The Haunted Hoard: Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti (NES)

While the Splatterhouse series is known for its grisly violence and detailed viscera, shortly after the first game’s release, the series already took things into a surprising new direction. Dispensing with gritty horror and shifting more into creepy cuteness, Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti on the Famicom was already going to have to be a step back in graphical quality from its arcade forebear, so the NES appropriate chibi sprites and silly monsters was probably the smarter move than trying to pare down the detail that made the first Splatterhouse so popular. However, since it was believed that American audiences didn’t quite click with cute content back in the 1980s, Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti never received an official overseas release until it was included in Namco Museum Archives Vol. 1 compilation in 2020. Perhaps the strangest thing about this departure in tone from the mostly dark and bloody main series games though is that Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti is possibly the best game in the entire Splatterhouse series.

 

Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti, the name translating to “Naughty Graffiti” and not really being relevant to the action, begins with Rick’s girlfriend Jennifer crying over his grave. The masked hero of the original Splatterhouse is suddenly revived when a lightning bolt strikes his grave, but another also hits the nearby plot for the Pumpkin King, a floating jack-o-lantern who snatches Jennifer away and sends Rick on his quest to save her once more. Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti proceeds from there in a surprisingly strong mix of its horror roots and its commitment to a sillier tone, the boss of the first level for example being a vampire who dances about to summon slimy minions, but those minions themselves look rather gross and the cemetery level beforehand wouldn’t look out of place in a serious NES horror game thanks to its choice of colors and attention to detail.

At times, Rick’s cute and squat little form is the only clue the game is even trying to be something besides authentically eerie, but then you’ll have more amusing moments like the grimy sewers featuring adorable and goofy looking mice in addition to the fearsome leeches that leap out of bone-filled waters. It certainly never reaches the bloody heights of its franchise kin, all of it being closer to the safe kind of Halloween horror than something truly terrifying or shocking, but there was definitely effort put into pulling off a more eerie aesthetic so it could then break it some with a silly design or unusual situation. It is, essentially, comic relief in its more literal sense, a scary level being topped off with something like a fly boss with a goofy face or a seemingly dead girl standing up and walking away happily after you cleared out the alien parasites bursting out of her chest.

 

Learning if what’s lying ahead is cute or creepy is part of the fun, but the platforming action is similarly well designed. Rick himself has a good high jump that is easy to adjust in the air, and with no instant death drops you instead get to focus on more interesting dangers like hazardous level features or the enemies trying to give you trouble. Normally Rick relies on a short range axe chop to hit anything he wants to kill and a lot of standard enemies go down in one hit, although a few undead monsters might have a head pop off and fly after you if you just try to carve your way through everything in your path. Flying foes and projectiles mean you often have to measure your approach as well, but you have a decent health bar to start with so even if you’re just learning the tricks of a tricky enemy or the more involved boss fights you can afford to take some hits as you figure it out. If you can find a shotgun though you can deal with the monsters ahead far more easily, the spread of the shot able to take out a good group and the ammo limit making you actually want to line up those shots for maximum impact instead of mindlessly pressing forward during the power trip. The seven levels often feature unique novel foes that bring something new to their location like the monstrous sharks patrolling Diamond Lake or the hanged men of the forest, although there are two secret areas that go for a different culture’s creatures in their unique departures from the haunted mansion grounds that make up most of the adventure.

All of these fundamentals gel well with the aesthetic to make for consistently engaging and decently challenging action, but things get far more interesting when Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti layers a level up system over it all. When Rick kills an enemy, he’ll get a point or two put towards building up his life bar. With boss battles that often involve a few moving dangers to watch out for, a good life bar provides that helpful cushion to learn their patterns, and in levels where health is spaced out more you can start feeling that craving for a piece of candy or hamburger to top you off so that you won’t be done in by what lies ahead. Most of the time though, healing items pop out of enemies or are placed to incentivize you adding a little risk to how you play, and with the experience system incentivizing engaging with every foe, you are encouraged to constantly get in close and try to kill every foe you find.

