Corpse Party (2021)

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A friendship charm, a cursed school, and the ghosts of murdered children.

Platforms: PC, Mac, Linux, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch
Price: Paid
Rated: Very Positive on Steam (90% of 1,547 reviews)
Players: 1
Controls: Keyboard or controller: move, check, menu.
Made by: MAGES.
Released: 2021

Get it on Steam GOG PlayStation Store (PS4)Xbox Nintendo Switch

What frightens A friendship charm ritual sends a group of high school students into Heavenly Host Elementary, a decaying school from another dimension where children were murdered. They are split up in its dark corridors among corpses and ghosts, the descriptions of each death are graphic, and binaural sound puts the footsteps right behind you.
Content: gore, intense violence, death of children, suggestive content, strong language.

Corpse Party (2021) is the updated release of the Japanese horror cult classic. High school students are pulled into Heavenly Host Elementary, a haunted school in another dimension, and must uncover the murders that happened there to survive, in a battleless pixel-art adventure where choices decide who lives.

About Corpse Party (2021)

Corpse Party began as a 1996 PC-98 game made in RPG Maker, was remade in 2008 and became a cult classic. This 2021 version, developed by MAGES. and published in the West by XSEED, came out in October 2021 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox and Switch. It includes the five main chapters, fourteen extra chapters and two new extra chapters, fully voiced in Japanese.

On a rainy evening after a school festival, Ayumi Shinozaki gets her friends to perform a friendship charm: each holds a piece of a paper doll and pulls. The floor gives way, and they wake scattered across Heavenly Host Elementary, a school that stood on the site of their own long ago, where something terrible happened to the children who studied there.

You explore the school from above in 16-bit pixel art, checking rooms, collecting items and talking with the people you find. There are no battles. Instead, the horror is in the text and the sound: graphic descriptions of what happens to the dead, binaural 3D audio recorded for headphones, and choices that send characters to sudden, often gruesome bad endings.

It is a heavy, gory story with likeable characters you can lose, best for players who enjoy Japanese horror adventures and visual novels and do not mind blood. The store lists intense violence, gore, suggestive content and strong language.

How to play Corpse Party (2021)

Buy Corpse Party (2021) on Steam, GOG, PlayStation 4, Xbox or Switch.
Explore Heavenly Host Elementary from above, checking rooms and objects for items and clues.
Talk with the other students and read the notes left by earlier victims.
Make choices carefully; wrong ones lead to bad endings.
Play the extra chapters after each main chapter to see more of the story.