The soundtrack kicks ass! Too bad just about everything else sucks. The story does set up some interesting ideas but it's hard to get invested when the game is clearly more interested in trying to be as shocking as possible. Throw in some totally unnecessary upskirts while you're at it, one of these being from a seven year old by the way. You also have to follow a specific path in order to progress otherwise you'll encounter one of the games many cheap deaths.
Pure shock value and not even the fun kind!

played the 2021 version.

corpse party, well, sure is a product of its time. i won't really go into a deep analysis of the game because the game itself isn't deep at all but i'll just mark some of my thoughts.

it's a pixel horror rpg and iirc the 2021 version improved the sprite arts which is cool. the art reminds me of the early 2000s animes so yeah, it's pretty neat. the ost and general atmosphere is good too. the story isn't something revolutionary not seen before, to be honest it was really predictable but the characters were interesting enough to finish this relatively quick.
as for the cons, ummm the writer sure wasn't shy to share his l0li bordering fetishes with piss kink sprinkles and lowkey incest. i sure didn't want to know that but considering the time the game came out i am not surprised.
though i wonder if the writer watched litchi hikari club because morishige reminds me a lot of zera. oh well.

i was into this game WAYYYY younger than i should have been but i never played it until pretty recently because i never had the hardware for it. got it on steam. here’s what i have to say:
- if you’re not really a horror guy and you get scared easily (like myself! i do!!) i’d say this is more tame on the horror scale. even if the atmosphere is tense and there are odd sounds and the music cuts out and you’re scared shitless you’ll generally know when something is actually out to get you. like there are some chase scenes but they are NOT hard because your pursuers walk at half your speed.
- unfortunately if you can’t handle blood and gore this is not the game for you. the gore is everywhere. it’s actually worse in the pixel overworld than the CGs a lot of the time? you also get a lot of gross squelching sounds.
- but at least the game looks good? i think it holds up for being like 10 years old. the pixel sprites were my personal favorite part. the music is also pretty good, especially the vocal tracks sung by some of the voice actors :)
- the gameplay itself is like a walking around simulator. you will get lost and wander around aimlessly a lot. it’s not that fun after a while even if you get cool flavor text, so there’s no shame in using a guide! i relied on those a lot, especially when searching for wrong ends.
- there are a LOT of wrong ends and then the occasional odd ducks counted as “extra ends”. not all wrong ends are created equal because some of them get a lot more love than others but a lot of them have good voice acting and atmosphere.
- the voice acting in general is pretty top-notch! they have a lot of all-stars that you can recognize from various other games and anime. they also used dummy mics so headphones are recommended for the full 8d experience or whatever. for some reason in the extra chapters featuring ohkawa from byakudan his voice is mixed kinda weirdly so it’s hard to hear him but that is the only problem i had with the voice acting and his acting was fine it was just hard to hear him
- ok story. i think the story is fine. like as a standalone without considering retcons in future entries (especially the ever-controversial blood drive) it holds up pretty well.
- i do think there are some issues with the localization making a lot of dialogue sound more aggressive? at best it’s fluffed up with swears like fuck and at worst we have naho saying actual slurs. i don’t think this game was updated very much for its newer re-releases 😭
- the characters are pretty decent across the board. my favorites include yoshiki, yui and nana from musashigawa! even if some of them grate on you (like i personally could not gel with ayumi no matter how much i tried) i think you can generally tell that the stress they’re under brings out the worst in them. whether that worst is whiny or trigger-happy.
- i also quite liked a lot of the extra chapters for showing how the kisaragi kids got along before they got sucked in, as well as fleshing out people we didn’t see much of (if at all) in this game like the byakudan and musashigawa kids. my personal favorite was after effect, which was one of the two added for the steam/switch/ps4 release. unfortunately not all extra chapters are created equal either because on the other end of the spectrum we get the incest dimension and fart girl 2020’s misadventures in heavenly host
- so now is where i have to say it. kedwin and co. have a really obvious thing for underage girls in compromising situations. you will get panty shots. you will hear uncomfortable moaning. these are at their worst with yuka, who spends half the game needing to pee and also has an incestuous crush on her older brother. There’s a reason nobody likes Yuka.

overall corpse party is an interesting game because you go from experiencing some very profound and well-voice acted grief and bravery from kids in the face of adversity… to The Piss Dimension. if this game didn’t make me cry in the last scene it would be 2.5 stars.

