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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Bex April May

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

Pinhead, a figure whose face has a checkerboard of scars with pins at the intersections, stands between stone walls.
A monk-like villain … Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival. Photograph: Saber Interactive

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.

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