Splatterhouse

Splatterhouse for PC Engine is Namco’s 1990 home conversion of its 1988 arcade horror action game. Released on HuCard for NEC’s PC Engine, it places players in the role of Rick, a university student who enters the ominous West Mansion with Jennifer during a storm. After an attack separates them, Rick awakens wearing the supernatural Terror Mask, gaining the strength needed to fight through the house’s inhabitants. This single-player side-scrolling game turns a haunted-mansion rescue into a relentless trip through grotesque rooms, corridors, and underground horrors.

The basic objective is to guide Rick from left to right through seven stages and find Jennifer. Rick’s deliberate walk is balanced by a useful set of close-range attacks: punches, kicks, crouching strikes, jumping attacks, and a low sliding kick. Enemies approach from either side, so timing and spacing matter as much as pressing forward. Health is represented on screen, and lost lives send the player back to checkpoints, making progress depend on learning each dangerous section rather than simply rushing through it.

West Mansion supplies more than bare-handed combat. Rick can pick up weapons placed along the route, including wooden planks, rocks, wrenches, spears, and shotguns. These give attacks extra reach or power but must be used before Rick returns to his natural fighting moves. Boss encounters break up the regular advance with unusual monster designs and specific patterns to survive. Some stages also allow alternate routes through openings and ladders, while automatic-scrolling passages prevent Rick from lingering behind. The result is a compact action game whose progress is driven by memorising enemy behavior, weapon placements, hazards, and boss tactics.

Its horror setting is central to the experience. West Mansion is associated with Dr. West and rumors of disturbing experiments, and its rooms are filled with creatures, corpses, and imagery drawn from the slasher and supernatural-horror atmosphere of the late 1980s. Rick’s mask and altered appearance immediately distinguish him from the genre’s usual street fighters. The game’s escalating journey leads through the mansion’s increasingly strange interior, where Rick’s search for Jennifer gives the violence a clear narrative purpose without slowing the arcade-style pace.

The PC Engine version closely follows the arcade game’s structure but is not an exact duplicate. It uses a shortened opening, simplified audiovisual detail in places, and several content changes. For example, the early cleaver is replaced by a wooden board, while a golden cleaver appears later; other scenes and effects were reduced or altered. The Japanese PC Engine release keeps Rick’s pale, hockey-mask-like design, whereas the North American TurboGrafx-16 localization changed the mask to red and black. These details make Splatterhouse PC Engine a distinct version rather than merely the arcade game on a different system.

Splatterhouse began a series that later included the playful Famicom parody Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti and the Mega Drive/Genesis sequels Splatterhouse 2 and Splatterhouse 3. The original’s mix of simple side-scrolling combat, horror-film-inspired presentation, and unsettling enemies established the foundation those games expanded on. For PC Engine players, this 1990 HuCard remains a focused adaptation of Namco’s early horror-action concept: a short, demanding solo journey through West Mansion with a memorable mask, strange bosses, and a distinctly macabre arcade identity.