You’ve probably not heard of this at all, but Corpse Party is a horror/adventure game created for a Japanese computer called the PC98, which is what the originals of the popular Touhou and Rance series’ were released on. Let’s give a rundown.
Corpse Party is a horror game about some students who attend Kisaragi High, which is infamous for several violent murders that happened decades ago at the previous building on the site called Heavenly Host High. While telling ghost stories, an earthquake strikes the school, and they are seperated, and trapped. Everything turns bad for the students as they have to make their way through the ghost of Heavenly Host High, a truly ironic name for a Hellhole.
The game is akin to an adventure game with the choices you can make and puzzles to solve, trying to reach the true ending without being killed yourself. The game relies heavily on text, description, and audio to convey the horror of the setting moreso than the largely-static graphics. A technique used in the horror visual novels Higurashi and Saya no Uta. It preys on the capabilities of the human imagination being far more than the capabilities of fiction.
It has already been remade for the PC, but this is a PSP port which has also gotten a nice treatment, including improvment of lighting effects, character art redone from scratch, more CGs, improved music, and the voice acting has been completely redone as well.
Corpse Party will be released on the Playstation Network on the 22nd of November for $19.99, as a fan of these text-heavy titles, you have my assurance that it will be worth every penny.
Rian Quenlin
If you purchase and like this when it comes out, I recommend the visual novels Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, Umineko no Naku Koro ni, Sekien no Inganock, Shikkoku no Sharnoth, and Saya no Uta, they follow similar supernatural horror themes.