An appropriately mixed bag of grisly body horror, Hellraiser: Revival is a strange, scrappy, and never less than fascinating game.

How do you revive a series like Hellraiser? When your source material spans four decades and multiple mediums, all with wildly differing tones (and fans), what stays, what goes? Where would you even begin? It's a question developer Saber Interactive seems to struggle with throughout Hellraiser: Revival and the result is a messy, uneven, but earnest, and often fascinating sort of tribute that, boldly, goes back to the start.

Clive Barker's 1986 novella The Hellbound Heart, the genesis of the Hellraiser series, is a queer horror classic; a story of obsession and addiction, loosely inspired by the gay BDSM scene. Later Hellraiser movies would see the series devolve into silliness, iconic villain Pinhead (played by Doug Bradley, who briefly returns here) becoming a quipping counterpart to the Freddies and Chuckies of the time. But Saber seems to have more literary ambitions, drawing heavily on Barker's original themes for its tale of two lovers and their encounter with the Cenonbites; extradimensional beings from a realm where agony and ecstasy are interwined.

It's a story that starts with sweaty softcore sex and soon descends into flesh-ripping violence, setting protagonist Aiden against a quasi-religious, extreme BDSM cult as he desperately attempts to rescue his girlfriend Sunny back from Hell. Unfortunately, their relationship is so immediately toxic, it's hard to get emotionally invested in this critical narrative throughline.

Tonally, Hellraiser is a strange game. Instead of artfully orchestrated scares, Revival's horrors rely on a grim procession of fused and rended flesh, as relentless as it is effectively offputting. But the ceaseless bodily destruction sits awkwardly alongside villains so deliriously flamboyant, they'd be twiddling their moustaches if it weren't for their masks. And attempts at eroticism and sensuality quickly short circuit amid the dildo-strewn nightclub neon, where extras spit out porn-calibre line readings of flat innuendo. Narratively, it's also a bit of a mess; too obvious and too incoherent by turns, clumsily walking through a minefield of complex ideas - most obviously, the intersection of sex and violence - with all the subtly and nuance of a double-A FPS with an interactive paddle spanking scene. But to its credit, it just about manages to avoid feeling exploitative, and there is, I think, an earnestness to Revival that carries it through.

This is the work of a studio, you sense, with a genuine love of the source material - and a desire to do it justice too. And that manifests in a game willing to take some unexpectedly big swings. They don't always work, but at least it's interesting. Take combat, for instance. Revival is, foundationally at least, a fairly bog standard FPS, and it's not long before an early dalliance with perfunctory stealth makes way for more confrontational action. You start with a pistol and, slowly, your arsenal swells to include a shotgun, a revolver, an SMG, and more; an enigmatic old woman intermittently setting up stall to sell you new toys and upgrades (it's not the only time Revival feels like it's channeling Resident Evil 4). Eventually, you're mowing down the Unworthy armed with laser-sight pointers and incendiary shells, which should be the absolute antithesis of horror, but Saber just about makes it work.

For starters, Aiden moves with a satisfying sense of physicality. He wobbles when he runs, sidesteps with weighty momentum, and, when the melee weapons come out, he bludgeons and slices with sickeningly tangible abandon. And while Revival is undoubtedly action-heavy, Saber still finds tension in withholding. Weapons break, ammo is short, and even the most basic enemies take a good few hits to bring down. Throw in armoured foes which need to be stripped first - either with a swing of something heavy or a particularly aggressive blast - and every combat encounter feels like it's perpetually teetering on the brink of disaster. But Revival strikes a good balance between stressful and unduly punishing.

And while I don't love the modern day proliferation of crafting systems, the focus on furious scavenging here feels additive. It heightens the sense of last-gasp desperation as you pocket anything and everything, in the hope you've got enough to eke out a couple more health packs or bullets when things go wrong. Your limited inventory space, meanwhile, forces some tough choices as you frantically shuffle, stash, or abandon items, optimistically Tetrising together the most effective arsenal from the scraps at your disposal.

