Splatterhouse (1988)

Preliminary: Hmmm, after trying the arcade Robocop game from late 88 I was worried I was entering the era of blatant coin eaters (tho the music and look were great in that). So I was hesitant with this one after reading that it's a game that clearly expects you to die. I was glad to see you can take hits, not just one-hit game overs, and I got through the first stage without savestates etc. I thought the Look was going to be tacky but it really is very gory and the weapons have a force to them and it has the Horror music and just all around surprisingly good, even if a bit cluttered. Love all the mangled bodies and the different ways the weapons destroy the enemies. I know my brothers will love seeing this.

Day 1

I like how responsive the controls are, so you can smack left then right then back left again etc. Tho different weapons have different speeds of course. You especially notice this responsiveness of the controls in the "boss" parts of each stage, as I called them (the ending segments). Bahaha speaking of I was over here just endlessly dodging the annoying bouncing chair boss during the, well, annoying "boss" of stage 2 before confirming I could in fact hit it (I had tried before and died). I'm starting to see the coin eating aspect of the game... argh.

Yep the cheap shots keep coming, and so sick of that "oww!" sound your character makes when hit lol. But the font for "stage II" "stage III" etc is so cool. And okay nice Stage III was good that's what I want: I like the brawler segments they do it surprisingly well (and that's not usually a genre I like), so the bosses should be more brawler-oriented like the chainsaw enemy was. That was a good stage. I really liked stage I and II until the "boss" segments which were really just the "annoying" segments that intended you to use coins. Onward and upward!

That's the font I liked.

And this gives you a general idea of the Look, tho the first stage was much more cluttered with mangled bodies etc. And some really odd enemies I've only seen once or twice so far lol, like the blob of body horrorness :-p

Yesss let's just take a moment to pray to a classic church organ sounding jam and then sudden horror movie screams lol.

I am really enjoying the Look, Sound, Feel, and brawler elements of this game. But jeesh is it hard at parts and jeesh do the bosses take an insane number of hits. This final boss especially! That was quite the underwhelming final boss compared to the others, plus the overall final level was kinda meh but I was at the end!

And thus I was at the ending, with the nice organ song playing for the credits

Look: 9/10 There have been a lot of sci-fi/alien games trying to emulate the Alien look, but none came close to the horror film enemies as this one. Everything about this, from the settings to the mangled bodies to the absurd monsters (I wish I had gotten the crawling head blob thing in a screenshot) was well-done. And for 88, this has that PC Engine/arcade look that has been getting me excited for the 90s expectations for Looks.

Sound: 8.5/10 Not that I love horror sounds, but this achieved it very well. Plus,. the Yamaha organ segments boosted this to 8.5. My main complaint is the character's "ow" sound when hit. It just didn't match his look nor the vibe.

Play: 8/10 This is one of the best brawlers I've played so far, just not totally in love with the platforming elements, the "boss" segments that didn't include an actual boss, and the cheap deaths that clearly forced coins. However, it's a short enough game that the cheap deaths are reasonable in the sense that this is an arcade game you were meant to try over again and again till you had it memorized (like the cheap chandelier death or the angled platforms sliding you down or the uh pulsing organ boss exploding lol)

Feel: 9/10 I was going to claim I'm not a huge horror game guy, but then I realized yes I absolutely am lol. Resident Evils, Parasite Eve, Dino Crisis, Silent Hills, Seventh Guest, the list goes on. Many childhood favorites were horror games, and I had a dad who raised my brother and me on horror films. This one did it early and did it much better than any of the other attempts at horror games I've seen so far. If only the gameplay remained brawler with brawler bosses throughout and maybe brief tough platforming parts in the last 2 stages, then I I could say the entire Feel was near-perfect.

Attachment: 9/10 I'm already super eager to show my brothers and have them try it, since the controls are responsive and the brawler segments are manageable. But I know they'd get frustrated with the later parts and any of us would have to resort to savestates etc. Still, a game I won't forget, that I may return to, that I know I will show my brothers, and that is an early example of a genre and mindset for videogames that I can't deny I grew up with (oh shoot forgot to mention how much I loved Mortal Kombat too as a kid)

Overall: 8.7/10

Completion: Main Story

Playtime: ~40m

(This was retro game club game #14 on the Grouvee forum.)

Splatterhouse is a horror-themed arcade beat-em-up from 1988 that stands out for being a particularly violent game for its time. When you attack monsters with a two by four, they don't just disappear -- they are smashed against the wall and burst apart into gory chunks, their gooey innards dripping down to the floor. This was four years before Mortal Kombat released!

This one is great all-around as far as presentation is concerned. The macabre pixel artwork is well-detailed, and the sound effects are satisfying. Your attacks especially carry a powerful and weighty oomph to them. But how does the game fare in controls and movement? Well, it's a very stiff and clunky product of its time. The best game I can compare it to is Altered Beast, which is a classic and all but is not one I actually enjoy playing. Beat-em-ups would improve a lot over the next several years, to put it all lightly -- Final Fight or Streets of Rage this ain't.

