I’ve been eager to finally play Hellraiser: Revival because I was still unsure what it’s trying to be. But having finally played a sample of it during Summer Game Fest, I’ve figured it out: Hellraiser: Revival is a lot like a Resident Evil game, only it’s exceptionally horny.
All the familiar elements are there. You have your doors “locked on the other side.” You have some crafting scraps with which you can make things to aid your survival. You have distinctive keys you use to open elaborate doors, and puzzles that require roundabout, lateral thinking. Played in first-person, you’ll have guns you use to defeat enemies, while you carefully manage your ammo and health. Even the UI indicators that tell you when you can interact with objects look a lot like those in Resident Evil games.
If you’re well-versed in survival-horror and Resident Evil, in particular, it would be virtually indistinguishable from a Resident Evil game if it weren’t for all the nipples. There are so many nipples in Hellraiser: Revival.
In my demo, these nipples mostly came in the form of posters, pictures, and other imagery hung up on various walls or found around rooms. Sometimes the nipples were implied in extremely lewd notes left around the world for you to find, conjuring the vivid imagery of nipples in your mind. There are mocapped nipples in cutscenes, too, and I’ve seen enough nipples in Hellraiser: Revival to suspect that, if you play the whole game, you’ll see every kind of nipple there is. There’s even a section where you embark down a revolving hallway, a la PT, but the narrow passage is plastered with nipples.
Hellraiser, is, of course, a series built on gratuitous sexual imagery–there are story reasons for this, but it also just feels like that was what sold in 1987 when it debuted. It seems like Hellraiser: Revival is going to be huge for people who really like Hellraiser or nipples. And if you happen to be someone who loves both Hellraiser and nipples, buddy, do I have the game for you.
I spoke to the team after my roughly 30-minute hands-on experience with the nipples, and they told me about how they were glad to have earned the Mature rating by the ESRB, the US games ratings board, rather than the kiss-of-death Adults-Only rating, which would make the game very unlikely to be sold in stores. It still needs to pass through several other ratings boards around the world, but as of now, the developers assured me that, just like the depictions of violence in the game, the sexual content was not edited to suit any ratings boards.
Every last nipple in the game–and yes, in the context of Hellraiser: Revival, each nipple is presented as sexual content–survived the oversight. When you play Hellraiser: Revival, you’re getting the unaltered, uncensored Nipple Cut, as the artists intended.
While many players are in between Resident Evils at the moment, with Resident Evil Requiem in their rear-view and Resident Evil Veronica still a ways off, Hellraiser: Revival, coming later this year, could fill in nicely as something quite like it for you to latch onto.
Hellraiser: Revival is due this year on PC, Xbox, and PS5.
