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.

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.

Corpse Party is responsible for introducing so many people to the world of RPG Maker and how it can be utilized in the creation of horror games. I can only imagine the amount of creators inspired, directly and indirectly, by this game to create their own horror games in the engine, and I think that’s a great thing. That is where Corpse Party’s merit as a game and a work of art ends.

For a survival horror game, Corpse Party has absolutely nothing to fear. While the abandoned, falling apart school might create a decent enough atmosphere, and the sound design is pretty effective, the vast majority of the game’s horror relies on shock and the repulsive: the corpses of dead children littered throughout hallways, buckets of maggots, literal piles of gore, but the threats that are actually within the school are comparatively pathetic. The few chase scenes here are genuinely hilarious, with virtually every enemy crawling at a snail’s pace while just yelling the character’s name. Actually, a lot of the horror is outright hilarious. There’s a scene in chapter 4 of a man throwing himself off of a roof repeatedly in the goofiest way possible, which had me cackling. Nothing to actually fear though, and the unintentional comedy isn’t frequent or good enough to turn this into “so bad it’s good”.

Any gameplay is an absolute chore. Most of the game is spent wandering aimlessly around the school’s hallways, with (again) no threats to speak of, and little direction to go off of. The school itself is far too big to warrant this directionless feeling, so it’s hard not to just rely on a guide while playing, just to get through these sections as quickly as possible. I’ve already spoken about the pathetic chase scenes, but there are also “puzzles” I haven’t mentioned yet, the highlights of which include following a ghost’s movements Simon Says style, saving someone from drowning by going to the exact tile the game tells you to go to, or picking up a teleporting item by having one character go to one half of the classroom, while another character goes to the other half, something the creators were so proud of that they repeated it like three or four times. Nothing here involves any sort of thinking beyond memorization, and it, again, leads to a lack of any horror, as the game just feels like an aimless haunted house.

Plot and characterization are just a big pile of nothing as well. The plot isn’t offensively bad, but pretty much any other Japanese curse story you can think of does everything here, except probably better. At least you can count on those stories having more interesting characters. I love video game stories featuring revolving protagonists, so I was initially excited to see where things would go, but all of these characters feel like they were just pulled from a mediocre Weekly Shonen Jump manga. As of my writing of this review, I’ve reached the final save point of the game, but haven’t actually finished it, so I will update things if the ending changes my mind (update: it didn’t), but for all of the mediocre gameplay I’ve experienced in so many RPG Maker games, at least those have interesting set ups, characters, and/or theming. Corpse Party is nothing.

To be honest, this is probably the type of game I would’ve loved if I played it as a teenager (I still have a soft spot for Misao, for example, which is basically a bootleg version of this game), but I can’t help but feel like Corpse Party is worthless in 2023. With the tropey characters featuring nothing to make them stand out, the unintentional comedy of the horror, and little details like the panty shots within otherwise serious scenes, Corpse Party’s standout feature is that it feels like a parody of itself. If you want a great Japanese survival horror game revolving around ghosts and a curse, check out Fatal Frame II. Actually, just check out Ao Oni, The Witch’s House, Utaho no Tatari, or even Misao, as these games are stronger indicators of the originality that comes out of RPG Maker (they’re also free, unlike this one). For all of the talk around Corpse Party, including its legacy and its being milked by larger companies over the years, I don’t see this game get recommended anymore as an actual video game, while I still see so many other RPG Maker horror games getting praise to this day. Playing it, it’s easy to see why, and while it might be interesting for those who like these games to go back to it, to see where things figuratively got started, I honestly think it’s better if we just let Corpse Party remain in the past, and let its legacy live on.