Splatterhouse

Splatterhouse began as a 1988 Namco arcade game, and its 1990 home port for the PC Engine brought this bloody horror brawler to consoles. Playing as Rick, clad in the mysterious Terror Mask, players fight through a monster-infested mansion against zombies and other creatures using fists and found weapons like a plank or a cleaver, in straightforward action clearly inspired by horror films like Friday the 13th and The Evil Dead. The mask grants Rick superhuman strength, but its dark nature is woven into a story about rescuing his kidnapped girlfriend. At a time when graphic violence in games was still rare, Splatterhouse drew censorship because of its content — the Western TurboGrafx-16 release toned down the blood and softened Rick's appearance compared with the original Japanese PC Engine version.

The sequels moved to the Sega Mega Drive, where more violent content had an easier path to release. Splatterhouse 2 (1992) expanded the story around rescuing Rick's girlfriend Jennifer and offered a smoother combat system and more detailed environments, while Splatterhouse 3 (1993) dropped the purely linear room-to-room structure in favor of exploring a house with multiple paths and several endings that varied depending on how the player handled individual sections.

After 1993 the series fell quiet for a long time, and thanks in part to its harsh visuals it remained mostly a cult favorite that game journalists still cite as one of the early and most distinctive examples of a horror beat 'em up on nineties consoles.