Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival – a game so grotesque it scares its own director

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. 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. 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.