I enjoy how Hellraiser: Revival's 'real-life' bondage club makes the rest of Hellraiser: Revival feel kind of embarrassing

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Hellraiser: Revival. The first five minutes of Hellraiser: Revival will make your eyebrows high-five the ceiling. It opens with a BDSM-flavored sex scene complete with piercing and blood and a veritable buffet of sex toys scattered around the room, then evolves into a gory example of what hooks and chains can do to flesh. If you're sweet and innocent you might want to clutch some pearls, but to Clive Barker fans like me it's a signal that Revival is committing to the spirit of the author and director’s sexy subversion rather than watering it down. And I'm not an easy woman to please. The original Hellraiser movie rewired my brain when I saw it as a teenager (yes, I have a therapist), and Barker's Books of Blood volumes are in my top five reads of all time. I was bracing for disappointment, but that opening proved that Revival wasn't going to shy away from the body horror or sex that runs through Barker's work. The Hellraiser world is one of horrible and hedonistic extremes, so trying to avoid either would be like trying to swap Beyond Meat patties for prime rib.

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.

Having just returned to Oz from a review trip at Infinity Ward, I was in a pretty good position to judge how authentic (and fun) a Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Pop-Up Experience could be. As luck would have it, Sydney recently hosted just such a shenanigan for press, content creators, lucky Xbox Fan Fest attendees and there were some limited slots open to the public via registrations. I infiltrated it fully. Let me bust out my Tac-map and give you a sitrep on how the organisers decided to… well, run DMZ (as in a recreation of a real Korean demilitarised zone). The result was a limited-time, MW4-themed mini-extravaganza built around a series of virtual and physical challenges. In next to no time, my objectives list was overflowing with around a dozen POIs to visit across the Carriageworks event space. Think interactive games, hands-on MW4 Campaign gameplay, photo opps and prizes for the exceptionally skilled. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if I would be among the exceptionally skilled. Working in my favour: I was one of only a handful of folks who’d already finished MW4 (and on its unlockable Realism difficulty, no less).

This year's open-world RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker and its myriad choices got me thinking: What does it really mean for your choices to matter in a video game? Typically, we think it's a good use of branching narratives when you have a properly big, dramatic effect on how things play out or when you have hundreds of endings. Just look at how so much attention on Baldur's Gate 3 focused on its endings or, years before, how everyone tended to ignore the smaller ways the Mass Effect trilogy changed across three games in favor of looking at the restrictive outcomes in Mass Effect 3. Large-scale narrative branches are engaging for a reason. They're satisfying, and they make you feel a sense of influence over events and characters you care about. Like with video game romance, however, they have become somewhat stale and predictable in form. So for this list, I decided to look at three games that use branching narratives in bolder and unexpected ways.

Sam Hill is a news writer at Polygon covering gaming and entertainment. He's a Portland, Oregon–based journalist known for covering gaming, the outdoors, national parks, tech, food, and internet culture. He has written for a range of publications including Outside Magazine, Boston Magazine, Vice, the Seattle Times and Digital Trends. New mod gives NPCs their own histories, grudges, and reasons to hunt down Arthur Morgan

If you’ve ever watched someone play an old PlayStation game and wondered why their character keeps spinning around in circles, congratulations, you’ve already met tank controls. If you’re unfamiliar, here’s your quick introduction: With tank controls, pressing up moves your character forward in whatever direction they’re facing, and pressing left or right only rotates them, so with the stick alone, you can’t sidestep or turn on a dime. That’s manageable in a hallway. It’s much less so when you’re sneaking past a guard, lining up a shot, or timing a leap across a pit, which is why the same scheme caused trouble in just about every genre during the PS1 era. These eight classic games are the hardest to go back to, whether the culprit is tank controls or something else entirely. The dealbreaker: Lining up one jump means turning in place, backing up, taking a run-up, and holding a grab button in midair. Every single time Reminder: Tomb Raider is a platformer. You’re jumping roughly every 15 seconds, and most of those jumps demand precision measured in single pixels.