I love horror. It's one of my favorite genres, be it in games, movies, or even comics, and the launch of Resident Evil Requiem on Switch 2 day one gave me huge hopes for horror on Nintendo's platform. So much so that I strongly believed Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival would be coming to the platform. Well, not only is it not hitting the console at the same time as other platforms, but there's also no official announcement for it, despite what Google AI might tell you.
To say this both surprises and infuriates me is an understatement. As I said, I love horror games, and as Hellraiser is one of the most iconic movie franchises in the genre, I want nothing more than to enjoy Revival no matter where I am. Pinhead deserves as many victims as possible, and Switch 2 players deserve to explore sin and pleasure if they so choose. Let us make this foolish decision, dammit - leaving us out is a waste of perfectly good suffering.
It's not as though Nintendo's hardware isn't capable of running it; one look at my Resident Evil Requiem review, and you'll see that the Switch 2 handles the spooks really well, while my Cyberpunk 2077 review shows that even the most demanding of games have a stable home on NS2. With that in mind, surely it isn't a performance worry? I could be wrong, but many developers are constantly proving the 2025 console has what it takes to run these impressive games.
If you ask me, the (mostly) smooth performance of Requiem, along with the stellar ports for RE7 and Village, paved the way for new horror games on the Switch 2 - we know that Alien Isolation 2 is coming to the platform. Like Hellraiser, that's a game set in the universe of a beloved spooky classic. One look at the trailers and recent developer diary is enough for me to know that I'm going to love Revival; the developer clearly understands the source material and is honoring it.
For the longest time, I've wanted to see a Hellraiser game - Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre have all seen games, but Revival is the very first Hellraiser game to see release. It's an occasion fans have long been waiting for, so leaving some players out is a real shame. No, being able to be a Cenobite in Dead by Daylight doesn't count, even if he's one of the cooler Dead by Daylight killers to play as.
Pinhead is an absolute gem of a character, and the Cenobites are a very menacing group from the depths of hell - it's going to be intense knowing that they're out to kill me, especially with iconic characters such as Butterball, Chatterer, and Deepthroat also being in the cast. Best of all, the legendary Doug Bradley is voicing Pinhead - as if it could be anybody else, really.
Revival does look like the game we all deserve, which is honestly what makes its seemingly skipping Nintendo's hardware difficult to swallow. I won't completely lose hope on a Hellraiser: Revival Switch 2 release, as it's not unheard of for developers and publishers to announce it as a platform after the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and PC. Still, even if it doesn't come to the console at launch, at least I get to see the wonderful sights regardless.