Pinhead has a new accomplice, and she came prepared. Peaches is the latest name attached to Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival — the first proper video game built on Barker’s Cenobite mythology — and she announced it in her own unmistakable register: a credits list headed by the phrase “Lubed up with.”
The post, published to her X account, thanks six collaborators (@bleach.babychino, @dan.rkn, @nancynutter_, @natashavlio, @street.walker and @rolereverso) plus makeup artists @sarahhartgens and @manuel_denniger for their work “For Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival,” tagging the game’s account, Barker’s own handle and studio @saber.games.
https://twitter.com/peaches/status/2107185263642341722
She arrives at a project with real momentum behind it. Saber Interactive and Boss Team Games will bring Hellraiser: Revival to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC and Nintendo Switch 2 on Oct. 8, with Doug Bradley back in the recording booth as the voice of the Hell Priest and a Standard Edition priced at $39.99. A scrapped NES adaptation in the 1990s is as close as the franchise ever got to this before, and the developers have spent the run-up to launch promising to push the material’s sex-and-violence blend as far as a ratings board would permit.
“Clive was heavily involved in our process early on,” Saber said in an interview with Daily Dead, adding that the author reviewed gameplay and narrative scripts and “made certain that we understood the soul of the work.” Game director Emil Esov has said the team deliberately stopped at Barker’s novella The Hellbound Heart and the first two films when studying the source material, skipping later sequels entirely.
For Peaches — born Merrill Nisker in Toronto and a fixture of Berlin’s electroclash scene since 2000’s The Teaches of Peaches — the assignment is not a stretch. Her seventh album, No Lube So Rude, landed in February through Kill Rock Stars, her first full-length since 2015’s Rub, and she cut it in Berlin with producer The Squirt Deluxe. The accompanying tour, with support from Model/Actriz, Cortisa Star and Pixel Grip, ran through North America in the spring and Europe into June, donating a dollar from every ticket to the Trans Justice Funding Project.
Saber’s leadership has been candid about where the content ceiling sits. Studio chief Tim Willits told IGN in March that the game secured its ESRB rating without a single cut, after saying the team intended to “go as far as we possibly can, as far as the people that make rules will let us go.” Developers have described keeping vomit bags on hand during a Summer Game Fest demo session built around one of the series’ signature sadomasochistic set pieces.
Peaches is lubed up. Hell opens Oct. 8.
