Dead of the Brain (Shinryō no Sakebi) is a Point and Click Adventure Game created in 1992 by Japanese game developer FairyTale and released by IDES for the PC-9801. It also has the honor of being the very last official game released for the PC Engine CD, in the form of a two-game bundle of Dead of the Brain and its sequel published by NEC in 1999.
Best described as a Japanese dev team taking a swing at the pulpy, ultraviolent zombie stories popular in the west at the time (such as The Return of the Living Dead, Re-Animator and Dawn of the Dead (1978)), the game begins with Cole, an industrial painter living in New York who just got home after working for his demanding boss. After cleaning off, he receives a call from one Dr. Hamilton Cooger, who has just succeeded in creating a reanimation serum that brings the dead back to life; in this case, his dead cat was the test subject. Trouble ensues after his cat kills a police officer investigating Cooger's home after getting a noise complaint, and Cooger decides to use the serum to bring him back with the assumption that it won't have any nasty repercussions.
The officer comes back, sure...as a bizarre living corpse that can't be reasoned with, chasing the two men out of the lab with killing intent. As they're running, Cooger accidentally drops the serum into a graveyard and begins a city-wide undead outbreak…or did he?
It's followed by a sequel, Dead Of The Brain 2, which was released in Japan in 1993. These two games, alongside the unrelated Marine Philt, make up FairyTale's "Nightmare Collection", a trilogy of horror games created by the former eroge publisher after the Saori incident (where a Japanese teenager was caught stealing a copy of the erotic game Saori: The House of Beautiful Women from a Kyoto computer store, prompting conversations about minors' access to erotic material) largely killed eroge's marketability in the mainstream Japanese game market.
The game was never officially released in English, but three fan translations exist — a 2019 translation patch by Retronomicon for the PC-98 version, a 2023 translation patch by WINE, also for the PC-98 version, and a 2023 translation patch for the PC Engine version by Dave Shadoff. All of these translations were done by separate teams, and the Retronomicon patch notably takes more liberties with the translation than the others do.
Dead of the Brain has the following tropes:
- Action Survivor: Cole and Kane are this; the former is a painter who's basically just trying to figure out how to stop the outbreak from getting any worse, and the latter is a journalist trying to run away from the outbreak only to stumble into another hotspot.
- Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: Kitty/Shrodinger's fur is inexplicably a bright purple (and it isn't a stylized black, either, since there's a good few minor characters with regular-looking black hair).
- Attempted Rape: Sheila almost gets raped by two members of the Bloody Foxes, but thankfully is saved by Kane.
- Bickering Couple, Peaceful Couple: Sally and Ray are constantly bickering over how to handle the outbreak, whereas Cole and Sheila are relatively tranquil with each other.
- Big Bad: Guol is revealed to be the instigator behind the entire outbreak, using Cooger's serum to run his own experiments on people he kidnapped to give himself and Kiel eternal life.
- The Big Guy: Out of all the survivors holed up in the unfinished hotel, Nose is the biggest of them all.
- Boom, Headshot!: Zombie heads tend to explode in a very satisfactory shower of gore when they get killed.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Guol kills Kane by trapping him in a giant vat and releasing a necrotizing gas that causes him to dissolve into sludge while he's still alive and conscious. Then he starts flooding the room with it in an attempt to kill Cole and Sheila.
- The Dragon: Kiel was this to Guol, albeit reluctantly; he was blackmailed into breaking into Cooger's lab and stealing the first serum he created.
- Dub Name Change: Professor Cooger's cat is called "Kitty" in the original Japanese and in the more accurate fan translations, but is renamed "Schrodinger" in the Retronomicon translation.
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Nose is only known by his nickname, and his real name is never found out even as he's dying from Kiel's gunshot.
- Eye Scream: Cole ends up having to take out the first zombie he encounters by driving his thumbs into its eyes so far that they pierce its brain.
- Face Death with Dignity: Subverted. Kane initially accepts he's going to get killed, saying sorry to Cole and asking him to avenge his family. As soon as his body begins to rot however, Kane dies desperately screaming for help. This only happens in the Retronomicon translation, while in the other translations Kane just asks Cole to take care of Sheila, then lets out a scream of pain as he dies.
- Failure Hero: Cole tends to regard himself as such, given that he fails to save anyone but Sheila.
