Corpse Party

Corpse Party is the most disturbing game I have ever played.

I mean, I've played some pretty gory games before. I've played God of War games, Mortal Kombat, Outlast, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, etc. But even with pixelated Super Nintendo-style sprites, Corpse Party managed to get under my skin in a way no other games have. At times, I found myself gasping, feeling sick to my stomach. One sequence had me so shaken I had curled my knees up into my chest, whimpering like a scared dog.

It's a shame, then, that the game is even called Corpse Party. It sounds like one of those macho violent games like Bulletstorm or Splatterhouse. You know, the kind of games that revel in their blood and gore to the point where you can't take it seriously. But Corpse Party isn't that at all; it's a deeply personal, psychological tale where every life is precious, and somehow manages to be creepier than most games even with graphics that look decades old.

The game is about a group of Japanese high school students sharing scary stories on a stormy night after class. For fun, they decide to practice an incantation they found online that would supposedly make them friends for life. Instead, an earthquake hits the school, the group gets separated, and they find themselves in a hellhole full of ghosts, corpses, and other humans slowly losing their grip on humanity.

The game is split into five chapters, each featuring multiple endings. There's one "true" ending to each chapter that continues on to the rest of the game, and the rest are bad endings where the characters die in a variety of gruesome ways. Very quickly, the game teaches you to be paranoid. The first ending you're likely to get features one of the main characters being force-fed a pair of scissors by a trio of ghosts, and the increasing length of the chapters means many more opportunities for things to go horribly wrong.

I will admit that the chapter splitting is not always handled well. As good as the first two chapters are at establishing a "things can go wrong at any time" tone, it's also not very good at explaining how to fix things. I had to consult a guide multiple times to figure out where I went wrong, and often, the solutions created a different ending without actually altering the player's situation. At one point, simply walking into a different room will let you continue the chapter, even though there was no strategic element to doing so. A later chapter gives you a 50/50 choice that is pure chance - either you do it right and continue with your story, or pick wrong, die, reload your save, and then pick the correct choice.

Another major problem I had with the game were sections where you were being chased. On occasion, a ghost or mad person will head straight for you, and you have to evade them in order to survive. While the claustrophobic environments do a great job at building atmosphere, they're just frustrating when trying to avoid a killer in close quarters.

However, while these problems are annoying, they are far from dealbreakers. In all honesty, Corpse Party tells a fantastic story. You really grow to care about the characters, which makes it all the tougher when you accidentally make a choice that leads to their deaths. Not only that, but the game also has a few clever tricks up its sleeve that I'm hesitant to spoil here. Essentially, there's one point in the game where you're lead to believe that a bad ending is part of the true story. There are plenty of "false" choices throughout the game, where it doesn't really matter which decision you make, so a certain event seems like it's unavoidable. Not only that, but it's still possible to get a bad ending within the bad ending, further cementing the idea that you're on the right path. In the end, though, you reach the end of that story branch, go back to the pivotal choice, and find that you can continue on differently.

As far as the gore goes, I usually don't like excessively gory stories. I can't stand many horror movies because the violence feels gratuitous. There's a movie on Netflix called Would You Rather that basically amounts to watching people needlessly torture themselves. There's no point to it other than to watch people suffer. Yet, I was willing to stomach the gore in Corpse Party because I really felt for the characters. I didn't enjoy watching them suffer, but I sympathized with them and wanted to see them survive against all the odds. There's a scene in Chapter 4 that's one of the most horrifying things I've ever seen in a game, and it works not only because it reveals a major revelation about the story, but because I really felt for the character who was involved.

Which isn't to say that the story is perfect. A couple of characters feel extraneous, and there's one plot thread that isn't fully resolved. Not to mention, the localization felt off at times, as certain jokes fall way flat and seem out of place considering everything that's going on. The phrase "dat ass" is uttered more than once. But all of these things are just minor quibbles in comparison to the bigger picture, which is that Corpse Party is one of the best horror games I've ever played, and is a must-play for fans of the genre.