Developed/Published by: Namco
Released: November 1988
Completed: 26th October 2015
Completion: Finished it.
Trophies / Achievements: n/a

Today I’m going to tell you about the scariest game I’ve ever played.

The scariest game I’ve ever played is… Kung-Fu Master on the Amstrad CPC. It’s terrifying… when you’re, like, five.

Now, it’s not going to be that apparent from that long play up there, but what makes it so horrifying—in the arcade too—is the way that the baddies rush you to just… hold on to you. And you have to waggle the stick like mad to get them to fall off. Every missed kick or punch leads to a desperate waggling as your health drops, with more and more baddies rushing and hanging onto you until you die. It’s chilling. They’re relentless, there’s no break, you just have to keep traipsing through the level fighting without error. That sense of no escape, no rest, just always horrified me. Even the pause button offers no respite. When you start again, they just go back to rushing you.

After all, what’s really more disturbing than the inevitability of death, eh?

When I got a bit older, though, something like Splatterhouse—despite being largely inspired by Kung-Fu Master—seemed amazing. I’ve never actually liked gore or horror movies particularly—I’ve never seen, for example, any Hellraisers, Nightmare on Elm Streets or Friday the 13ths—but that opening level of Splatterhouse, what’s not to love? Slicing baddies in half, or smacking them with a bit of wood so they explode across the wall. There’s a lot to be said for the slight abstraction of pixels when it comes to something that would have freaked me out properly in a movie as a kid (I count my lucky stars I never actually saw An American Werewolf in London as a child, like pretty much everyone else I know.)

But why have I gone back to finish it? Well, I was just at Fantastic Fest in Austin, the best film festival where you spend far too much money on food because they serve it to you in the cinema and you’re like “sure, apparently I do need a $6 milkshake” (but also, generally, the best film festival?) They’re not only a film festival but have Fantastic Arcade, which did lots of cool stuff this year (including the amazing Super Russian Roulette for NES) but, most notable here, a beautiful restoration of a Splatterhouse cabinet by (I believe) Estil “Doc” Vance (who may actually be a doctor based on Google searches.)

I thought to myself “what a nice opportunity to play a game to completion” and I had a bunch of goes of it but by the time I got to stage 5 (not bad going) the annoying nature of the level (or, hell, the entire game) meant I gave up and just came home and beat it in MAME. (Which is still a huge pain to set up, by the way.)

Splatterhouse is one of those great old games where you kind of feel like the developers didn’t really know what they were doing, and they were also pretty sure very few people were going to finish it, so there are several ideas that go half-implemented and the game gets less interesting as it goes on. In fact, I’m not super clear why the game has seven stages when it feels like it should conclude at stage five, I wonder if they were told it was too short.

Really, when you get down to it, you see everything interesting about Splatterhouse in the first level. Enemies don’t get more interesting, and the weapon pick-ups are absolutely sparse, in a “is this really intentional?” kind of way. My favourite being the spanner you pick up in stage 2, throw once at a completely ordinary baddie, and then never ever see again. It’s real weird! (Actual favourite: the shotgun in stage 3, which allows you to blow dogs up in an enjoyable fashion, and also never see again.) There’s some level branching for replayability, I guess, but it doesn’t add all that much (it’s most apparent in stage 5.) And the two levels after stage 5 are so boring. In one, you fight bubbles against a generic organic background, in the last, you jump over enemies on fire in a slight modification of an earlier background (insanely frustrating—the jumping in this game is awful and you always seem to land short) but I suppose at least the final boss looks like Marilyn Manson if he’d melted slightly.

So yeah, Splatterhouse, totally one of those games you put 25p in, play the first level, see the fun weapon effects and then die. At which point you are, if you’re sensible, done. There’s definitely a pretty cool Kung-Fu-esque game here—I mean even if the game just had more weapons and unique kills it would be instantly more fun—and I wonder if the home console sequels managed it.

Will I ever play it again? No, and I can’t be arsed to find out if any of the sequels managed it unless someone chimes in and says I’ve got to play X or Y with a good reason.

Final Thought: In a surprising twist, however, although the game’s ending is a nothing, the end music is actually great. A very atmospheric Italian horror-esque lament. Totally worth it, but you can listen to it without going to the effort I had to.