Splatterhouse is the horror beat 'em up Namco launched in arcades in 1988: Rick, possessed by an evil relic called the Terror Mask, storms through a haunted mansion smashing monsters pulled straight from classic horror cinema, in one of the medium's first big bets on openly embracing gore. NEC brought it to the TurboGrafx-16 in 1990.
The home conversion, though technically solid and well received for staying faithful to much of the arcade design, toned down several of the original's most explicit moments: it swapped out weapons, softened a scene featuring an obscene gesture, and replaced a particularly graphic death with a generic explosion. Even so, by the standards of a family console in 1990, it remained one of the darkest games in the catalog.
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