Later, Hellraiser's iconic puzzle box - here, the Genesis Configuration - essentially becomes a gravity gun, so you can fling sawblades, spikes, even fireballs, shredding through multiple bodies as one. And if you're short on the Suffering needed to power it, near-dead enemies wobble on their last legs so you can gruesomely syphon it out of them. Combat's pilfered parts might feel Resident Evil by way of Half-Life and Doom, but at its best, Hellraiser finds an enjoyably ad hoc rhythm of its own - creating showdowns of pure frantic panic as you scramble to juggle weapons that seem to empty their ammo in seconds, as you furiously scan your surroundings for something pointy to use as a projectile, and delve into your inventory, desperately jettisoning stuff to make space for whatever feels most pressing right now.

The trouble is Revival spends a lot of time failing to make the most of its tools. Particularly in the first half of the game, progress feels like a linear sequence of encounters that are over before they've even begun, so quick to wrap up there's no space to settle into anything like a rewarding combat rhythm. (Conversely, bosses tend to drag on a touch too long.) And it tends to make for a lot of uninspiring busywork in a game that's already erratically paced, often adopting the relaxed meandering of a walking sim. And while I get what Saber is going for with its inventory system, constantly having to pause a big fight to manually switch weapons in and out of the limited equip-slots feels like a faff too far, and kills momentum.

What saves it though are the set-pieces: cabin in the woods ambushes where you're suddenly expected to furiously board up the windows while the Unworthy pour in; locked-room face-offs against grasping horrors that can melt into the floor while you've barely space to turn, and swerves into smoky hide-and-seek creeping. There's rarely a big encounter that doesn't throw in a new twist, and it lends Revival an infectious unpredictability that permeates everything.

Few of Hellraiser: Revival's ideas are original, admittedly (it even nicks Skyrim's lockpick mini-game), but it's hard to be bored in a game that pingpongs so incessantly. And just when its real-world action feels like it's starting to sag, proceedings are usually buoyed by Aiden's extra-dimensional jaunts into the Labyrinth, where the Cenobites and their demonic deity Leviathan reside. Revival is a good-looking game, but it's here - in Hellraiser's Escher-esque, non-Euclidean nightmare of endless, impossibly configured stone - that Saber's artistry really shines.

I am, I'll admit, a sucker for video games that delight in impossible spaces, so there's definitely some bias here. But the Labyrinth's confounding abstractions are a real high point; trading uneven combat for a shift into puzzles, platforming, and pursuit.

It's rarely complicated stuff: you'll dodge vicious blades and sneak around violently whirring traps; you'll stealth to avoid the watchful eye of Leviathan, or use your Genesis Configuration to shift monolithic blocks and create new paths. But when the blocks you're shifting are vast spirals of grinding stone, or staircases that seem to unfold on themselves, spinning around as gravity shifts on its axis, sending the world into a disorientating vortex of movement and sound, it massively elevates the whole thing. Likewise, there are a handful of arresting PT-inspired sequences, where memories melt into unreality under the Leviathan's gaze, and even some genuinely effective chase sequences as you flee from a relentless Chatterer - the Labyrinth endlessly reconfiguring itself around you in real-time. These are perhaps the standout moments; melding spectacle and tension without descending into frustration.

Hellraiser: Revival is not, I don't think, a great game. It's too messy and inconsistent to earn that accolade. And there are times - particularly in its uneven opening half - when I wouldn't even say it's a good game. Tonally and narratively, it's all over the place, stumbling where nuance is required and struggling to create a strong emotional throughline. It borrows so much for its gameplay grab-bag that it often struggles to find its own identity whenever the Cenobites and the Labyrinth are off-screen. Its action sometimes sags too. But slowly, it begins to find a more confident rhythm. Its combat and encounters grow more engaging, making the most of its tools. And as the line between the Labyrinth and the real-world blurs, the erratic tone settles and the best bits of both halves start to merge. Hellraiser: Revival might be scrappy and inconsistent, but it's entertaining, and even when it's not, it's at least fascinating. Which probably also describes the series as a whole. A bit of pleasure, a bit of pain - how apt!

A copy of Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival was provided for this review by Saber Interactive.