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.

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.

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.

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.

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!