The narrative director on Clive Barker’s Hellraiser Revival has revealed during an interview with IGN that developer Saber Interactive had something of an unofficial goal to have the game banned or censored somewhere in the world.
Hellraiser Revival, in keeping with the series’ trademark gore and other mature content, features depictions of full-frontal male and female nudity, buckets of blood and gore, and more. Now, Anthony De Fault revealed that the team’s efforts went beyond simply depicting these trademark mature themes, but have the player being able to perform them in-game.
It was an unofficial goal of the team to be banned, unrated, or restricted at least somewhere in the world as one barometer of whether we’d done our jobs right. But in a video game, it shouldn’t be enough to have the player simply see taboo things – it’s necessary to get them to perform taboo acts too. So we require the player to engage in extreme violence, to engage in sexual play, and just generally to stick their hands in a bunch of very questionable places.
This didn’t mean bucking traditional survival-horror mechanics necessarily, but it did mean making them more sensual, or disgusting, or making firm choices like the more intimate first-person perspective.
Clive Barker himself stated during an interview with Dread Central recently that he’s “proud as f**k” with the final version of the game, noting he was impressed with how far the developer was able to push things without getting censored. Hellraiser Revival was release for PS5, PC, and Xbox Series X/S on October 8, and you can read our full review here.
The game serves as a canonical entry in the famed horror franchise, sees protagonist Aiden using the puzzle box known as the Genesis Configuration to help his girlfriend, Sunny, escape from the hellish Labyrinth. Pinhead of course makes an appearance, one again played by Doug Bradley, with players facing off against blood-thirsty Conobite cultists and other creatures, using the power of the box to unleash an assortment of unearthly weapons.