Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival is the first game of the franchise, and what's most exciting is that it's single player and the original voice for Pinhead returns.
In 1987 Clive Barker's twisted imagination brought us the sadistic movie Hellraiser. It was so gruesome, horrific, and unique that it became an instant genre classic, despite its narrative flaws. The movie has sparked many more sequels with varying quality, but surprisingly there never was a Hellraiser game in almost 40 years that the franchise existed.
Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival finally closes that gap and invites players into the realm of torture and pain that is the labyrinth. The game will be a single-player, first-person action survival horror experience, as developer Saber Interactive describes it. In the game you play as Aidan, whose girlfriend Sunny gets abducted to hell by the demonic cenobites. You try to help your girlfriend escape while wielding weapons and mystical powers and traversing a world filled with demons, cultists and deviants. While the trailer for the game doesn't show much gameplay, it's still exciting for different reasons.
The Original Pinhead
The main villain in Hellraiser are the cenobites. Demons from hell that view torture and pain as something pleasurable. The leader of the cenobites is also the most iconic part of the franchise, Pinhead. The pale man with needles in his head and black eyes, who speaks like a demonic priest, became an instant icon with lines like "No tears, please. It's a waste of good suffering."
Even though the franchise has been with us for 40 years, with a new movie coming out every few years, the original Pinhead has been gone for a while. Doug Bradley played Pinhead in the first eight movies, before stepping away from the role in 2005. Now he returns as the voice of the leader of the cenobites, after briefly voicing Pinhead for Dead by Daylight.
From Skepticism To Intrigue
In April, Pinhead was removed as a DLC character from Dead by Daylight. Now many speculate that Hellraiser: Revival was the reason for that happening. When the game was first teased, a lot of horror fans suspected that this will be another asymmetrical multiplayer game, similar to Dead by Daylight and Saber Interactive's own Evil Dead: The Game.
dear baby jesus please let it be an actual story-mode Hellraiser game and not a multiplayer that will be dead in a few months.
— We Watched A Movie (@WeWatchedAMovie) July 17, 2025
This sparked a lot of initial hate and skepticism. Some believed that the developer would just repeat what happened to Evil Dead: The Game, which has been removed from stores after only three years. Most players are also just tired of asymmetrical horror games. After Dead by Daylight's success many big IPs have been following the same route, like Friday the 13th or Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
But as soon as players found out that this is indeed a single player game, skepticism turned into intrigue and excitement. Finally, a brutal, single player survival horror game instead of a doomed multiplayer game. But until the game comes out we'll just have to wait to see if they truly have "such sights to show us".
I must be dreaming. Hellraiser video game? Single player??? https://t.co/QT2Ea3jT6k
— Horror Games Community (@horrorvisuals) July 22, 2025