To most international players, the PC-88 and PC-98 series of machines are still a trench of undiscovered gems. With thousands of games and an uncanny interface, fan translators have only cracked the surface of this esoteric library. One of its most infamous entries was FairyTale’s 1992 gross out Dead of the Brain, an adventure game about a zombie outbreak, and the developer’s first foray into horror from the erotica scene. Funnily enough, that seems to be a similar case as the publisher, who brought this lurid classic back to life this weekend.
In Dead of the Brain, Cole and Dr. Cooger seem to have a Doc Brown and Marty thing going on. Unfortunately for Cole, this late night phone call isn’t a summons to check out some tricked out DeLorean. Cooger, it seems, has crafted a formula to revive the dead. Initially testing it on his house cat, the suddenly feral animal kills a passing police officer. As the two try to cover their perversions of science, the glowing formula makes the rounds. The streets are quickly overrun with oozing ghouls, but not all is as it appears in this city of the dead. You will have to point, click and shoot your way to uncover a most bizarre conspiracy.
The game takes open inspirations from horror classics like George Romero’s Living Dead saga and Brian Yuzna’s nasty Re-Animator films. Because of its handcrafted new localization, the tongue-in-cheek approach comes through grinning. Reminiscent of the beloved Return of the Living Dead, its young cast are fully aware of the stereotypes of the story, but have no choice but to reenact it regardless.
Released in 1992, Dead of the Brain was the first plunge into horror from developer FairyTale. It summoned a direct sequel and a spin-off in the ‘Nightmare Collection,’ but prior to it FairyTale’s games were almost exclusively erotica. Funnily enough, this new port has been published by FAKKU, the long-running hentai platform, who have begun a program to bring other retro Japanese, non-pornographic games to modern hardware. On their socials, FAKKU said that they had to lop off a few racier sequences to avoid a harsher rating on Steam, but that fans can unlock them with a free patch available on their homepage. In the near future, FAKKU will also be publishing the madcap 1992 RPG Dengeki Nurse.
Amid a backdrop of AI-spawned language patches, it has been an otherwise stellar year for creepy retro classics brought to modern hardware. On top of Dead of the Brain, this week saw both Ecstatica games remastered on Steam, and earlier in the year the FMV oddity The Dark Eye was made available (albeit under a perplexing new name).
