Survival horror 2025: hands-on with Hellraiser, Crisol, Project Spectrum and more

Horror games were everywhere at Gamescom last month, including not just Resident Evil and Silent Hill but other more obscure and unexpected delights.

Following the demise of E3, this year’s Gamescom took up the mantle of the world’s biggest video games show with aplomb, setting new records for attendance – over 357,000 people passed through its giant, labyrinthine halls – and boasting over 1,500 exhibitors.

Not only that but over 72 million people viewed its Opening Night Live curtain raiser online. And one aspect of that show would surely have struck everyone: there are an awful lot of blockbusting horror games on the way.

I got to play many of these at the show itself, since most of them are out this year or early next. After so much forlorn hope of a survival horror renaissance it now seems as if a golden age for the genre is finally upon us. So if you get a thrill out of being scared half to death, the next couple of years are going to be a real thrill.

Resident Evil Requiem

Capcom’s Resident Evil Requiem – the ninth major instalment in the beloved survival horror franchise – is unquestionably one of the most anticipated games right now, with a launch set for February 27, 2026. At Gamescom, it was playable for the first time, albeit in the form of a looping, timed demo that provided a tantalising snapshot of gameplay which was unlikely to be representative of the game as a whole but certainly revealed the game’s overall vibe.

In the demo, you play as Requiem’s new lead character, Grace Ashcroft, and in the grand survival horror tradition, she is pretty clunky and slow-moving. The sequence began with Grace strapped to a medical chair and after managing to free herself, it was time for some exploration in the typical Resident Evil fashion, as you try to escape the area.

Stealth was the order of the day, and I soon discovered that I would need two fuses to power up a door and escape the section. The first was easy to find, but other useful objects – beyond the likes of green herbs — were in short supply. Crucially, I found a lighter, revealing that in the demo sequence, light and dark was a key mechanic.

Exploring a promising new room, in which a movable trolley could provide access to a toolbox, Grace causes a bottle to smash, and I was confronted by a suitably terrifying giant monster, which I could only deal with by running away. The monster followed me by diving into a ceiling duct but stayed well away from the well-lit room I ended up in; it clearly shrank from the light, so I could use that to keep it at bay.

Resident Evil Requiem’s Gamescom demo had a great sense of claustrophobia to it, evoking memories of Resident Evil 2 and being constantly pursued by Mr X. It also gave us an initial choice of taking a first or third person view; the former undoubtedly ramped up the atmosphere, but the latter gave us a better idea of what was happening around us, so increased the likelihood of finding a solution to Grace’s predicament.

My first taste of Resident Evil Requiem bode well for the game – undoubtedly it will include sequences that are more action-oriented, but what I experienced was shot through with the general sense of dread that pervades the best Resident Evil games.

Silent Hill f

It is now 13 years since the last non-remake instalment of Konami’s survival horror franchise, so there was understandably a lot of noise around Silent Hill f at Gamescom. The game has a very different setting compared to its franchise predecessors, of 1960s rural Japan, but plenty of the creeping psychological dread that characterises the series. You play as Shimizu Hinako, a Japanese high schooler who lives in a remote mountain village.

Early into the demo, the village was invaded by mysterious entities, first necessitating a long sequence in which Hinako had to run ahead of the threat, before she began fighting back, equipped with an iron pipe and a knife.

There were traversal puzzles in the labyrinthine village and much to collect, the most useful items of which could be crafted into health-recovery objects. After a while I arrived at another setting: a religious retreat in marshland. There, the combat was mingled with some classic puzzle-solving involving prayer symbols, and the game’s sanity system – which, for example, determines whether Hinako can survive certain mind-scrambling sequences – started coming into play.

Silent Hill fans won’t have to wait too long for f, as it’s due to release on September 25, as it looks set to add another compelling chapter to a beloved franchise.

Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival

For me, this game, whose cumbersome full name will henceforth be ditched in favour of plain old Hellraiser, was the surprise star of Gamescom. Tucked away from the main bustle, on the Saber Interactive stand, it felt like a labour of love, aiming to add a new wing to the voluminous Hellraiser celluloid canon.

As the full name attempts to imply, Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival is all about clothing the fearsomely dark spirit of the original film in the trappings of a thoroughly modern and high-tech video game. Hellraiser’s production values are simply through the roof and while its gameplay adheres to the survival horror norm – stealth, evasion, resource collection, melee combat, and gunplay – it is endowed with a level of slickness and responsiveness that renders it all the more chilling and shocking.

Hellraiser started with a vaguely yuppyish couple, Aidan and Sunny, engaging in what may be the only convincingly depicted instance of sado-masochistic in the history of video games. And from there, it proceeded to get even filthier. Naturally, given that it’s a Hellraiser game, a puzzle box – called the Genesis Configuration – is involved. Of course, things go horribly wrong and Sunny is spirited away to a hellish underworld inhabited by Pinhead and a cast of other creatures featuring flayed skin and nails hammered into just about all body parts.

You play as Aidan and after some sequences involving running through morphing labyrinths, you find yourself in a basement below a club run by the franchise’s notorious Cenobites, from which you must escape before discerning how to rescue Sunny. This involves finding keys, stealthing around enemies and full-on gunplay with very limited ammo, although I found some helpful environmental items that could help a single bullet go a long way.

