The Haunted Hoard: Splatterhouse 3 (Genesis/Mega Drive)

Playing through the Splatterhouse series has been a bit of a bumpy road. While you can almost always count on it taking an imaginative approach to its horror visuals, even when it dipped into a cutesy approach for Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti, the action has been less reliable. Overly demanding at times and sometimes marred further by random chance, Splatterhouse 1 and to a lesser extent Splatterhouse 2 really needed their grisly visuals to get by. Coming to the last game of the series I had yet to play I was unsure if it would be more of the same, but Splatterhouse 3 not only shifts away from the side-scrolling platforming of the first two titles but has some smart ideas on how to structure its beat ’em up action to get more out of it.

 

Splatterhouse 3 begins with Rick resting easy after the events of the previous two games, now able to settle down and marry Jennifer and even have a son named David with her. Unfortunately, darkness enters his life once again, something called The Evil One capturing his wife and child and taking them back to the Splatterhouse to aid in a ritual. Rick needs to fight off the grotesque monsters standing in the way of his happiness once more, and sure enough the cursed mask that aided him the last two times was waiting for this moment, grafting onto his face and providing him with even more power than before. This time around though things are far more pressing, Jennifer and David both having their fates tied to how quickly you can clear the game’s small selection of levels. As you navigate through the different floors of the Splatterhouse you’ll get updates on how they’re doing and it is quite possible to be too late to save either of them. You can clear the game still and get a sadder ending for it, but the extra pressure to fight well and navigate the mansion quickly makes this six level adventure one that offers more than a series of straightforward battles.

In Splatterhouse 3 each stage starts with you finding yourself on a new floor of the mansion, the player provided a map with a big room marked with an X. The floor’s boss resides in there and needs to be reached and defeated in time if you want to save your family, but the path there isn’t always straightforward. Rooms have multiple exits, the ones marked in white on the map one-way doors and the yellow ones instead shortcuts that can sometimes get you closer to your destination or might instead take you down a more fruitful route with less dangers or more helpful pick-ups that can speed up fights. The timers can certainly feel tight and the tension ends up a constant element during the four floors where beating them in time is a true necessity, every time something goes awry making you antsy about your chances at getting the best outcome. Rick has a jump kick that will knock enemies down for example and it is great to briefly incapacitate them, but you can’t hurt them while they’re down so you’re losing time by choosing safety over the raw damage potential of your basic punch combo.

 

Figuring out how best to fight foes quickly and efficiently becomes an important part of managing your progress and there are a few things in place to make this more manageable. You start a stage with three lives and should you die you’ll be asked to restart the level with those lives restored, the player able to attempt a floor as many times as it takes to beat it. There’s a password system with very short passwords in place so even if you turn the system off you can jump back in, the player not needing to clear all the levels quickly in some perfect run. Being able to easily retry means you can take the time to experiment, taking different paths through the mansions, learning how certain monster types should be approached, and feeling out how much time pressure there really is once you better understand what you’re up against. Levels aren’t normally too long because of the time system but repeating them makes them last longer without feeling drawn out. You can always continue on if you get tired of trying to hone your level approach and the game won’t deny you any action content, so if you do just want to punch your way through the mansion without a care it is technically a valid approach.

 

However, having this accessible quest for tidying up your take down of the Splatterhouse’s horrors does do a lot to enhance a fairly simple battle system. The beat ’em up action of Splatterhouse 3 takes place in the common tilted plane layout of the brawler genre that allows movement in all directions and Rick’s attacks are fairly limited. He has a punch combo, a jump kick, a spinning kick for high damage, and a few grab moves he can execute by getting in close. For most enemies, be they headless zombies, bug-eyed creatures with protruding jaws, or the bulky flesh monsters with mouths almost as big as their bodies, you’ll probably just want to get in close and hit them as quickly as you can. The small selection of grimy and malformed creatures you encounter do usually have a unique attack or two to set them apart and dodging their special techniques is incredibly important because some can even take out your entire life bar in a single lucky blow. Most of the time they won’t be so devastating, but moving around to avoid them and learning to recognize when they might go for something like a slide kick, jaw lunge, or triple stab is key not only to survival but to avoiding being knocked down yourself and losing some of that precious time. While the instant kill hits can feel like too much, especially when they look just like attacks that barely dent your health bar at other points, most battles will be about using your simple skills to try and manage your foes well, not just because of their individual threat level, but because any second spent not pummeling something is a second wasted.

