It’s particularly good at providing the impression of someone - or something - whispering directly in your ear while standing behind you it’s enough to make all the little hairs on your body stand up on end, I tell you. This is a game that you’ll absolutely want to wear headphones for, since it makes use of quasi-3D binaural sound in order to make sounds and voices appear as if they are coming from various points around you. But given the context of what is going on, the content of the dialogue and the way our imagination has a tendency to “fill in the blanks” when one or more of our senses are deprived… it’s a truly, truly unpleasant (and highly memorable) scene.Ī significant part of Corpse Party’s horror comes from its absolutely spectacular use of sound. There are occasional flashes of red, sound effects, but aside from this it’s a completely minimalist presentation. One of the most horrific sequences in the game, for example, is presented as nothing more than a blank screen and a text box with voice acting. And, perhaps most importantly for the horror genre, it knows that sometimes the things you don’t show are the most powerful stimuli for the imagination. It knows that death itself isn’t anything to be celebrated sometimes it’s drawn out over a long period and excruciatingly painful.
Sometimes it’s just someone’s time - even if the manner of their passing isn’t necessarily… natural.Ĭorpse Party knows that there is nothing glamorous about being trapped in a horrific situation. Indeed, you can try to do something about it - but eventually you just have to accept that sometimes a situation is just hopeless. Not so in Corpse Party the game makes this abundantly clear at the end of the first chapter, where a character who we’ve just been starting to get to know and like meets an untimely end, and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.
As gamers, we’re conditioned to expect characters in the things we play to inevitably find themselves getting into a pinch and then finding a convenient means of escape as part of the narrative. Interestingly, too, Corpse Party is a game in which sometimes, unpleasant fates are unavoidable.
And a fascinating bunch of characters they are, too for the most part, the game resists falling into typical anime archetypes, and often throws up some significant surprises, such as when you discover quite how foul-mouthed and crass the rather demure-looking Seiko is, or the dark fascination the distinctly sensible-looking Morishige has with corpses and violent scenes.
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