 

Building up your health and maintaining it becomes an exciting part of the adventure, the player not wanting to miss out on chances to assure their safety but the enemies aren’t so simple that you’ll breeze through them even with the reward system making you more durable as you press in deeper. Bosses provide a proportional amount of points for their greater challenge as well that tops off the satisfying feeling of overcoming those more dangerous battles, and while the final boss is a bit basic in his design, the adventure overall does manage to keep things balanced so you’ll always be considering every risk and what opportunities it could provide. Even the simplest moments of platforming ended up elevated because it’s not simply about overcoming some obstacle and moving on as it can provide you the boost you need to handle some danger up ahead that is more involved than that bat flying down at you now.

THE VERDICT: Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti balances true horror design with comedic subversions to make for a fun mixture of legitimately creepy critters and ones that are delightful to see act silly. More than just a tour of its aesthetic creativity though, this platformer builds a simple but effective foundation with challenging jumps and dangerous enemies that you can start to gain an edge against by engaging with them more often, the experience system and health item distribution keeping you looking at everything ahead of you as a chance for greater success despite the risk. Some moments are a bit more basic than others, but it hardly hurts an adventure with plenty of fun surprises on top of a smart progression system that encourages you to get more involved in the action.

 

And so, I give Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

A GREAT rating. Remove the experience system and you would still have a smartly designed game that places its dangers well, but that reward system makes encountering trouble much more interesting. Enemies pop out with enough time to respond to but in ways that can make it a little hard to hit them with your axe or clear them if you aren’t ready to act, and even if you are caught by surprise, your health bar, even at its smallest, can take some punishment before you croak. Mix in the ability to keep expanding that health bar though and bosses can be a bit more dangerous and include more concerns during their fights, and even the regular enemies can start tracking Rick’s movements better or pack nastier tricks after that first hit doesn’t quite eliminate them as a threat. The growth is gradual enough it will likely be a work in progress up until the final level but it still rewards you with health upgrades often enough that you will see an enemy ahead and be driven to take them out either in hopes of a health refill due to the damage from previous risks that didn’t work out perfectly or just to push you a bit closer to long term survivability. Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti can get away with only really having a few shotgun sections to shake up how you play because the enemy types keep bringing in the new considerations on how you want to move in and get that helpful kill, and since kills are so valuable you aren’t just trying to breeze past everything to reach the boss battle.  Regardless of the art direction this system would already ensure this would be a quality platformer, but your journey isn’t just one of dangers. The world is interesting for its mix of sillier monsters inspired by famous films and creatures that lean closer to something a bit more legitimately unnerving. You still won’t be scared by the cartoon horror, but hanged men in a forest whose ragged bodies drop down to attack you will be found in the same stage as a silly smiling werewolf, and a danger can just as likely be a bunch of buckets falling from above as it could be mean looking spikes in breaks in the floorboards.

 

Rather than being so concerned about appearances they forget to make a good game, the team behind Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti provides a very effective design for its action and then mixes in both its traditional horror inspiration and moments that make fun of that in amusing and unexpected ways. The other Splatterhouse games would often put an impressive sight over actually making fighting the monsters enjoyable, either through things like unfair randomization or such limited health that an already hard to move character is going to be punished for not being pixel perfect in a jump. Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti could have survived such concerns with its approach to health and progression though, but it doesn’t need to since the fights are already fair and the focus can be more on learning what you are up against and overcoming it in that moment rather than through repetition and hoping for a lucky break. It’s perhaps not as exhilarating conceptually as facing a grotesque and imaginative horror in the other Splatterhouse games, but it instead can make that fight enjoyable in its substance and still keep you interested with the ways it parodic tone manifests. Considering the early Splatterhouse games were buoyed more by their appearance than how they played it was probably the wise marketing decision not to release Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti overseas where its visuals might lead to undue dismissal, but now that it’s finally left its home country officially, this spooky and silly platformer can be better appreciated by a gaming public less concerned over impressive graphics.