Rick is able to utilize a few more tricks that help in a fight. Weapons like a plank of wood or cleaver will deal more damage than your basic attacks and can be used quite quickly, but if you get knocked down while wielding one, you’ll drop it and a ghostly face will appear to try and snatch the tool away. Your power trip can be quite short lived if you aren’t careful, although with some rooms like the library where animate furniture and books attack, it would be a miracle to hold onto the weapon you likely find just before it. Weapons aren’t necessary either, and you will often get fuel instead for your mutated form, Rick able to bulk up and access a few new moves for as long as he has energy for it. Rick’s grab attacks are fairly potent, especially in mutant form, but he also gets unique skills like firing spears of flesh from himself while in mutant form and hitting harder in general also makes this option a great resource if you find yourself in a tough room. Considering the first floor’s boss can already be found as a pair on the second floor it is important to not waste it, but the orbs used to provide energy for it also aren’t in short supply so you ask yourself if the time saved from speeding up a battle is worth burning up that mutant form fuel.

 

There are certainly a few points where the game feels like it’s wasting some time on purpose. The teddy bear boss that reveals its monstrous sinewy limbs is constantly moving and the floating bagmen turn intangible fairly frequently, but you never feel like you’re incapable of turning the tables nor does the game expect precise performances even when it comes to getting the best ending. You’ll need to have a good idea of how you want to approach the floor and focus on killing enemies quickly, but even if you lose a life or two or get in a rough and slow battle, there is still hope for wrapping up the stage in time. It is perhaps tamer in the art department compared to its more demanding predecessors, the small enemy count still impressing with a few designs but the backgrounds feel like they cake mansion spaces in blood and viscera and are mostly content with that approach. There is still a good dose of horror, but perhaps peeling back some of the desire to impress with its horrific creatures instead allowed Splatterhouse 3 to focus on making fighting them an entertaining challenge.

THE VERDICT: Splatterhouse 3’s brawling action would be fairly basic if not for the ingenious addition of the time crunch needed to save your family. Your simple attacks are now tools with conditions you need to consider in order to effectively navigate the mansion and the right allowances like free continues makes experimenting and exploring a viable means to putting together a successful run. While playing through without a care for the fate of your wife and child would be a bit more plain, most monsters still require an amount of deference so the fights have more considerations than just time management. While some things like normal baddies having the rare instant kill attack feels needlessly rough, Splatterhouse 3 is a more compelling beat ’em up because its simple combat has a purpose that molds it into something more meaningful.

 

And so, I give Splatterhouse 3 for Sega Genesis/Mega Drive…

A GOOD rating. Adding some more attacks and monster types to Splatterhouse 3 would allow its action to thrive without the need for the timer to prop it up into something more engaging, but having that technically optional but still achievable goal in reach does a lot to make the encounters richer than just another room full of often familiar foes. Figuring out the best path through the mansion means you are weighing up if that room of basic baddies is the wiser way to go than one with tougher foes, the weapons available, the time it takes to kill monsters, and the access certain rooms grant to others meaning it is something that needs to be discovered rather than the player just plotting the shortest path on the map and assuming it’s the best. It’s not an overly complicated discovery process either but the foes put up a good enough fight that it does take some refining to get to the point David and Jennifer can be reached in time. A little more consistency in the damage enemy attacks can deal would be wise and a few foes like the bagmen feel like they’re meant to be annoying instead of interesting battles, but most baddies will slow you down in reasonable ways while providing a fight that is a bit more than just a simple impediment.

 

Some more attention to unique and gnarly monster and environmental design would help to bump up the experience as well even though you can’t always stop and appreciate it, but the earlier Splatterhouse games do beat it on memorable visuals and some of Splatterhouse 3’s greatest hits in that department draw from those older designs for that success. Designing a combat system that is entertaining to engage with puts it above Splatterhouse 1 and 2 though, and it does so without simplifying things down to the point they’re mindless. Splatterhouse 1 asked for a lot of luck and precise approaches, Splatterhouse 2 demanded perfect timing to avoid Rick brushing against a foe and taking huge damage for it, but Splatterhouse 3 lets its action be accessible without being too easy and instead has a strategic element that isn’t hard to engage with but still a challenge to master. The Splatterhouse series has gone quiet at the time of writing, but it is nice to send off the games with an enjoyable title rather than one trying to coast on its gory horror aesthetic.