Octurbo: Dead of the Brain 1 & 2
by mento
It's a spooky Octurbo bonus! And what better way to celebrate both Halloween and the end of this year's Octurbo than with Dead of the Brain 1 & 2 . Not only is this a particularly gruesome adventure game (a pair of them, even), but it was also the very last official release for the NEC PC Engine CD-ROM, appearing as late as June 1999. Dead of the Brain 1 & 2 originally began their respective un...
It's a spooky Octurbo bonus! And what better way to celebrate both Halloween and the end of this year's Octurbo than with Dead of the Brain 1 & 2. Not only is this a particularly gruesome adventure game (a pair of them, even), but it was also the very last official release for the NEC PC Engine CD-ROM, appearing as late as June 1999.
Dead of the Brain 1 & 2 originally began their respective unlives on the MSX computer platform, and despite the gory violence and horror beats they are both as traditional a Japanese adventure game as you're likely to find. I wrote a little about what I understood of the Japanese take on the point and click genre, and how it evolved to to be more focused on its storytelling and visual novel aspects while adventure games in the West chose to double down on the inventory puzzles and interaction instead. Similarly, Dead of the Brain sticks to the Japanese adventure game blueprint (present in early NES games, such as Portopia Serial Murder Case/Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken by Dragon Quest's Yuji Horii) in that the player must continue to investigate hotspots until the story suddenly decides to move ahead on its own: the "puzzle" isn't so much what inventory item fits where (though there's some of that too) but rather it's ascertaining where to investigate so that the player can glean all the necessary information for the story to continue. Often, you'll examine the same bit of background for the seventh time when you'll discover some new piece of information (usually a clue, since most Japanese adventure games are crime whodunits) and a cutscene suddenly kicks in and moves you to a new area. It can be a bit arbitrary, but you get used to it after seeing enough of these games. It feels as if that, above all, these games want you to have a keen sense of what's going on, letting you investigate on your own until its satisfied that you know enough for it to move the plot along.
Anyway, the two Dead of the Brain games were packaged together with a visual upgrade and the addition of voicework and presented extremely late in the PC Engine's lifespan. The previous PCE game actually came out two years prior: Motteke Tamago in April '97, which we already checked out here. Dead of the Brain 1 & 2 is therefore a pretty weird release for a great many reasons. (I'll add it to the list of bonus stuff at the end, but the Tumblr obscurevideogames has put out a lot of screenshots of the creepier scenes from this pair, if you want to keep digging deeper into this zombie-a-thon.)
After a Whole Month of These Blogs, I'm Getting Dead of the Tired
Welcome to Dead of the Brain 1 & 2! Full disclosure: I can't read Japanese, and these games haven't been fan-translated, so I have absolutely no idea what's going on. I'm just going to click on shit until spooky stuff happens.
We apparently start in the hero's swinging bachelor pad. Beer cans and girly posters. Tasteful. 
A scientist, possibly mad, calls us on our phone. The game does a neat thing here where it strips away all the room to focus on the telephone in the corner. 
Anyway, we meet at the Cooger mansion. Here's hoping we don't get hit on by illiterate 50 year old women.
Before the good professor can explain his new discovery, Purple Garfield suddenly shows up to cause a ruckus. We hear gun shots and the kitty goes down.
Man, that is just... I don't need to see this. It's not animated for you guys, but that little guy is twitching throughout the next forty pages of exposition text. Apparently it got into the Doc's new serum.
Officer Steve heard the gunshots and came to investigate. Hi Officer Steve!
Bye Officer Steve! I guess we didn't kill that cat good enough, because it just slashed this cop's throat out.
Fortunately we have some serum left, and with nothing to lose we try to bring Steve back to life by injecting it into his neck. It works!
Well, depending on what you would determine as a successful result. Officer Steve suddenly appears to be pre-occupied with our juicy brains, somehow losing his moustache in the process, and we decide to cheese it.
"Quick, to the cemetery! There's no corpses there!"
We finally get a shot of our hero as he and the portly professor make their way to the safe and totally not creepy confines of the local graveyard.
But oh no! The professor trips!
Why did the serum have to hit Stephen King's grave? Hasn't the poor soul contributed enough to the horror genre?
Anyway, a gooey Stephen King, who did not die in 1984 to the best of my recollection, emerges to become the second of what appears to be a growing army of ambulatory cadavers. Dammit, this zombie serum was invented to help mankind!
The zombie's hand falls off and then slowly crawls towards us, Thing style. Creepy stuff, but then I can't imagine it can do much on its own.
Late title card! The Nightmare Collection was a trio of games from visual novel developers Fairy Tale, that included the two Dead of the Brain games and a sci-fi horror game nonsensically called "Marine Philt". It has a Xenomorph in it.
Anyway, I dragged the good professor (getting less good by the minute) to my bachelor pad to hide from the monsters for a while. We have a whole crate of booze on top of the fridge that we can live off while we wait for this whole "zombie apocalypse" thing to blow over.
