Splatterhouse (1988 Video Game) User Reviews

Play it in the arcade

[CuriosityKilledShawn · 7/10 · 14 July 2005]

Remember the movie Re-Animator, based on the short stories by HP Lovecraft? Remember the crazy Doctor Herbert West, played so wildly by Jeffrey Combs? Well it seems that Doctor West has been dabbling some more into bad science and has created an army of freaks and monsters. He's long since vanished but the monsters still live in his mansion. You play a college nerd called Rick Taylor who has to rescue his girl (a popular feature in beat-em-up games at the time) from this house of madness. Rick is aided in his mission by a special Aztec sacrificial mask which gives him superhuman strength and powers to go zombie-bashing.

Splatterhouse is a very hard game to across. Either you play the arcade machine (now very, very hard to find) or you buy a Turbo-Grafx PC Engine and get the home-console version, which is so horribly censored that it even deletes the cut-scenes. Thus making the game completely storyless.

Still, it's a cool-looking game and one can really tell where a lot of Resident Evil's influences came from. At one point in the game, the character of Rick walks through a giant vagina and battles evil foetuses. As a side-scrolling beat-em-up it's pretty weak. There's no real impact to the fighting and the controls feel somewhat sluggish.

Seriously, the Arcade is the only place to go if you want to have a go at Splatterhouse. The Turbo-Grafx version neuters the game to the point of no-fun-ism.

A game that had to have inspired Resident Evil and Mortal Kombat...

[The_Light_Triton · 8/10 · 4 January 2011]

Back in the 80's, games were usually labelled as children's toys. you had mascots like Mario, link, Zelda, samus, and donkey Kong, and not one of those games talked of blood and gore. Welcome Namco's Splatterhouse. Released on the Turbografx 16, Splatterhouse might very well be the first survival horror game ever released. it's a horror-themed game, obviously, and the title even brags of it's violence and gore.

Rick and Jennifer and students who are exploring west mansion. While inside, Rick and Jennifer and both knocked out and separated. When rick awakes, he's covered in blood, Jennifer is nowhere to be found, and he's wearing a mask he can't remove. now it's different. he's not leaving with the mask and without Jennifer. now the player takes over, as rick explores west mansion, slaying weird creatures, and avoiding grotesque things, to get his girlfriend back, and to get the mask off his face.

As mentioned on my summary, this game had to have paved the way for games like resident evil (mostly Resident Evil, They're both survival horror games) doom, and mortal kombat years later. Being one of the first games to openly depict gore is one thing, having a parental advisory warning before the ESRB is another.

I suggest you go find a copy or download this for Wii's Virtual console, you will have fun with it.

"It was the mansion of Dr. West, but those who knew it better called it...~Splatterhouse!!!"~

[Foreverisacastironmess123 · 8/10 · 27 December 2017]

This is known and fondly remembered as one of the first and most violent horror games to ever be released on a home console, and for its time, it was bloody glorious! It must have downright murdelized the vast majority of the eager young kids that were dumb enough to try to brave it in the arcades back in the day! It really doesn't have much of a story, but that wasn't really important at all with a game like this. What it did have was the fun of playing as a hulking monster man in a hockey mask in a house of horrors where there are tons of demonic monstrosities all lining up for an ass-wupping as you bring the slaughter to the house!! I love the driving spooky music and the dingy visuals and just how much eerie atmosphere the game had as you embarked in the right direction in the disgusting-looking environments. I was creeped out while playing this as a kid and it still kind of does when I watch it, some of the ideas are still pretty impressive in how daringly screwed-up they are, like when you fight the upside down cross and the living 'womb' of the house, when you fight against the demonic ghost foetuses and the surreal boss fight where the 'hero' is forced to kill the very one he's been trying to save! Its inspirations are clearly the classic 80s horror movies of old, and it's a lot of fun spotting the various little nods to them that are dotted throughout all three of the original games, as well as the remake, which wasn't really all that bad! Speaking of inspirations, that may not have been Jason per se, but that was undoubtedly was a take on his iconic mask that Rick wears, they even made it red in some versions of the game to avoid any copyright claims! To their credit though, the "Terror Mask" did become much more skull-like as the games went on. Sweet pixelated gore, spooky atmospherics, and just fun splatter-soaked monster-bashing mayhem made this a cool retro gem of a game that's still more than capable of showing you how it's done, and is still a 16-bit scary delight to play. Classic! X