Welcome to the thirteenth episode of 23 Endings: The Early Years, the show where we put old school video game endings into proper context. It's time to put on that hockey mask and grab the cleaver, because today we're talking about Splatterhouse. Does this horror brawler trilogy have a satisfying ending? Find out now when you watch this episode of 23 Endings: The Early Years!


Don't you hate when your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere? Well, be thankful that your sob story has nothing on what Rick and Jennifer went through. After having car trouble, the couple run to a nearby mansion in hopes of using the phone and getting out of the rain. Little did Rick know that Jennifer was about to get abducted and a supernatural mask would be stuck on his face until he broke the curse.

Alone and afraid, Rick fights his way out of a poorly maintained underground prison, into the sewers, past all these spooky mirrors, into the church and through a room that looks like internal organs until finally meeting up with a melty-faced demon in front of a forest fire. And what do you get for this trouble? This terrible ending.

I'm not going to lie; this ending freaked me out more than any of the boss fights. As a kid, I genuinely thought the dude's head exploded. And what about Jennifer? I mean, I know she supposedly turned into a demon back in the fifth level, but wasn't that just the house messing with Rick?

The good news is that Splatterhouse has an extra scene after the credits, just like one of those Marvel movies. Sure this is going to be the moment when Jennifer shows up and everything is back to normal, right? Nope. It's just a clip of the mask putting itself back together, teasing of a sequel.

That brings us to Splatterhouse 2, which was released three years later on the Sega Genesis. This saw Rick return to the haunted house and save Jennifer from a living nightmare. This sends us on a straight-forward journey through a lot of familiar locations. Rick gets trapped in an elevator, fights through the swamp, runs from Cthulhu, discovers a bunch of genetically-engineered monsters, gets trapped in whatever this is and then flees from a giant made out of electricity. It all ends with Rick punching a bat/demon/thing and saving Jennifer.

Sure, it's another sequel ending, but at least Rick and Jennifer are finally together again. It took Rick a couple tries and there was a bunch of time where he went back to living his life, but at least they're together again. Oh wait, there's a twist ending setting up Splatterhouse 3.

So here's where things start to get interesting. Not the gameplay, that stays exactly the same, but the final installment in the Splatterhouse trilogy ups the ante with four different endings. The story picks up five years after the last game, and things are looking up for Rick and Jennifer. The couple is now married and recently welcomed a son named David into the world. They've even managed to amass a sizable nest egg, thanks in large part to some luck on Wall Street. Everything seems to finally be back to normal for this young couple. Roll credits, the end.

Of course, we all know that this is a Splatterhouse game, so Rick isn't going to get off that easy. The troubles start when he decides to buy a mansion. Suddenly he's having conversations with the evil Mask that has been haunting his dreams. Rick is told that he must don the mask one more time to fight the monsters that have invaded his mansion. I mean, it's a Splatterhouse game. What did you expect?

So Rick fights through a bunch of stages and discovers that the haunted mansion is planning on using David's latent psychic abilities to tap into the power of something called the Dark Stone. He'll eventually make his way to The Evil One, only to then realize that the demonic force he needs to go after is none other than the mask that has caused him so much trouble. This sets up one final, epic showdown between a pissed off Rick and a giant floating masked head. Now if everything has gone wrong up to this point and Rick has failed to save both his son and wife, then you get this crummy ending.

Now, if you rescue David but fail to save Jennifer, you get this version ...

Now, let's say you rescued Jennifer, but couldn't get to David in time. This is the ending you'll see ...

And finally, let's say that Rick managed to save both his wife and son and then defeated the flying mask demon monster. This is the happiest Splatterhouse ending you'll probably ever see.

The mask is finally destroyed, the sun is out and evil has once again been defeated. The credits roll, and all is good with the world. You won't find a twist ending here, because this is the conclusion of Rick's decade-long fight against the mask. That is until 2010, when Namco decided to reboot the franchise and put Rick through another house of horrors. But we're not here to talk about reboots, so as far as I'm concerned, Rick lived happily ever after. The end.