Corpse Party (PC) Review

Modern day Tokyo: a class representative of the Kisaragi Academy is telling a horror story instead of cleaning up the place; a story about a haunted elementary school that was possessed by the ghost of the one that murdered all the children - a typical, yet effective, tale, as one of her classmates actually ends up screaming like a wuss. The fun continues with a simple "magic ritual," involving everybody holding a so-called lucky charm, in order for them to remain friends forever… or something.

Moments later, they are still in a school, but not theirs, since, judging by their surroundings (especially the various skeletal corpses), the dark halls they are now walking on, are the ones from that spooky place from the story! This intro is powerful enough to ignite some curiosity about what's going on; however, the developer has made a terrible mistake by releasing a port of the 2008 PC version instead of the 2010 multi-platform one, which means that, besides characters having somewhat amateurish (yet not bad) portraits, this iteration lacks the cool, and quite creepy, CG cut-scenes.

That being said, Corpse Party still retains its core charm, even without these unfortunate absences, which is its capacity for being quite the spooky ride. Some may look at the - otherwise very good - 16-bit graphics, and think, "How the bloody heck could a game resembling a SNES RPG be scary?" but, luckily, the direction is spot on, since it uses the old-school visuals to its advantage, sparking the imagination by forcing the mind to fill the visual gap on its own.

Furthermore, things become even better through the use of some generic, yet very effective, Resident Evil-meets-The Exorcist tunes, chilling sound effects, great voice acting, or - better yet - absolute silence. The foreboding atmosphere is so good that simply checking a creaking door, reading a note (describing acts of murder very graphically), or even checking on a character while he/she is… doing some nose powdering can create quite the feeling of dread.

Of course, whether one will find this scary has a lot to do with prior experiences with horror media, yet, despite the obvious room for improvement, Corpse Party can safely be placed somewhere between Clock Tower and Silent Hill in terms of spine-chilling. Now, while the first half of the fun here is the horror setting (no matter how light it may be for some), the other better aspect is the plot, or, to be more precise, its characters, since, while good, this is just a generic J-horror fairytale, filled to the brim with every standard trope, black-haired ghost girl and all.

Luckily, and although the cast will initially look so generic that it will actually be easy to mistake this for that girl, after seeing them change throughout their ordeal, most will surely start feel a connection with them, care about their wellbeing, and even pick favourites. That's not to say that everything is perfect with this title, however. Besides the lack of audio-visual variety, as well as a horror element that could be way stronger, while the characters are the strongest feature here, their dialogue sequences tend to rely on oversaturated anime clichés over and over again.

All these, however, are minor flaws, because the big one - the problemo uno - is the gameplay. Is it terrible? Far from it… but it sure decreases the fun factor a lot. First of all, chapters have several endings, with all but one being dead ends. Is that a bad thing? Well, it's just… there; a simplistic speedbump that serves as a "collectible" of sorts - just like the ID tags taken from student corpses. The biggest problem, though, lies elsewhere.

Being an adventure, puzzles range from simply "using item A on B" to overcoming an obstacle with the help of some cryptic messages. Simple, but good, right? Actually, no, since this feels more like a "trigger the cut-scene" type of game, requiring doing something like checking a random desk inside a random classroom, although there's no reason for doing so; and while this might seem like a minor issue, it drags the story down, and even destroys the atmosphere. In other words: this should focus in traditional, yet exciting, puzzles/riddles, instead of lame backtracking in order to activate a scene to progress the - otherwise entertaining - storyline.