All the while, Hellraiser lore was front and centre, with semi-flayed, chained-up bodies in abundance. If body horror is your thing, Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival is the game you have been waiting for all your life. But I couldn’t help thinking that it’s so graphic, yet also realistic, that it will surely be banned in those countries that are notorious for adopting a censorious attitude to video games. One of the filthiest games ever, it should arrive at some point in 2026 on Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.

Cronos: The New Dawn

Bloober Team has had a mixed reputation as a crafter of horror games, as while some of its earlier efforts were praised for their atmosphere, they were criticised for being deficient in gameplay, but the 2024 remake of Silent Hill 2 suffered no such problems. So Cronos: The New Dawn, an original survival horror game due to release as soon as September 5 (on Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, Switch 2, and PC) is an important one for the company.

My Gamescom playthrough proved highly enjoyable and left me wanting to play more. While the third person gameplay of Cronos: The New Dawn is typical for the survival horror genre, involving exploration, puzzle-solving, melee fighting, and gunplay, it adds an interesting time travel mechanic to the genre, with areas being depicted pre and post-apocalypse.

It also has a body horror element, in that when you take down enemies any other incoming enemies can consume them and combine with them. In my gameplay session, I played as a nameless Traveller, a sort of resurrected operative in a cumbersome suit somewhat like an early 20th century diving suit. I was also given a high-tech pistol that transformed into a melee weapon.

Vibe-wise, although I was in a post-apocalyptic interior landscape, littered with dead corpses that had combined into masses of flesh, I discovered lore suggesting I was actually in 1980s Poland, before the fall of Communism (Bloober Team are also Polish). While movement was on the clunkier side, there were some decent puzzles to solve and gunplay was satisfying. Coupled with the unique ambience, Cronos: The New Dawn promises to provide a memorable survival horror experience.

Crisol: Theatre Of Idols

Blumhouse is a name that will be familiar to fans of horror films, a milieu in which it has long been an important player. Recently it announced that it is branching out into horror games and Crisol: Theatre of Idols is one of the first fruits of that move, after last year’s Fear The Spotlight.

At Gamescom, Crisol could be found on the Spanish Games stand, and it has a very Spanish vibe to it. The developer described it as a cross between Bioshock and Resident Evil, which is apt enough, as while its gameplay will be familiar to Resident Evil aficionados its slightly cartoonish and steampunk-esque graphics heavily reference Bioshock.

I played a sequence in a mediaeval-looking Spanish town in which, in typical Resi fashion, a giant enemy would pop up frequently, that could only be escaped from rather than engaged. This involved running around and finding small openings to duck into, while amassing a growing armoury (including a shotgun) and store of useful items. There were plenty of environmental puzzles, involving finding keys to open new areas, and enemies I could take down, which resembled animated, wooden mannequins.

Crisol was certainly fun to play, albeit in a fairly familiar vein, and while it wasn’t too heavy on the conventional horror side, it bore obvious Spanish fairytale folklore influences which lent it a pleasingly distinctive air. Definitely one for those who prefer the quirky over the scary, and we’ll watch Blumhouse Games’ future development with interest.

Project Spectrum

Chinese behemoth Tencent has been a major player in the games industry for quite a while, but it hasn’t yet established itself fully outside of its home market, although it has financed – and continues to bankroll — a large and diverse roster of blockbusting Western-developed games.

One of its first attempts to garner a global reputation was first person shooter Delta Force; at Gamescom though, a new IP was showcased for the first time. Currently titled Project Spectrum (although we suspect its name may change) it too is essentially a multiplayer first person shooter, but its enthusiasm to embrace horror elements lends it a distinct air.

I was given a hands-off demo, played live on PC by one person at Gamescom and a few others hooking into a server elsewhere. Not only does it have a multiplayer element but it lets you play as a horror-influenced monster: a giant, black spidery object with all manner of devastating melee attacks and movement abilities.

Project Spectrum casts you as a member of an elite military squad tasked with investigating specific areas of some very large maps, which have recently become afflicted by mysterious anomalies. This involves elements of puzzle-solving, in that you have to identify areas where the anomalies are strongest, fight weird alien enemies that they bring and work out how to deal with and eliminate said anomalies.

Encroachment by rival humans, played by other players, adds another element, primarily of shooter style gunplay. But there are other elements that are more commonly associated with horror games, including a sanity engine. Intriguingly, Tencent say that you can opt to succumb to insanity, bringing a much more hallucinatory experience but opening up potential new routes through areas that aren’t there when you have a full grip on your sanity.

Project Spectrum also has a free-form crafting system which, for example, lets you take a shovel and craft it into a melee instrument that inflicts additional fire damage – handy when battling aliens that are vulnerable to fire.

Project Spectrum is hugely ambitious, free-form rather than claustrophobic, and does a good job of mixing realistic-looking environments with weird horror tropes. It certainly doesn’t conform to the established horror game blueprint, especially with its multiplayer nature, but in the demo I saw, there were plenty of chilling moments. It looks as though it won’t be released for quite a while, but it’s definitely a mould breaker to look out for.

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