Splatter Beach is a 2D beat ’em up made by the same folks that gave us the game Splatter School a year prior. We play as an idol called Mutsuki, who alongside her group, are on their way to a photoshoot on a private island. It features a significant amount of text all throughout as the story takes on a more prominent focus this time around. This hasn’t been translated from Japanese, so it would be a good idea for those who can’t read it to install the Textractor program to translate it on the fly into your language.
If you don’t particularly feel like installing the Textractor, it doesn’t matter a whole ton in this case. While the story is there, I wouldn’t call it award-winning by any means, and the rest of the game is simple to understand. Once you either read or skip the intro, things quickly spiral out of control as you hear screaming from an idol member who went to use the restroom. It seems an undead outbreak has occurred, and things took no time at all to reach hellish levels of carnage. These are much more violent than your typical zombies and appear to enjoy causing excess suffering as they mangle and tear apart bodies in creative ways.
So there you are. All alone with nothing but a micro bikini and nowhere to go but forward as you try to escape this hell. Starting off, all we can really do is attack and jump. Our attack consists of a small kick at shin levels that has incredibly short range and a small knock-back that the enemy will regain in no time. There are times when it is necessary, yet trying to defend yourself in this matter is near suicide. What you want to do is jump and then attack, which results in a powerful jump-kick with a great deal more knock-back on impact to give you some breathing room. As you may guess from having undead enemies, they outnumber you and will always be pushing forward toward their prey.
If you look at the bottom left of the pics, you can see your Clash meter. It is more of a get-out-of-jail-free card than an offensive move. Filling it up will allow you to immediately escape a grapple or a trap rather than wasting time mashing buttons as your health drains. With that knowledge, off you go to try and escape this island across five stages. It features a good amount of thematic progression as you go from the sunny starting beaches, to the untamed wilderness, and then to a slaughterhouse found within it in just the first three levels. The final two are a bit more disappointing as they are pretty much the same location, but it does make narrative sense, and there is much more than just distinct backgrounds that differentiate stages.
While it is a linear game, each level has a hidden location. These are more important than you may first assume. Found in them are your idol friends, who are being tortured in various ways. Whether you watch them die or actually attempt to help, it is up to you. These choices will affect which of the three endings you get and result in a very cool change in the final level to reflect your actions. Trying to help them out is not always straightforward. You will at times have to solve a puzzle while under heavy duress as your friend inches ever closer toward death. As someone who sucks at puzzles, you can bet my lack of intellect got darn near everyone killed, which is the same as letting them die as far as the game is concerned. Not finding them in the first place is also the same. The player is quite unlikely to save everyone and get the best ending on their first playthrough, giving it a high degree of replay value.
When you looked at the Clash meter, you likely also noticed the weapon one. Saving a friend will give you a firearm, the type depending on the person. Ammo is extremely rare, and you can only shoot horizontally. They can be a lifesaver if used in the right situation but doesn’t suddenly turn this into Metal Slug or something. Dying is both forgiving and something you really want to avoid doing. It will set you at the beginning of that same screen you perished on, and there are infinite continues. The catch here is that it also takes away all your ammo, which is far from what you want happening the closer you reach the end of a stage and have to face the boss monsters that guard their exit.
Facing off against a boss is where the game really takes off the gloves. This is not an easy game. You will have to give it your all. The difficulty in these also highlights the at times unfair hitbox where it feels like an attack should have missed or our character being too slow to escape taking damage. It is far from undoable though and is ultimately a great deal of fun fighting these monstrosities. The final stage is a particular highlight. Bloody thing almost reaches NES levels of difficulty in my eyes, but defeating that final boss proved to be very satisfying. Beating Splatter Beach will give you a gallery to view the CGs, the sex animations, and a level selection screen. Selecting a stage is more of a way to practice since it will assume all of your friends before then died. You will need to replay it all over again to receive the good ending.
This brings us to the hentai aspect of Splatter Beach. If the game’s title and extreme violence didn’t tip you off, there is little in the way of vanilla sex here. Most of it will be high degrees of sexualized violence, also known as Guro. It doesn’t hold back. Things get really extreme right off the bat. CGs are earned by either getting a game over, which is entirely your choice given you have infinite continues, or failing to rescue a friend. The animations occur in-game, whether to you or someone else. If you are knocked down, enemies can mount you, resulting in unique “foreplay” depending on the foe that has you in their grips. Running out of health before you can shake them off will usually result in a highly violent sexual violation or torture.
Your most common zombie enemy is always horny to the point of where we can take advantage of it. We can defeat a female opponent and draw it towards her corpse. He will then completely ignore you as he pounds away at it. This world revels in its gruesome carnage and will likely turn away players that aren’t at the very least uncaring about its inclusion. There is a ton of H content to uncover here. If you like Guro, this is a title you need to experience. With its difficulty, I doubt those not familiar with the beat-em-up genre will be able to get through it. Luckily, it features a 100% save file in a sub-folder you can copy over and freely view all of the lewd content.
When it comes to using gamepads, it only supports X-input compatible controllers. If you don’t have an Xbox controller, you will need another tool such as joy2key to use it. All in all, this was a significant improvement over their prior title Splatter School. I feel the latter had better environments and atmosphere, yet essentially everything else has been refined. Gameplay mechanics such as being able to crawl and your otherwise useless basic attack now have uses. Everything feels like it has a purpose, resulting in a much tighter and well-thought-out feeling experience. Both games are unrelated to each other besides who made them, but it is always interesting to see the growth of a developer. Splatter Beach is a fun game with a ton of replay value and a challenge to match its vicious theme. I hope to one day see it translated as this is a title well-worth playing for those with a penchant towards violent content.
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