We continue our lookback at history's best and worst videogame/horror movie tie-ins

If you haven't seen Part 1 of our videogame nasties feature then check it out here before you get started on Part 2.

In 1989 Capcom had its first stab at the survival-horror game. Often touted as being the first true survival-horror game, Sweet Home was a top-down adventure game for the Famicom that only found a release in Japan. Licensed from a movie of the same name, both game and movie were released concurrently.

The filmic incarnation of Sweet Home (Suito Homu) was directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Pulse) and follows a very similar plot to the Robert Wise classic The Haunting. Both film and videogame chart the exploits of a group of reporters who enter a haunted mansion to film the restoration of a painting that hangs inside the house. However, it transpires that one of the paintings – depicting a young child burning inside a furnace – seems to be connected to an evil spirit residing inside the halls of the mansion. The game retells the events of the film and shares a great many parallels with its seminal descendant Resident Evil. In fact, Resident Evil’s creator, Shinji Mikami, has admitted on several occasions that Sweet Home was the direct inspiration for his 1996 horror classic, and it clearly shows. There’s Sweet Home’s mansion setting for starters and the fact that when you start the game the five protagonists split up and tier off into two separate groups. Puzzles also play a big part in the gameplay, and because of a liberal inventory you’re continually forced to juggle items and weapons.

But as a game in its own right, Sweet Home employs a few neat tricks of its own. The puzzles tend to be practical and logical in feel (no concocting potent pesticides to take out a giant weed or slotting diamonds into the eye sockets of a gold statue of a tiger). Upon entering the mansion at the beginning of the game, the player is quickly introduced to their party of five and learns that each member has their own unique skill that will prove essential to negotiating the rooms of the mansion. Sweet Home‘s puzzles also involve using objects believably, like shining a torch to clear a doorway from darkness or using a lighter to burn a rope and expose a hidden exit, and the game’s battle system is also of particular note. Enemy encounters in the game are random and when your team runs into one of the mansion’s gruesome abominations the game’s perspective switches from an overhead to a first-person Phantasy Star-style battle screen. It’s here that the player, using a list of attack options and spells, must take it in turns with the creature to launch their attacks. Death is also very much final in Sweet Home. When one of the main characters snuffs it they will stay that way for the entire duration of the game. And, although you’re able to pick up new items in the game that replicate the individual special abilities of each character, as you lose already limited inventory slots every time one of your party gets killed, finishing the game becomes increasingly harder.

… continued