When I got out of the hospital, I wanted something a bit more short and sweet to break back into being home again. Coincidentally, I happened to be showing a friend my PCE Mini, and then I remembered that this game was not only on there, but that it also fit great into September's TR theme of inferior ports~ (this being a port of the arcade version). I used save states pretty extensively to get retries at the last few stages and bosses, but overall I think I got familiar enough with their patterns that I could do it legit if I gave it a few more tries. It took me about 45 minutes to finish the Japanese version of the game.

Splatterhouse was originally an arcade game and it has the sort of simple story you'd expect from that. Rick & girlfriend are visiting the house of a paranormal researcher, Dr. West, when his girlfriend is suddenly kidnapped by monsters who also badly injure Rick. Rick is surely doomed when suddenly the terror mask appears, promising him great strength to help defeat Dr. West and his creatures if he'll just put it on. Rick obliges and gets all hulked out with his new mask friend and embarks on a journey through the game's ten or so stages to show these monsters what for. It's all pretty unimportant to the action at hand (that being punching and kicking monsters), but it certainly sets up for a very interesting aesthetic for an action game.

And a pretty solid action game it is. Splatterhouse is a 2D sidescrolling beat 'em up of sorts. While there is some platforming to jump over pits, this is more so an action game than anything else. You walk along the one-plane (no depth to walk back and forth between) punching and kicking all that dare stand in your path. It's a pretty tough game, with Rick only getting five hits before he's lost a life (of which you get 3 per continue) and have to go back to the start of the current room, but at least they give you a pretty sizable number of continues. Apparently the jump kick makes the game much easier, but I never quite figured out how to do it ^^;.

The difficulty doesn't always feel entirely fair, though, lending to the arcade roots of the game. Enemy spawn locations are sometimes fixed, but also sometimes procedural, so there are times where you simply can't avoid taking a hit because of how relatively big and slow you are. The bosses trend towards being much more manageable and follow more set patterns, and are definitely some of the game's biggest highlights. The game has stage and enemy inspirations from all sorts of horror films (from Rick's own obvious Friday the 13th design cues to the boss that's straight up the Poltergeist), and it makes for a lot of very cool and spooky set pieces and stages to punch your way through~.

That spooky presentation is definitely ones of the game's biggest strong points. The horror themes don't shy away from the gore, and although the PC Engine can't show them quite as pretty as the arcade version, the graphics and the music still sound great on a HuCard. The graphics are honestly one of the biggest "inferior port" things about the game. While it still plays just fine, the sprite limit is definitely something the game struggles with, and playing as a nearly invisible Rick trying to kill enough nearly invisible enemies to just make everything look normal again. It isn't exactly game breaking, but it's definitely an aspect that makes the arcade version something more desirable to play than this one.

Verdict: Recommended. The sometimes random nature of enemy spawns and relatively high difficulty can make this a bit of a frustrating action title, but it's also got enough charm and extra lives that I think it pulls through just fine. If you're into action games and want something quite aesthetically unique among retro games, this is a great one to check out (or perhaps the arcade version instead, if you're looking for something that runs a little better).