We confronted evil yesterday, an evil that gave rise to a rampaging force of murder wearing a hockey mask. An iconic evil, but an evil nonetheless. In his first appearance he wore a burlap sack to hide his fucked up face, but then once he came back he swiped a hockey mask from an unlucky sexy teen. Since then, the mask has become his symbol, a cursed object bonded to him. Symbols have arcane power all their own, and so did the hockey mask come to symbolize superhuman strength and murder in a horror setting. What if, then, this symbol transcended its roots in horror cinema, jumping mediums? Someone at Namco was inspired to make the protagonist of their upcoming horror arcade action game a hockey mask wearing strongman, and thus the evil has crossed entertainment forms. This is the Splatterhouse, and it begins with a man and a woman seeking shelter in a mansion of some kind. There is a scream. Insert a coin and begin, and the hockey mask hovers over the prone figure of the man, before attaching itself to him. Like it or not, the evil is linked to you now. You are in control, but there are no sexy teens in your way this time; only nightmare abominations. Still, the mask demands blood, and you've already donated to the Dread Beast GREED... so it's time to play.
Mechanically, Splatterhouse is a scrolling beat-em-up, but it's a bit of a regression. By now the belt scroller had been in place, with games like Renegade or Double Dragon allowing for planed movement. Splatterhouse is straight sidescrolling, more akin to Kung Fu on the NES. Still, there are innovations. A slide move. Weapons to get to increase your attack range beyond punches and kicks. Selectable paths. Oh, and the ultraviolence. Dear god in heaven, the ultraviolence. Every punch and kick has force behind it, leaving viscera in its wake as you tear through enemies. Whap something with a two-by-four and make it splatter against the wall in the background. Get a cleaver and cleanly slice off their heads. It's not quite the moral panic of the early 90's yet, but this was one rung below that ladder. It's a surprise nobody freaked out over it. As for our bosses... it's less of a boss fight and more of an endurance. Gore everywhere, and then monstrous worms jump out everywhere. In stage 2, we're fighting a haunted room where chairs and knives fly at us. Then stage 3. Oh lord, stage 3. You get shotguns at this stage, which only have so many rounds in them but are immensely satisfying to fire (as most shotguns in video games are) and are a good ranged weapon. Then comes the boss. Holy fuck. A dude with a burlap sack over his head and fucking chainsaws for hands. If you don't have the shotguns, this guy is tough... but isn't that interesting? Before the mask, there was a killer wearing a burlap sack. Now we're a mask-wearing strongman fighting a dude in a burlap sack. The chainsaws are new, but I'd almost call this a dark mirror were it not for the fact that later in the game actual mirror images of you burst through actual mirrors to kill you.
Well, then you kill a bunch of heads floating around an inverted cross, pray to an altar, and hear that scream. The girl's still alive and in need of help. I don't know if the arcade machine itself made it clear that you were running about this spooky house full of abominations to save your ladyfriend, but that appears to be the case as is so often in these games. Ghosts n Goblins was clear about it, but the princess amounted to little more than a motivation. Here, things take a darker turn. At the end of stage 5, you find your ladyfriend! She's laying on a couch surrounded by abominations but they run off and she gets to her feet. "Oh, my darling!" she (probably) says... and then comes the terror. She writhes, her body contracts... and explodes into a brown and red monstrosity that hops around, attempting to stab you with retracting claws. We haven't even gotten to him yet, but this is suspiciously a dead ringer for that other mask-wearer's big foe from 2003, a guy we have yet to meet. More to the point is the fact that this game has taken the damsel in distress and turned her into an abomination that's trying to kill you who occasionally transforms back into her human form to beg. Her begging is low-quality gibberish in the arcade, but the Turbografx-16 port's alternate sound byte is clear. HELP ME. There's only one way to progress, grim as it is. The evil must be defeated, and if you do it fades away, replaced by her human form which collapses. "Thank you. Goodbye." she whispers, her body and soul flying away. The game continues at this point. Is this a fridging? Just a bit. The game isn't in-depth enough to show our protagonist's motivations for continuing on, but the player wants to see the evil defeated. They may even want to kill the abominations for what they've done. Go now into the innards of some beast and punch the root of the problem. After doing so, everything is on fire. The mask somehow summons a beast from an unmarked grave, and our final boss is... a big scary head whose hands come up from the ground. Odd choice, but why did the mask summon it? Has it gained sentience and decided to fuck with the protagonist/player? I don't know, but once it's dead we see the ending, and the mask shatters from our protagonist's face. The evil is defeated, and we get sad music over the credits. A fun game, a gory one, and a nice way to kill time during the Halloween season. Except... the mask reforms. And then begins to laugh. You won't defeat the evil so easily. We still have work to do. We have to find the source of what half-homage that guy's ladyfriend turned into. Where could we find that? In a world I've been to before.
A world of nightmares.
No comments:
Post a Comment