Corpse Party
Dec. 8th, 2023 07:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingCorpse Party is a 16-bit RPG Maker horror adventure game from 1996 that was released on multiple platforms before finally finding its way, in a substantially updated form, to the Nintendo Switch. It shows its age, but it’s definitely worth playing if you’re into retro-styled horror adventure games.
Corpse Party is divided into five chapters, each of which stands as a discrete unit accompanied by its own set of save files that can be selected from the main menu. Every chapter has a number of optional bad endings, but you need to achieve the good ending in order to unlock access to the next chapter. If you’re using a walkthrough, each chapter takes roughly an hour to complete.
You play as various members of a group of high school students who stayed late after school one evening to tell ghost stories. They unfortunately trigger a curse that transports them to an abandoned elementary school building that was shut down in the 1970s after a grisly series of abductions and murders. Different students occupy different pocket dimensions of the school, which is almost entirely cut off from reality. To make matters worse, your group of students isn’t the first batch of kids to be spirited away to the school, which is littered with corpses and haunted by vengeful ghosts. Your goal is to help the kids escape the school... if that’s even possible.
Corpse Party is extremely gory, and not all the kids are going to make it. The game contains intense depictions of mutilation and self-harm accompanied by vivid textual descriptions and occasional environmental illustrations of an uncomfortably graphic nature. The violence occupies an intersection between disturbing, gross, and campy, and I thought it was a lot of fun.
There’s an optional collection quest that encourages you to find and interact with all the corpses in each chapter. If you like, you can return to the main menu and read about all the horrible ways these kids died. I thought that was fun too.
The characters are usually divided into interesting pairs, and most of what you’ll do in the game consists of walking around inside the ruins of the school building while having conversations. The kids are very good about following horror movie rules - they don’t split up or do anything stupid - but they’re at the complete mercy of the ghosts of the original murder victims, who will change the layout of the school or create traps just to fuck with them. For the most part, the kids are good and gentle and kind to one another, which makes it all the more upsetting when something bad happens.
The characterization and conversations aren’t that deep, however, so you never get so attached to any character that you don’t want to see them die. My favorite death is when one of the kids gets slammed against a wall so hard that their body explodes into red pulp, which all the rest of the kids have to walk through for the remainder of the game while navigating that particular hallway intersection.
Through disjointed and disconnected teamwork, the kids learn what actually happened to the ghosts haunting the school. One of the newer additions to the roster is the ghost of a teenage paranormal investigator with highly questionable motives but useful insights into the original set of murders. For curious lore hunters, there are also various bits of text scattered around, from newspaper clippings to messages left by other victims of the curse. These textual passages start off as grim and gradually grow more disturbing, and it’s always a pleasure to find something new to read.
The main challenges of Corpse Party are of the standard “find a key to unlock the door” adventure game variety. The layout of the school changes from scene to scene, but it’s not large enough to get lost in. Aside from avoiding the occasional wandering ghost, there are no reflex challenges, and your characters are very rarely in any immediate danger. If there were jump scares, they didn’t register with me. The 16-bit character sprites are very cute, even when they’re depicting corpses. The horror comes mainly from textual descriptions, as well as spending enough time in the haunted school for the hopelessness of the situation to sink in.
It's probably more accurate to call Corpse Party a “visual novel” as opposed to an “adventure game,” but it’s fun to explore the school while interacting with various objects in the environment. It’s also fun to gain access to new areas, both to get more story and to see more of the game’s pixel art. One of my favorite areas was the outdoor pool in Chapter 4, which is of course filled with corpses and preceded by a horrible locker room. Good times.
So, as far as horror games go, Corpse Party is relatively chill, but I should mention two caveats:
First, the anime-style character illustrations aren’t great. All of the girls are empty-eyed twigs with glued-on boobs and comically short skirts, and there’s one younger girl in particular who’s sexualized in a super gross way.
For what it’s worth, I made my peace with this style of character design by understanding that it’s not meant to be taken seriously; I simply dismiss it as “otaku bullshit” and move on. I don’t like it, but what can you do.
Second, Corpse Party is completely linear and frustratingly opaque about what you need to do to trigger the next event in any given sequence. Unless you want to walk through endless dark hallways searching every square of the map, you’re going to need a walkthrough to get through the game. The walkthrough people use is (this one), but the walkthrough can sometimes be just as opaque as the game itself.
Personally speaking, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I managed to get through the first two chapters of Corpse Party without using a walkthrough. These initial two chapters stand on their own as a story, and I felt that they were actually the best part of the game. I think it’s probably safe to say that the opening of Corpse Party is more than enough to satisfy someone with a casual interest and playstyle.