Which makes me curious to check out the Splatterhouse sequels some time, which were made for the Sega Genesis. Because while the setup for Splatterhouse is great, the execution is lacking -- and some cheap bosses mark this one as a harsh quarter-muncher.

Some very tough boss battles in this game. You have so many hits until you have to do the level over. Ouch. It's not something I could play legit beyond the second stage. It's an overall short game that seems to be built around the premise of 'you'll die.'

I don't think any of the game is random, very little elements of the game are affected by the player's position even. As far as games like this go, it's very much a memorization of where things are and how to engage them. It's the more long, drawn out boss battles (which get very chaotic) that make it so tough to make progress.

Still, It's a nice looking and sounding game with a killer cool theme. Best played on an emulator to offset the difficulty.

A True Classic

I remember seeing reviews and discussion of this game forever but haven't seen many that give it the treatment it deserves and encourages you to play this in it's proper arcade form-and play it hardcore.

The first mistreatment I see in reviews is the game's aesthetics. We all know about the gruesome backgrounds filled with rotting corpses, the ghouls that have their guts spill out when sliced with a cleaver, the flesh-eating dogs you blast in half with a shotgun, and that one boss that has his hands cut-off and replaced with chainsaws. But what's amazing is how the game doesn't have just one or two shocking moments and than leave the last few levels as a bunch of undetailed corridors with rehashes of old foes, but it keeps throwing new stuff at you the entire way through. You are still seeing new enemies and new horrors right up to the end! Each new background has something fun to look at, and the mansion has incredible variety of locations, it even managed to make a dining room scarey by covering the floor with animated zombie hands and forcing you to jump between tables.

If we confine the discussion to platformers, I can only think of 2 other games from all of the 80s that can come close to how visually spectacular this game is: Stryder and the second GnG's arcade game. That's quite an accomplishment!

The second mistreatment I see is discussing the game's difficulty. Will the game eviscerate you and mop the floor with your innards? Of course. You are given an extremely scarce amount of health (4 health per life. 3-5 lives for the whole game and your only healing is having a single heart restored upon clearing an entire stage), and any given screen can easily tear through at minimum half your health if you don't know what you are doing. You're also always under pressure, if you sit still for more than a few seconds black mist will come in from behind and start creeping towards eager to kill you. In the later stages the mist is particularly fast and anything but the most aggressive play style while cause it to start creeping up on you. Run! Rick! Run!

However, and this is why I think it's a great introduction to 1cc and real arcade games, the game does not require extreme reflexes and is actually pretty easy to learn (at least until you get to stage 6). The game heavily, heavily rewards memorization and does not require insane reflexes or mastery of a complex move-list (again until stage 6). Neither the jumps nor the enemies are very elaborate and their behavior is rarely dynamic, so it's possible to develop an approach to each screen that works 100% of the time, the enemies and spinning blades are also not insanely fast as to make executing your plan very difficult. This means if you stick with it you'll see yourself going from constantly beatings to being able to clear multiple stages not only not getting hit but GAINING life. Once you manage to clear about the 3rd stage or so like this it's an incredible feeling of conquest.

This also ends up as the game's one real fault when combined with Rick's highly limited move-set. If you know a bat is going to start flying at you once you reach a certain screen, you're just going to stand there hitting the punch button knowing he will fly into it at the same angle he flys every single time. And once you know where the safe-zones are on a boss fight the battle becomes trivialized. This is mostly a problem on the early levels, later levels have enemies that are quick enough or unpredictable enough so you need to stay on your toes, the early levels are simply not dynamic or fast enough. But the game does a total 180 on stage 6 and swaps out it's predictable, slow, methodical level design for a real nightmare. Rick is forced to walk down a womb-like corridor while bubbles of embryonic fluids spawn infinitely, sometimes 4 at a time, in totally random locations, that move in highly erratic ways. If the bubbles are not destroyed almost immediately, they will mutate into highly aggressive, horrifying fetuses. If you let more than 1-2 or these monsters emerge at you're pretty much dead as they will cling to you, drain your health, slow you down, allowing time for all their little brothers and sisters to hatch until you die in that womb. (That imagery man..... I told you this game is awesome!) Reaching this stage probably as far as a non-expert player can hope to get and it's put right near the end of the game to make total victory a real trophy. Although if you did manage to even make it that far on 1 credit that's still going to be a real accomplishment: pretty much every review or summary of the game was written by someone who probably only played the watered down console port and couldn't even get past the early levels.

To wrap it up, and hopefully coax you into trying to playing this game seriously, let's talk about the story. I won't spoil it, and I encourage you to not look it up yourself, you'll lose a great form of motivation if you do, slowly tracking down your girlfriend Jennifer through the monster-filled Mansion wondering how close she is, if she's safe, what happened to. But let's just say that this game has one of the most memorable and shocking twists I've seen in a side-scroller.

I still remember it. That horrible, horrible laughter.....