- Gratuitous Japanese: Cooger names his sword Rashomon, after one of the Jidaigeki films he watched with Sheila.
- Guide Dang It!: This game is rife with them due to the nature of adventure games; the most notable one is your first encounter with a zombie in Precinct 16.
- Inconsistent Spelling: The names change a fair bit depending on which translation you're using, with some prominent examples being Kane/Cain, Sheila/Shela, Guol/Ghoul and Kiel/Killer.
- Intrepid Reporter: Downplayed; Kane is certainly intrepid, but he's not really doing his job as a journalist since he has been actively trying to escape and survive the outbreak instead of covering it, while also hunting down Cooger, as he associates the outbreak with him.
- Killed Offscreen: Ray and Sally are found naked and dead after figuring out Guol's true intentions and being killed by the chief with a laser cannon that he had hidden in his body due to being a cyborg.
- Martial Pacifist: Nose may have been in the army, but he definitely hates fighting...of course, when push comes to shove, he won't hesitate to go down swinging like he does with Kiel to save Cole.
- Meaningful Name: Cooger's cat is renamed Schrodinger in the Retronomicon translation; after all, she's both dead and alive.
- The Mole: Kiel and Jack were this for Guol, as the former was meant to keep the other survivors in line at the hotel, and the latter was supposed to assassinate Cooger in his home the night Cole visited.
- Nasty Party: Conversed:Cole: Did you actually see them? Did you see the zombies that attacked your town?Kane: They...attacked my sister's birthday party. My whole family was there. In an instant, such a happy gathering turned into a sea of blood. I made it out, and when I looked back...I was the only one left. I'd lost everything. That's why I swore I'd find the murderer responsible for this and kill him!
- Our Zombies Are Different: They're created by a mysterious chemical serum, and can only be killed by Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain. They hunger for brains above all else, but seem happy to eat flesh in general. They move slowly and clumsily, and have no ability to use tools. They're pretty much your standard "Romero" type shamblers.
- Ridiculously Human Robots: You'd never be able to tell Guol was a cyborg who gained eternal life from the serum unless you took into consideration the fact that Ray and Sally had abnormally large holes in their bodies that no gun in their armory could leave.
- Self-Disposing Villain: After Kiel reveals key details about how the outbreak really began as well as how Guol was pulling the strings, Officer Jack becomes this since he was also blackmailed by Guol; Jack was supposed to kill Cooger at his home, but to maintain his cover, he had no choice but to answer the concerns of the noises coming from his home first...which ultimately would result in his death thanks to Schrodinger slicing his throat.
- Shout-Out:
- Cooger's reanimation serum and the first undead you meet in the game being a undead cat are homages to Reanimator.
- The outbreak seemingly beginning when Cooger drops his serum in the graveyard and it washes down into the soil, the zombie's raggedy appearance, hunger for brains and ability to "turn" anyone they bite, and the discovery of the massacred police station all homage Return of the Living Dead, with a little of Dawn of the Dead (1978) thrown in for good measure.
- Guol's SkeleBot 9000 appearance strongly resembles the titular Killer Robots from The Terminator.
- Stupid Scientist: Played for drama; Cooger's obsession with defying death and making a serum that could resurrect anything it touches not only caused him to get an officer killed thanks to his undead cat, but also gets him killed at the hotel and gives Guol the tool he needed to cause a catastrophic undead outbreak before the events of the game.
- Too Dumb to Live: "Oh my, this dead guy has a gun. But it's empty, so I'll come back for it if I happen to find some bullets."
- Trademark Favorite Food: A minor example, but Nose mentions he absolutely loves eating hot dogs; specifically, a type that is referred to as a "big dog".
- Tragic Villain: Kiel and Jack are such due to being blackmailed into doing Guol's bidding; to make matters worse, the former's family are still harmed even after he got rid of all the survivors from the abandoned Hotel, sans for Cathy and Sheila.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Cooger's toying around with something as serious as a reanimation serum has pretty much caused an outbreak. It's downplayed later with the reveal that it was Guol who was the perpetrator behind the outbreaks since he intentionally sent Kiel to steal it and caused the outbreak way before the events of the game actually occurred, using Cooger's good intentions as a stepping stool for his agenda.
- We Hardly Knew Ye: Pretty much every character introduced in the game except for Cole and Sheila are subject to this.
