Chiller is a light-gun Arcade Game by Exidy originally released in 1986 that received an unlicensed port for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1990. You have to shoot a sufficient number of targets to reduce the Monster Meter to 0. The game's most well-known point is its extreme gore and torture methods used to kill people in the torture chamber and rack room stages (to the point that the original arcade game was banned in the UK), but the hallway and graveyard are standard fare with classical monsters.
This game provides examples of:
- Bonus Stage:
- Finding all items in a level gets you a chance to play a slot machine where you can earn points/a free try for matching slots.
- Finding all items in the game lets you shoot at heads and hearts that fly around for a huge point bonus. The game doesn't let you go beyond bonus stage 16, even if you do it perfectly.
- Bowdlerise: While what remains is still far beyond anything Nintendo of America would have ever allowed in an officially licensed game, the NES port nonetheless heavily tones down the gore and removes the graveyard woman's toplessness (you can still dismember her, of course). The manual also cooks up an extremely flimsy Excuse Plot that the helpless victims strapped into torture devices are "evil spirits" you have to destroy before they can escape the haunted castle, in an attempt to frame your protagonist as an explicitly heroic figure rather than the implicitly murderous psychopath they are in the arcade original.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: The execution methods for people in the game aren't that out of the ordinary (most of them are shot, while one woman is beheaded), but one man has his head crushed by a press and another is lowered to get eaten limb by limb by an alligator.
- Endless Game: The game loops back to the first stage after finishing the fourth each time.
- Fan Disservice: The torture chamber has several naked people on display, including a man tied up in chains and a woman binded to a wall, plus there are a few more skimpily-dressed people in the rack room. To progress through the game, you have to shoot them.
- Cruelty Is the Only Option: It doesn't matter that these victims are helpless, clearly suffering, and pose no threat to you whatsoever; if you don't torture, flay, and execute them, you lose.
- Gorn: One of the game's main aspects is its over-the-top gore. The torture chamber and the rack room in particular have tortured people that bleed in grisly detail when shot.
- Grave Humor: A gravestone on the NES version's boxart reads "DEAD PEOPLE ARE COOL".
- Rivers of Blood: The torture chamber has a long stream of blood coming out of a pipe.
- Trade Snark: The in-game Monster Meter is trademarked, for some unknown reason.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: The whole game's about shooting people/monsters, but you can go above and beyond in a few spots. The dog in the hallway only needs to be shot once to count, but you can do it multiple times just to hear it whine in pain.
