There are probably few video game projects where the question of whether you’ve understood the source material carries quite as much weight as Hellraiser: Revival. Since Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart first introduced the world to its particular blend of sex, violence, desire, and suffering, Hellraiser has developed a very specific identity. During my chat with narrative director Antony de Fault, it means something more important than simply ticking the right boxes for fans.
“We took a lot of time in pre-production to really understand what Hellraiser is and to narrow our definition of what we should be trying to bring into the world with a Hellraiser product,” de Fault tells me at Gamescom. Hellraiser: Revival’s development process also involved Saber Interactive connecting with Barker and his team. Given how closely Barker’s name is intertwined with the identity of Hellraiser, you’d expect that to come with plenty of creative restrictions. According to de Fault, that wasn’t really the case.
“Honestly, I think we got really lucky with this, with Clive and his team, because we just never really had any of those discussions,” he says. Instead of approaching Hellraiser as a checklist of recognisable elements, the team wanted to understand what de Fault describes as the “soul” of the series. “It was mutually important to them and to us that we understood the soul of Hellraiser,” de Fault explains. “Not just what Hellraiser is in some kind of superficial checklist sense, but why Hellraiser was written as a kind of primal scream of energy from Clive, and why Hellraiser resonated with so many people.”
Barker apparently wasn’t interested in hovering over the project. “Once we’d identified that and discussed it with Clive, he just let us rip,” de Fault says. “As long as he knew that, as artists, we were channeling that same spirit that he was channeling with Hellraiser, and that we were saying something with the game that was important to us, he was very permissive.”
From there, Barker and his team would offer the occasional correction on lore, but otherwise the developers were given room to explore. For de Fault, that freedom also came with an unusual advantage: he wasn’t a lifelong Hellraiser fan when he joined the project. In fact, he’s a newcomer.
“I wasn’t on the project at the very inception,” he explains. “I came on a little bit later, once it started to coalesce and we needed to figure out what the story was going to be exactly, and how to plan all the content so we could build it.” That might sound like a disadvantage to hardcore Hellraiser fans, but de Fault sees it differently.
“We had loads of really big Hellraiser fans on the team who had absorbed everything: all the books, all the films, all the comics, everything,” he says. “So they knew it inside and out.” He instead approaches the series with what he calls a “fresh brain.” He went back to the source, reading The Hellbound Heart multiple times before moving on to the first two films.
“I just stuck with this kind of crystalline impression of Clive’s intent with his work and the series, and then we made something that renewed and followed that, basically,” he tells me. There’s heaps of media to pull from in the Hellraiser series. From the recent reboot movie to comics, de Fault has plenty to root through.
However, rather than attempting to absorb every piece of Hellraiser lore before contributing to it, de Fault deliberately narrowed his focus to Barker’s original intent.
“The number one thing you have to do on any project like this that you work on is you have to fall in love with it,” de Fault says. “Because then everything else is easy. You’re in love with it, and it becomes a passion project.” During our conversation, de Fault points out that he now has the Configuration tattooed on his arm. “So it’s made a permanent mark and a permanent fan of me,” he jokes.
For all the grimness surrounding Hellraiser, though, there’s another side of the series that can sometimes get overlooked: its sense of humour. It isn’t quite on the level of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2 or even Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil, but there’s always something knowingly absurd and self-aware underneath it all.
On this subject, he expresses, “I’ll be honest, I think this is one thing we maybe could have pushed harder on: counterbalancing the grimness and the seriousness with a bit more comedy.” Some of that humour emerges naturally through the gameplay. Watching enemies ragdoll around during combat provides an unexpected physical comedy amid all the gore, while other moments are deliberately tucked into the world.
That includes some of the game’s text messages, which apparently channel the distinctly questionable aesthetic of mid-2000s sexting, complete with character-based approximations of emojis from before emojis were everywhere. Then there are the cultists. “Some of the things that the cultists say and scream at you as they’re attacking you are intended to be darkly humorous because they’re just so over the top and absurd and deranged,” de Fault shares.
The humour doesn’t necessarily undermine the horror, though. Instead, it offers a brief release from it. “I very much see art generally, especially horror, as being a safe place for people to explore topics and process things,” he says. That extends to the more uncomfortable elements of Hellraiser: sex, violence, BDSM, trauma, and unhealthy relationships.
“People do deal with this stuff, but we don’t make art about it really. Especially not games; we certainly don’t make games about it.” Speaking more broadly, he posits, “that’s why I think we’re motivated to go and spend time with horror: to almost inoculate ourselves against those things, so that if we ever encounter them in our real life, we’re better prepared to handle them.”
For more on Saber Interactive’s new Switch game, you can check out my Hellraiser: Revival preview before it launches on October 8, 2026.
