The Splatterhouse remake/reboot from 2010 is a seriously underrated gem … and one of the BLOODIEST games you’ll ever see in your life!
I cannot fathom how some hardcore series fans could possibly hate the 2010 reboot/remake/requel of Splatterhouse on the PS3 and Xbox360.
OK, the critics were going to hate it regardless. You can look at the review aggregators yourself and see how much websites like IGN and Gamespot loathed this game. But when have we ever let mainstream critical tastes flavor our personal opinions over here at Wicked Horror?
To put it as succinctly as I can, 2010’s Splatterhouse is an absolute BLAST, especially if you grew up on Dead Alive and Evil Dead II and own multiple Lamb of God and Mastodon albums. It’s a gore and guts-soaked mini-masterpiece that still feels incredibly fun and engaging 16 years later. And since it’ll probably never get re-released, if you don’t have an old copy and a “retro” console that still works, you’ll likely never get to experience or re-experience this one. Well, unless you emulate it, which is something the WH corporate lawyers told me I really shouldn’t talk about, so ixnay on the emulation-tay.
The Splatterhouse series is pretty much the epitome of a cult classic horror franchise. The original game from Namco (the same people who gave us Pac-Man and Tekken, among many other storied video game series) was an arcade title that stood out from the crowd for a pretty obvious reason: I mean, you played a dude who looked just like Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th movies and you spent the entire game pummeling zombies to death with two by fours. Sure, it didn’t have a lot of mechanical depth, but who needs that when you get to karate kick brain-eating maggots into the nether realm?
The follow-up games — Splatterhouse 2 and 3, obviously — were Genesis exclusives and yeah, they both ruled and hard. To this day opinions vary on which of the two is better, but it’s kind of a moot point, like arguing whether Ride the Lightning or Master of Puppets is the better Metallica album. They’re both terrific in their own right, so who cares?
The long, long delayed Splatterhouse is the PERFECT 3D update to the beloved 2D beat-em-up franchise. The 2010 game manages to capture the spirit and essence of the original trilogy while also splintering off into its own direction. It expands upon the lore of the first three games and give us a brutal and darkly hilarious action-horror-satire experience that really has to be seen (and played) to truly appreciate.
First things first, the story of the game is TREMENDOUS. It takes the basic plot of the original game — your girlfriend gets abducted by a mad scientist, then you put on a magical mask that turns you into a hulking brute genetically engineered for puréing monsters — and completely revamps it into a genuinely engaging and riveting narrative. You really feel for the main character, Rick, a scrawny emo nerd who suddenly finds himself transformed into a musclebound killing machine. The mask, though, is what really drives the story of Splatterhouse. It provides running commentary and exposition throughout the title, and pretty much everything it says is hilarious, profane, or a combination of both. Amazingly, the voice actor behind the foul-mouthed cursed narrator is none other than Jim Cummings — i.e., the voice of Winnie the Pooh. All I’m gonna say is hearing him drop the F bomb and make crude comments about certain aspects of the female anatomy is a brain-breaking experience.
The core gameplay is pretty much your standard God of War/Devil May Cry/Ninja Gaiden style of hack and slash action. From the outset you have a ton of melee moves at your disposal and it’s not too difficult to find any weapons — lead pipes, meat cleavers, a shotgun and one of the most SATISFYING chainsaws in the history of video gaming, among others. Oh, and you don’t just maim and mutilate your enemies, you impale them on spikes, eviscerate them in microwave chambers and literally shred them limb from limb. You can get bonus health by finishing them off in “Simon Says” sequences that, among other cheery visuals, includes a bit where you literally slay a monster by ripping its intestinal tract out of its own bunghole and strangling it to death with its own guts. Needless to say, this game more than earned its “rated M for Mature rating.”
But it’s not just the ample blood spillage that makes Splatterhouse a tremendous horror video game. The level design is outstanding, from its evil-clown-littered abandoned carnivals to its body-horror-coded lairs where eyeballs, teeth and who knows what jut out of the pink walls to give you the heebie jeebies. Every now and then the game even switches over to a pseudo-2D side-scrolling mode, just like the old school games from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. It’s a literal love letter to all things Splatterhouse and horror kitsch … right down to the ability to collect nude photos of the damsel in distress. I’m telling you, the people who made this game thought of everything.
The Splatterhouse remake isn’t perfect, of course. It’s a pretty hard game with a steep learning curve and until you get the motions down you’ll be dying A LOT. The platforming (read: anytime you have to jump on and over stuff) sequences are very slippery and frustrating and every now and then the in-game camera gets stuck and you’re left throwing blind punches at abstract polygons for a while. But those are all forgivable considering how entertaining everything else about Splatterhouse is.
There are like three or four boss fights in this game that are simply awesome. They’re imposing AND they make you feel like a total badass at the same time. The battle with “Biggy Man” — an iconic legacy Splatterhouse villain rocking double chainsaw arms long before that kind of thing became fashionable — deserves special mention as perhaps the single most awesome moment in a game with no shortage of truly awesome moments.
The soundtrack, the humor, the over the top mayhem, the oblique horror references, the overall tone and atmosphere — it’s all spectacular. It’s no without a few issues, but on the whole Splatterhouse is one of the BEST video game remakes nobody ever talks about. And don’t be surprised if it actually makes you feel a real emotion or two here and there; it might be a love story with death metal and zombies getting heads squeezed into bloody pulps, but it’s a love story all the same.
