The Haunted Hoard: Splatterhouse (Arcade)
Splatterhouse was one of the first horror-themed games to hit the arcade, but despite the gory deaths of its monsters at the hand of the Terror Mask wearing Rick apparently being kosher for places kids could gather after school, the home ports ended up having quite a bit of censorship. A meat cleaver was replaced by a wooden plank, the inverted cross boss was turned into a floating head, and of course a lot of the blood was taken out, although changing Rick’s hockey mask to a red and black alternative was at least more of an attempt to avoid comparisons to Jason Voorhees rather than trying to tone down the thing that made the game appealing. Splatterhouse revels in the bloody destruction of its creatures inspired by horror movies and Lovecraftian mythos, and its unflinching willingness to bring blood and guts to the arcades in 1988 is why it’s so fondly remembered even though the actual game doesn’t play well at all.
While the censored home ports did provide more of an explanation as to why Rick finds himself in a mansion filled with horrific creatures all bent on killing him, the basics are still easily picked up from the few cutscenes in the arcade game. Rick and his girlfriend seek refuge from a thunderstorm in a mansion out in the woods, but quite quickly Rick meets an unfortunate end and Jennifer is taken away. A mysterious mask revives Rick and attaches itself to his face to help him on his quest for revenge, the now muscle-bound man making his way out of the mansion’s dungeon in his quest to escape the mansion and save his girlfriend. The Turbografx-16 port and other versions at least give some reason as to why this particular mansion is filled with horrific monsters, the Splatterhouse containing the deranged creations of the deceased Dr. West. The game is mostly about smashing apart whatever interesting creatures stand in your way though, and considering its reliance on bloody carnage, it’s not too surprising it went for a minimalist approach in explaining why you’re even on this specific warpath.
The titular Splatterhouse lives up to its visceral name, the living mansion the game takes place in filled with creatures who are often lumpy, slimy, bleeding, or otherwise disfigured and deformed before you’ve even landed a single punch. Animated corpses spew slime at you to attack, large fanged worms emerge from rooms filled with meat, and while you can usually make out the mansion’s architecture amidst the organic features of the Splatterhouse, there are parts where you might as well be traveling inside of a living creature rather than a living building. Location variety remains important throughout the experience, Rick finding himself exploring the mansion’s exterior, treading water through an underground river, or exploring special areas of the building like a full on chapel. It’s run-down and unusual appearance definitely make its a suitable stage for a game about tearing your way through every monster in your path, but Splatterhouse’s style really is its only effective part.
Rick can punch enemies, do crouching kicks, and jump attacks, and since the game is locked to a two-dimensional plane, this means he can hit most enemies he needs to take care of. He does have a special attack as well that is definitely a little awkward to pull off. The special sliding kicking requires you to jump forward and then hit attack and a downwards angle as soon as you touch the ground, the maneuver sending you skidding forward with your leg outstretched. This maneuver is definitely powerful and useful, but you need room to execute it, a failure often leaves you vulnerable to attack, and it can send you skidding right into danger as well. The weapons you can pick up can definitely assist, things like an axe or cleaver giving you a reach advantage over your fists and some items like spears and shotguns useful for hitting foes from afar, but they all feature limited uses and are lost during room transitions. With only a few hearts representing how few hits Rick can take during a life, it’s important you use what you can to avoid damage, but Rick’s attacks aren’t really supported by any good method of dodging foes or attacks, especially if they’re already close to him and won’t be knocked out with one punch.
If his foes were built to challenge these combat tools then there wouldn’t be much of a problem, but the enemy and level design in Splatterhouse is definitely built around killing you if you don’t already know what’s coming or aren’t lucky enough with how enemies appear. There are many examples of enemies the game asks you to either face off with in a specific way or just hope your foe will not pick the moves or maneuvers that will mess you up. One of the game’s most memorable boss enemies is Biggy Man, a man with a sack over his head and two chainsaws for hands. The primary method for defeating Biggy Man is to bring a shotgun to the fight, but you’ll likely have to use ammo on the way to the fight. If you can juggle the level’s two shotguns effectively on the way to the fight you can kill him, but if you die once on the way, the checkpoint won’t allow you to get the first shotgun. So, if you are left with the second shotgun only, you need to get in close and hurt him. Since he constantly holds his chainsaws in front of him he has the reach advantage and some of his movements are incredibly quick, your meager dodging options too slow to avoid them. You have to hope your slide kicks or lucky punches slip through the small moments where has made himself vulnerable, and if those don’t arise he’ll crowd you against the left side of the screen and easily kill you instead.
