imagery for the project. The game prioritizes sustained discomfort over jump scares.
Mad Head Games is preparing to release Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival, a first-person action-horror game set in a new story within Barker's universe. Protagonist Aidan Lynch must use the puzzle box known as the Genesis Configuration to rescue his girlfriend from the Labyrinth, while Pinhead, his Cenobites and a cult close in.
The development team began with a single guiding question: what should players feel? Their answer was discomfort rather than sudden shocks. Director Emil Esov says that while researching imagery people find hardest to look at, he discovered he himself has trypophobia, a fear of clusters of small holes — and rather than softening those images, the team built them directly into the game.
Discomfort over jump scares
Early in the game, players must reach a hand inside a grotesque sculpture to retrieve an item, and even stealth kills are deliberately drawn out with struggle, sweating and moaning rather than being instant. Esov compares Pinhead to a calm, imposing monk rather than a typical slasher villain, describing him as almost trolling the player.
Clive Barker himself helped shape the characters, themes and rules of the game's universe before remaining on as an adviser. One of his most specific notes was a request to make the sky in the Labyrinth more purple — a level of nitpicking Esov says he appreciated, since it showed Barker was still watching over his creation.
Doug Bradley returns as Pinhead after roughly two decades away from the role, recording his lines remotely. According to Esov, the actor needed almost no direction, since he simply embodies the character. The Cenobites will receive more individual roles and screen time, but they remain unbeatable in combat rather than becoming ordinary enemies.
The first-person combat draws comparisons to Resident Evil and BioShock, while Condemned influenced its unpredictable melee encounters. Around a quarter of the game takes place in the Labyrinth, and one of the difficulty settings is named after Hellraiser itself — Esov's own preferred way to play.