Played on PSP

Based off of a popular manga in Japan, Corpse Party delivers a great and haunting story with memorable characters in a very haunting setting. Several school kids perform a cult type ritual called the Sachiko Charm as a gag. They don’t realize that the charm is part of a sadistic and horrific murder of four school children including the girl the charm is named after. They get thrown into a parallel dimension of Heavenly Host Elementary and must find a way to appease the ghosts or get stuck there for eternity. What the children go through is horrific and gut-wrenching, but that is the beauty of Corpse Party.


Forget about gameplay and everything else because this game is all about the story and atmosphere. I have to give the developers props for bringing across such a scary game with such simple graphics as a 2D survival horror with low-quality sprites and the occasional well drew anime shot. The game is disturbing mainly in the well delivered Japanese voice acting and just the raw terror and gore in the game. There are buckets of blood, severed heads, and mutilated bodies everywhere, but mainly in textual descriptions more than anything. The game really doesn’t do much in terms of visuals so you solely rely on the great script to get the horrific images. Some scenes are just black with only voices and text to go by, but it still brings across the feeling of sheer terror.


This is possible because you go through everything with these kids and the things that happen to them are just horrific and extremely sad because you really get attached to everybody. The game, however, is also lacking in gameplay because you only run around pressing X on everything trying to find items to unlock new areas. The school is the same through every chapter, but it just changes and blocks certain areas off or adds new areas. The game is pretty easy to navigate and understand until you get to chapter 3 and then it all falls apart and requires a guide. Everything has to be done in an exact order or you wind up with “Bad Endings” and it’s game over. While each bad ending is different you get frustrated when the game takes you through 20 minutes of gameplay only to realize it was all part of the bad ending. There even a glitch that won’t let you get all the school tags to unlock the extra chapters. I really hate how the game has to be played out an exact way and not to mention during certain scenes you can die by selecting the wrong choice, but there are saves throughout the game that help remedy this a bit.


While the game is lacking any type of gameplay at all you will still be satisfied with the excellent story and characters. This is the only thing saving Corpse Party from being another terrible attempt on the PSP, but being so late in the systems cycle is a surprise. If the game had better graphics, or maybe just more anime cut-aways, the game would be one of the best on the PSP.

Stinky.

The real horror of this game is the tremendous amount of time you waste walking around trying to figure out where you're supposed to go.

Chapters 1 through 3 were okay, but by the last chapter I found myself caring less about our "grand escape from hell school" and more about my grand escape from this mid-ass storytelling.

Could not tell you what version this was, its on PC and I watched my partner play it. Can't tell you about the gamefeel, just the sightfeel.

RPGmaker horror gets a lot of, not undeserved, criticism and its easy to see how those cliches formed naturally in this. I'm sure there's major story changes since the PC 98 version, but it follows the same patterns of weird disjointed parts. Plot details that don't make 100% sense, conflicting information, event flags that are difficult to discover and bad end flags that are a little too easy to fall into. Its all the basic trappings of the genre.

But this is sort of the pro and con of these kinds of indie projects. They can't expand too large a scope and sometimes you get a more personalized game out of it. Sometimes you get something with a more amateur style or the author's personal sexual interests leak in too much. A bit too much anime-isms. Some little sis characters written by people who definitely didn't have siblings. These are all problems you can find in Corpse Party.

Still, I dunno, even if I struggle to call it good, I can't say I disliked it. Its got charm! Its not deeply complicated or full of depth, but its likable in its sincerity. Sometimes its fine if something plays a lot of cliches straight if they work together well enough.

I don't know if I'd rec it to many but hey, its a couple hours.

Honestly, the nostalgia is strong with this one. When I was a teenager, I watched so many people play this on Youtube. Used to have a real soft spot for it, too.

I wouldn't say I enjoyed playing it myself for the first time. Sometimes, the game really doesn't do a great job of telling you what you're meant to be doing and it's frustratingly easy to get a bad ending.

The writing is mostly fine but not the plot not particularly scary or well constructed. This very much has that edgy, gory vibe that was essential to older pixel horror games. Younger me loved Corpse Party for that just but now, as an adult, I can't really bring myself to care much about it anymore.

I finally got back to finishing this game and instantly remember my issues and why I hadn't come back to it in so long! The game is a horror where the characters get transported from their school to a deserted and falling apart school filled with ghosts, curses and the dead bodies of children of different kinds of ages.