Another annoying enemy type crops up multiple times across the adventure, mirror versions of Rick bursting from reflecting glasses to fight you with your own moves. If they do the slide kick you really don’t have much of a chance to avoid it, and their reach is identical to yours so you have to hope you land the punches first. Some points in the game allow you to pick your path forward and some Mirror Ricks can be avoided, but a run of Splatterhouse requires some face-offs with these luck-based foes, even the final boss having a move that sometimes gets out of sync and can mess up the intended dodging method. Rick’s slow cumbersome movements also mean he’s not very good at avoiding rooms filled with enemies, and while some do have tricks like memorizing enemy spawn points and attacking them before the bad guy appears, some stages like the womb-like level have bubbly fetuses called Oba spawn from the ceiling and floor in an unpredictable manner. Even if you do your best to keep up with them, a death in this level means they’ll spawn in a new way, and their numbers continue to grow as you get deeper into this stage. If you don’t pop the bubbles quickly enough, they can also hatch into fetus creatures who attach themselves to you and you need to shake off, meaning you aren’t dealing with the new Obas appearing at the same time and can get easily overwhelmed.
When random chance and the unpredictable aren’t screwing you over, success in Splatterhouse depends a lot on knowing what’s coming or figuring out exploits. There’s a mutant boss with extendable claws who hops around the room in a mostly consistent manner, the proper way to fight this boss being a slow and methodical exploitation of certain jumps for easy damage since they’ll hit you easily if you try any other approach. Levels like the meat-filled worm rooms or the poltergeist boss are not so much reactive as they are about already knowing how an enemy will move or appear, and the final level of the game is literally about just figuring out the pre-boss patterns in enemy and hazard movement. The fact the learning process costs real cash is both why this is so aggravating but also likely why Splatterhouse built its stages this way in the first place, but it also leaves very few moments where the challenges feel like they’re built to be reactive or learned in the context of the current fight. You spend a few quarters to figure out that the mutant boss can only be reliably hurt while jumping, but then that illusion of fairness means you’ll try to figure out Mirror Rick when his gimmick is his unpredictability. Only the simplest of simple enemies and hazards are handled with regular fighting techniques or the dodging Rick is capable of executing, and these are shallow victories when you know something aggravating is waiting not too far ahead. Perhaps the worst part of it all is even if you do figure out some way past whatever type of foe lies ahead, levels are often made up of multiple segments with different foes, meaning that even if you understand how to clear three hard stretches, a random boss or memorization focused moment will throw you back to the beginning of the stage on Game Over, making any learning process take even longer.
THE VERDICT: Memorization and luck are poor bedfellows, and they are the fundamentals that Splatterhouse is built on. When you aren’t figuring out the exploits needed to overcome certain enemies, you’re often instead dealing with random factors that can easily deal damage due to Rick’s limited ability to respond to shake-ups. The foes who aren’t asking for such approaches are unfortunately shallow and only more enjoyable then the rest of the game since you didn’t spend quarters learning a pattern or waiting for a lucky quirk in their behavior. Splatterhouse is hoping its impressive gory visuals and monster designs keep you moving through the mansion, but it doesn’t make that process enjoyable to play.
And so, I give Splatterhouse from the Arcade…
A TERRIBLE rating. I definitely understand the appeal of learning how to beat an enemy through repeated failure, I can see why some people would enjoy finding an exploit to take down a tough foe, and I also experienced the satisfaction of finally getting through a tough area after multiple tries, but Splatterhouse’s design isn’t encouraging these so much as sometimes hitting on them as a side effect of its flawed design. Juggling the shotguns to Biggy Man isn’t hinted at or natural and is the only case of such a maneuver being helpful, and moments like the Oba swarm are clearly there just to keep killing you over and over while offering little in the way of truly testing your skills. If they spawn the right way you can react properly, and if they don’t you’ll be thrown off and likely lose the stage if luck doesn’t come through in the end. Perhaps even more important to it all is the fact that when your attacks are doing their job and aren’t being tested in some strange and often aggravating way, they’re only interesting because of the over the top violence attached to them. Smacking a foe against the dungeon wall is of course viscerally satisfying, and watching an undead monster explode into gooey chunks definitely fits the game’s name to a T, but when the extent of that interaction is pressing a single button, it doesn’t really make up for the moments where far too much is demanded of you instead.
Getting through Splatterhouse is a boot camp in learning patterns and weird exploits while also being prepared to lose because random chance wasn’t on your side. It’s constructed to be difficult even if you know what you’re doing and frustrating if you can’t figure things out, because earning coins in arcades was sometimes not about playing fair, it was about looking interesting enough to get a handful of quarters from a kid who has been dazzled by the visceral action on display. Splatterhouse is still remembered because it brought detailed gore and horror monsters to the arcade, but even when it’s pulling its punches with its simpler stuff, Splatterhouse never really delivers on the gameplay side, making it hard to recommend in an era where you can easily bypass all the clunky action and find the interesting parts on a video site.