Corpse Party

Playtime: 17.1 Hours

Played the 3DS remaster, released in 2016 - contains some extra content (Extra Chapters 11-14), but missing some stuff that was added later in the 2021 Steam version. Decided to follow a guide for my playthrough because of the obtuse & obscure failstates in this game - didn't want to have to replay hours of gameplay if I missed an event or something. Picked up all of the name tags, but only played through the true/best endings for each chapter - not sure if I care enough to fill out the other endings. Also finished all unlocked Extra Chapters (1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14) - the others are unlocked behind bad ends in the main game that I didn't get. Only did the true/best endings for those too, but the bad ends aren't really interesting in those to be honest.

Playtime is based on the total 3DS playtime, which includes some previous attempts at partial playthroughs so isn't completely accurate... Chapter playtimes (in order) were: 1.9 hours, 1.5 hours, 2.1 hours, 2.6 hours, and 3.7 hours, extra chapters were all less than ~15 minutes (some only a couple minutes long).

I'm not really that big into horror games, so this game has actually been sitting around unfinished in my 3DS for the better part of a decade. I've tried to play bits and pieces of it a few times before, but never really carried through with it - I feel like there's a few aspects of the game that are a bit of a hard sell. From what I understand, the 3DS release is a remaster of the PSP version released several years earlier (Corpse Party: Blood Covered ...Repeated Fear), which is itself a port of a PC release in 2008. Even that version was not actually an "original" work per se, but instead a full remake of the original RPG Maker game released to the PC-9801 all the way back in 1996. Suffice to say, the game's visuals have an early-2000s pixel-quality to them, the mechanics and gameplay flow feel very outdated, and the story is incredibly anachronistic, especially playing it in 2024 where so many of the "old schoolhouse" motifs, old-fashioned cell phones, etc. all don't really exist anymore.

The old mechanics are really what make this game an occasional struggle to play at times, even despite the several layers of remastering (which does add some very valuable & basic QoL). Probably the most notorious is the way endings are triggered, considering this is a horror game built around experiencing bad endings with gruesome deaths. Several of them have some extremely obtuse requirements to trigger, but to make things worse they often do not fail immediately, but can drag the story along seemingly normally for hours before putting you into a fail condition near the end of the chapter. Trying to go back and figuring out what you did wrong is infuriating in a game like this, not only because it can be extremely difficult to find out what you missed (ex. forgetting to interact with a hidden item, or in some cases even finding certain items) but the game is very slow paced overall, turning the tension from the first playthrough into boredom in the second. Lots of events require in-depth examination, and it's not always clear what is or isn't even interactible in a room, given the limited use of "shining object" sprites - again, as another example, a critical alcohol bottle in the first chapter is hidden in a completely normal-looking shelf. For these reasons, I decided to use some walkthroughs as a reference to play the game - it did spoil some of the scare factor but I value my sanity more.

That said, I quite enjoyed the story in of itself; the story managed to create a very strong tension and atmosphere despite the RPG Maker pixel sprites, relatively basic anime artstyle, and nearly complete lack of random flashy jumpscares. With relatively few chase scenes or active dangers, the ones that sparsely occur throughout the chapters feel more memorable and generally play a bigger role in the plot, like how Naomi was practically hysterical after her encounter with the infirmary shadow, which was a ~30 second chase. In most other games, it becomes routine to the extent of becoming a stealth or shooter game with a horror-themed skin and maybe some scripted spooky scenes (which I'm also OK with). I also kind of appreciate the general simplicity of the plot - Heavenly Host is simply a spiritual plane filled with hatred through the accumulated suffering of all its victims (including Sachiko & her mom, the original two); at this point in the series, there is no further convoluted explanation and it all works better that way. I did kind of feel like the deaths weren't as big of a persistent threat than I originally expected (much of this is probably because I only got the True Ends of each chapter); but in the main route most of the deaths are basically clear after the first couple of chapters (Seiko and Mayu already died, Yui is basically flagged, Morishige is alone & creepy which is also basically a flag). Throughout the rest of the game, it never really felt like the other characters were in serious risk of dying which felt a bit odd. To make up for it though, the game does actually commit to their deaths (and even worse, a rewrite of the outside world to completely forget their existence) which I always prefer in a game like this. It feels cheap to respawn dead characters, much as I would have liked to see Seiko, Mayu and Yui back :(

Overall, I really enjoyed this to be honest! After finishing it, I feel like this is a perfect self-contained game, so I don't really know if I plan to continue on to BoS (and I hear pretty awful things about Blood Drive) - it might be best to leave it where it is now and not defile it with the subsequent inferior entries. I don't know if I'll ever play it again, nor if I'll come back to get the rest of the endings and extra stories, but the time that I did spend wasn't wasted, that's for sure.