Doc's assistant Sheila is here too, presumably because we needed a love interest. I don't even know what she's wearing. A pink bib over a white shirt?
Unfortunately, we neglected to do anything about the giant window in this apartment, and a rather hungry zombie has found his way in. Hopefully, he gets tangled up in the blinds long enough for us to make our escape.
Of course, we could just shoot the guy with the gun that the professor still has. Where did he even find that thing?
The zombies have been busy, it seems. I guess a Sunday shop at Sundys is out of the question?
Instead, we follow the standard zombie city infestation protocol of heading to the nearest police station.
I've yet to talk about the commands on the left here. You use them to interact with the world, obviously enough, but in most cases many of them are inert and unusable. I guess it's to cut down on wasting time trying every command on every hotspot. For instance, the Get command only lights up if there's actually something to get in the vicinity. The sequel streamlines this aspect even further.
These are your standard Romero zombies, so their only real goal is sweet, delicious brains. These folk have been left relatively intact, but for their cerebellums.
"All right you wiseguys, who shook up this can of Diet Fanta? Was it you, Kowalski? Buncha animals."
Dispatch appears to have been dispatched with. You can try using the radio, but only a zombie picks up. He doesn't have much to say.
And here's the office of the President of the Police. As befitting such a lofty title, his office is luxurious and free of viscera. If only we could all work in such swanky conditions.
This guy had a gun, but couldn't stop the zombies from enjoying a smorgasbrain feast on his behalf. Unfortunately, the game won't let me take it. He's hanging onto it pretty hard, I guess.
The last but one room in that earlier corridor is an empty meeting room, though I do notice something of particular interest in the foreground. Might as well take it with us. You never know when you'll walk into a room without light.
The next room is a room without light. If only we could solve this problem somehow.
Unfortunately, I kinda got stuck here. The hero absolutely flat out refuses to follow the blood trail around the corner, and there's nowhere else to go. I checked the only online walkthrough there is for this game (which was in Spanish, conveniently enough) and apparently I'm meant to find a code in one of the other offices that I'll need later. Once I have that, the story will eventually kick in with another zombie attack. But I couldn't find it! Oh well, let's try Dead of the Brain 2!
Welcome to that game I just said!
Well, I apparently missed a lot, because the game opens with this T-800 looking robot fellow. Did I accidentally load up Snatcher?
Sheila and the prior game's hero Cole apparently survived the last game's ordeal (spoilers?) and are chilling in this darkened room for some reason.
The game's interface is now completely different. Gone are the individual commands, replaced instead with a omni-contextual cursor that also helpfully highlights hotspots with these blue borders.
After enough clicking on different parts of the furnishings, Sheila hands me two plane tickets. I guess we're off somewhere to help us forget about all the zombies.
Probably good timing too, since they appear to be back in season. Maybe the perspective's off, but that dead dude's head is gigantic.
Sheila is still wisely carrying a piece around. We haven't met any zombies yet, but it certainly doesn't hurt to be prepared.
Fortunately, there's no zombies out here either, just a bunch of marts. Or "Merts". 
Without warning, some poor woman is grabbed by motorbike gangsters and dragged off. I don't quite see how it's any of our business, but we might as well go after them.
I'm guessing they're holed up in here? Jeez, I hope nothing scary happens. Wouldn't want anything like that in my horror game screenshot LP.
Whoa, hey, okay, wrong kind of adult content. What did we just walk in on? I do the "get your damn hands off her" routine and we're suddenly face to face with the game's first timed puzzle.
Apparently these were in the prior game, but I didn't get far enough to activate one. I have a finite amount of time to click on the right series of hotspots, or else the game will end.
The correct combo in this case is to block the bike tough's first punch by pressing his fist hotspot, and then countering it with my own by clicking his face.
Of course, I still get worked over by the two other goons with bats, but at least I got a matchbook out of it.
Wait, did I just come full circle? Is this Groundhog Day? Do I have to keep breaking up that attempted sexual assault until I get it right? This is getting too spooky for me already.Well, I didn't get to show off much of the big gory moments, but perhaps that's for the best. Probably plenty of that floating around tonight anyway. The Dead of the Brain duo seem like fairly standard adventure games and I don't doubt they'd be more fun if I could understand anything. Still, there's a lot to be said about unsettling the audience with confusion, though I hardly think that was the intent.
Feel free to look up more images from this game on the internet. It gets pretty darn graphic in spots, and is way more violent than most games we ever saw over here in the early 90s (or late 90s, in the case of this very late PC Engine release). Anyway, that is truly the end of Octurbo this year, and my thanks once again for anyone who read all twenty-five of these truncated screenshot LPs. You must be very dedicated followers of 90s anime.
- Dead of the Brain 1 opening/early game
- Dead of the Brain 2 opening/early game
- Some Tumblr gifs from the game (these are pretty gross, fair warning)