The game is split up into different chapters and the characters are also split up into different areas of the school, completely cut-off from one another and at the mercy of these malicious spirits.

The story and writing I feel are done very well, though it feels like it's more censored than what I imagined when I heard about this game so often and so many visuals were missing compared to what I had expected to see. Still, it ends up achieving the rule "Sometimes, less is more" where even if you don't see the scene playing out, the description and sound effects are enough to make you conjure up images that could potentially be more disturbing that what the artists could achieve.

That said, this title has some pretty heavy flaws that I'll detail below:

-No Sprinting! (You have no ability to speed up your movement, which means if you're stuck, you can't run through all the places you've been previously but just walk slowly instead.)

- No Cuts! (If you attempt to get this game and you finish a chapter, even an alternate ending, you are forced to endure the credits and as the game refuses to run in the background you can't even mess around on YouTube to waste the spare time. Even if you've seen it once before, there's no skipping it!)

This was a difficult game to review, but I did genuinely enough it and getting all the ending to get a different angle up on the situation.

a surprisingly fun time (for the most part), graphically it looks great, the pixel characters are both cute and expressive, cgs are few but they look good, the sound design is on point and the ost is generally good although its sometimes pretty jarring how a song abruptly ends for a new one to start playing.

Plot is fine, the characters were engaging enough for me to care and the chapters being generally short length and not dragging too much makes it easy to go through each one and solving the mysteries.

Biggest con is that it can be annoyingly obtuse at times, puzzles aren't that hard themselves but many times you clearly have to do things in a very specific order for an event to trigger, and if you fail to do so (like I did) expect to be wandering around for a while (or get tired and look up a guide).

Also 3DS version comes with a bunch of extra chapters that help expand upon side characters and certain events and they are pretty cool.

I really just love Corpse Party. There's no other way to say it, I'm extremely passionate about this series and will staunchly defend it. It scares me and I legitimately felt for the characters within it. You wouldn't think that a pixelated top-down 2D game would be terrifying, but here we are.

Corpse Party is able to fuel my anxiety via the gradual increase of encroaching fear (of the unknown) as the chapters continue. The story summed up can attest to this effect: the main characters are very suddenly thrown into a school with deadly traps and suffering souls scattered about. Death lurks everywhere and any wrong choice can lead to one of the protagonist's doom. Something like that would probably start to make you a bit uneasy.

Unlike most RPGMH series, Corpse Party goes into great detail when describing how each bad end occurs. Most of these are extremely unnerving on an unimaginable level and will legitimately continue to linger in your mind for a while after they occur. I can totally understand if people thinks it gets to an uncomfortable degree, because it does. But it also haunted my dreams for quite a bit afterwards, so I'd say these scenes

The dialogue for a horror game such as this is well written and a lot of it is exactly how I would think a group of Japanese high schoolers would react if they were trapped within a death school with no way out.

Even more amazingly, the developers are able to craft these characters and flesh out their personalities within such a dire situation such as this...and it works.

Most of the characters, even minor ones, are likeable (or hateable) in some way, making it extremely difficult to deal with the fact that most of them will perish right in front of you or end up becoming tools for the main antagonist. Scenes where these characters are clearly in pain are just as disturbing to watch, especially when the are shown slowly dying, contemplating what they can do with their last bit of life. The same can be said for characters who has a deterioration of their sanity. As the player, you view their inner thoughts as they slowly swell into meaningless nonsense or desperate attempts to cling onto some form of comfort.

Corpse Party is just as engaging gameplay-wise, being a mix of puzzle elements and text-based dialogue choices. The puzzles are not too difficult, with the most challenging part likely being you ensuring yourself that your next move isn't going to end with a wrong/bad end. There occasionally parts where things can get a tad too confusing and force you to look around the school more thoroughly for an answer (or even consult a guide), but these occurrences are rare.

Even with such a long description of the frights that are in Corpse Party, there are certainly some parts that are lacking. For example, voice acting is not available in every version of the game (though can be via mods on PC). This is a pretty integral part of the experience and I'm a little confused as to why it is omitted from some releases.

It's also unfortunate that there are not very many CGs. These are usually reserved for emotional or horrific scenes, but they're still not always there.

Corpse Party is a game you have to play to understand. Of course, not everyone is scared by this type of game. A lot of people just won't be able to find something like this frightening. But I'd still recommend anyone who is a horror fan, RPG Maker fan, or even just a suspenseful story fan to check out Corpse Party.