All that being said, I really enjoyed Corpse Party, and the English translation created by XSeed is fantastic. While reading the game’s Wikipedia page, I learned that there’s a manga adaptation, and I had so much fun exploring this horrible haunted school that I’m considering going through the trouble to track it down. The manga is apparently banned in China, which is fair, probably.
Corpse Party is divided into five chapters, each of which stands as a discrete unit accompanied by its own set of save files that can be selected from the main menu. Every chapter has a number of optional bad endings, but you need to achieve the good ending in order to unlock access to the next chapter. If you’re using a walkthrough, each chapter takes roughly an hour to complete.
You play as various members of a group of high school students who stayed late after school one evening to tell ghost stories. They unfortunately trigger a curse that transports them to an abandoned elementary school building that was shut down in the 1970s after a grisly series of abductions and murders. Different students occupy different pocket dimensions of the school, which is almost entirely cut off from reality. To make matters worse, your group of students isn’t the first batch of kids to be spirited away to the school, which is littered with corpses and haunted by vengeful ghosts. Your goal is to help the kids escape the school... if that’s even possible.
Corpse Party is extremely gory, and not all the kids are going to make it. The game contains intense depictions of mutilation and self-harm accompanied by vivid textual descriptions and occasional environmental illustrations of an uncomfortably graphic nature. The violence occupies an intersection between disturbing, gross, and campy, and I thought it was a lot of fun.
There’s an optional collection quest that encourages you to find and interact with all the corpses in each chapter. If you like, you can return to the main menu and read about all the horrible ways these kids died. I thought that was fun too.
The characters are usually divided into interesting pairs, and most of what you’ll do in the game consists of walking around inside the ruins of the school building while having conversations. The kids are very good about following horror movie rules - they don’t split up or do anything stupid - but they’re at the complete mercy of the ghosts of the original murder victims, who will change the layout of the school or create traps just to fuck with them. For the most part, the kids are good and gentle and kind to one another, which makes it all the more upsetting when something bad happens.
The characterization and conversations aren’t that deep, however, so you never get so attached to any character that you don’t want to see them die. My favorite death is when one of the kids gets slammed against a wall so hard that their body explodes into red pulp, which all the rest of the kids have to walk through for the remainder of the game while navigating that particular hallway intersection.
Through disjointed and disconnected teamwork, the kids learn what actually happened to the ghosts haunting the school. One of the newer additions to the roster is the ghost of a teenage paranormal investigator with highly questionable motives but useful insights into the original set of murders. For curious lore hunters, there are also various bits of text scattered around, from newspaper clippings to messages left by other victims of the curse. These textual passages start off as grim and gradually grow more disturbing, and it’s always a pleasure to find something new to read.
The main challenges of Corpse Party are of the standard “find a key to unlock the door” adventure game variety. The layout of the school changes from scene to scene, but it’s not large enough to get lost in. Aside from avoiding the occasional wandering ghost, there are no reflex challenges, and your characters are very rarely in any immediate danger. If there were jump scares, they didn’t register with me. The 16-bit character sprites are very cute, even when they’re depicting corpses. The horror comes mainly from textual descriptions, as well as spending enough time in the haunted school for the hopelessness of the situation to sink in.
It's probably more accurate to call Corpse Party a “visual novel” as opposed to an “adventure game,” but it’s fun to explore the school while interacting with various objects in the environment. It’s also fun to gain access to new areas, both to get more story and to see more of the game’s pixel art. One of my favorite areas was the outdoor pool in Chapter 4, which is of course filled with corpses and preceded by a horrible locker room. Good times.
So, as far as horror games go, Corpse Party is relatively chill, but I should mention two caveats:
First, the anime-style character illustrations aren’t great. All of the girls are empty-eyed twigs with glued-on boobs and comically short skirts, and there’s one younger girl in particular who’s sexualized in a super gross way.
For what it’s worth, I made my peace with this style of character design by understanding that it’s not meant to be taken seriously; I simply dismiss it as “otaku bullshit” and move on. I don’t like it, but what can you do.
Second, Corpse Party is completely linear and frustratingly opaque about what you need to do to trigger the next event in any given sequence. Unless you want to walk through endless dark hallways searching every square of the map, you’re going to need a walkthrough to get through the game. The walkthrough people use is (this one), but the walkthrough can sometimes be just as opaque as the game itself.
Personally speaking, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I managed to get through the first two chapters of Corpse Party without using a walkthrough. These initial two chapters stand on their own as a story, and I felt that they were actually the best part of the game. I think it’s probably safe to say that the opening of Corpse Party is more than enough to satisfy someone with a casual interest and playstyle.
All that being said, I really enjoyed Corpse Party, and the English translation created by XSeed is fantastic. While reading the game’s Wikipedia page, I learned that there’s a manga adaptation, and I had so much fun exploring this horrible haunted school that I’m considering going through the trouble to track it down. The manga is apparently banned in China, which is fair, probably.
