Splatterhouse

Splatterhouse by Namco is an arcade brawler from 1988 that reached the PC Engine two years later, and it is that console version you can start here. You play Rick, a student whose girlfriend is dragged away inside an abandoned mansion and who nearly dies there himself, until a mask brings him back and takes a piece of his mind in exchange for strength.

The play is direct. You walk right, you hit things, you occasionally pick up a plank, a cleaver or a shotgun and then lose it again. Combat runs on a small vocabulary of punches and kicks and asks for nothing more complicated than timing and a sense of reach. So what sets the game apart is not its mechanics but its look. In 1988 it was not usual for a hit to spray up the walls, for things to crawl along the ceiling, or for an entire stage to walk you through a room where the furniture starts hurling itself at you. The debts to Evil Dead, Friday the 13th and Lovecraft are never hidden for a moment, and that open horror nerve is what the game lives on.

The console conversion is weaker than the coin-op, with thinner sound and fewer details, and the Western release also went through edits that cost it some religious imagery and the original colour of the mask. What survived is the full arc of the story, including the fight against your transformed girlfriend, still one of the nastiest scenes of its generation.

The difficulty is of its time: you learn the route by heart, you die in places you could not have anticipated, and you are sent back to the start of the section. Anyone expecting depth from the combat will be disappointed inside twenty minutes. Anyone here for atmosphere will still find it thirty-five years on.

On oldgame.cz it starts straight in the browser, with nothing to install.