How a RPG Maker cult classic uses audio to subvert visual novel reward systems and fuck you up at the same time.
A note, before we get started. This article is about sound technology in a game. It’s inherently an accessibility problem, and I don’t want to waste your time, reader, if that applies to you. I apologize, and suggest you instead read one of our other seasonal Halloween pieces, such as Thomas Wilde’s excellent piece on hope in Resident Evil, Rhi Easby’s retrospective on John Carpenter’s They Live, or Jarrett Green’s Dead Take review. If you keep reading anyway, I appreciate it!
In my fifteen years in this business, few games have stuck in my mind as strongly as Corpse Party. It’s a crass, dopey game that started as a cult classic made in an archaic version of RPG Maker, later remade by MAGES and published by XSEED Games for the PSP (it’s on more stuff now). That’s the version I played, often at night, in bed, with headphones in, still learning how to write video game reviews with any kind of voice or personality. In a way, being impacted by this gross, perverted, and legitimately unsettling little horror project helped put me on the path to where I am now. Whatever that says about me I’ll leave to God or Whatever when the time comes!
On its face, Corpse Party isn’t that special or interesting. A group of students perform a spooky ritual they find on the internet for laughs, but the curse turns out to be real. The kids wake up in the haunted remains of a decaying elementary school, where the ghostly inhabitants rewrite the rules of reality as they please. As you roam the pixelated halls looking for clues, students are split up, grouped, and picked off one after another. For most this is a horrible, waking nightmare. For the one or two freaks in the group, it’s more of an opportunity. Go figure.
Corpse Party shares a lot with other unhinged, independent horror media from Japan of its vintage. There’s an emphasis on sexually-charged violence and gore, traditionally-flavored ghost stories, and a deliberate juxtaposition with tropes you’d normally find in bubbly, slice of life anime fare. The goal is to make you uncomfortable at every possible angle, even when you’re not staring death in the face. The results are mixed for Reasons that always have me second-guessing whether or not to recommend this thing to people. But hell, I’ve already written about Mary Skelter on this website, so what else could I have to lose? Content warnings abound, folks!
Problematic vibes aside, Corpse Party actually stands out where it seems to borrow from visual novels despite its overall point-and-click/RPG gameplay structure. That borrowing quickly turns to subversion, at which point Corpse Party flips what I’d consider a visual novel’s inherent reward mechanism upside down, robbing you of what you’d expect as a “payoff” from not just a VN, but a horror VN. A violent, ugly, gratuitous horror VN, to be precise. Corpse Party engages with a different sense, literally, than the obvious one, using sound, and only sound, as the real tool with which it bludgeons you over the head with. Reading is important too unless you understand Japanese of course, but you get the idea.
If you don’t go here, visual novels, especially genre-heavy ones, tell their book-like stories with additional fanfare. The text is the main attraction but it’s enhanced with sound, visuals, maybe even some rudimentary game-like functions, all to make reading a book feel more like watching a show or playing a video game. There’s a “prize” of sorts in most VNs, full screen-sized images colloquially referred to as “CGs,” which are tracked by games and stored in title screen menus for users to go through later, like a photo album of memories. CGs are like little treats you get for sticking with the reading parts, highlighting big moments in the story such as character introductions, fight scenes, major deaths, even sex and gore. Classics of the form like Fate/Stay Night, Muv-Luv, Song of Saya, and more all use CGs in this way. From family-friendly romance stories to “eroge,” it’s a pretty uniform feature.
Like its peers, Corpse Party uses CGs. But it uses them sparingly, and not where you’d expect. They’re mostly focused on characters and story moments, with very few actually being tied to the various bad endings and death sequences that would warrant them the most. The nasty stuff is what the audience wants to see, after all, especially in horror. What’s a Living Dead movie, if not for the scenes in which you watch zombies dig butcher meat out of cleverly-rigged body doubles? Sure the social commentary is there too, but Tom Savini is a big name for a reason. How else can you sell Director’s Cut DVDs?
Instead, most of Corpse Party’s bad endings and death scenes comprise text over black screens. You never see what’s happening, and you almost never see who it’s happening to. Perhaps there’s a CG set before or after the popcorn moment, but the real payoffs happen in pure darkness. But oh boy, can you ever hear it. Corpse Party uses a combination of expertly-crafted sound effects and voice acting to create some of the most gruesome violence I’ve experienced in a video game. I’m mostly writing this from memory, but I can still recall the sheer discomfort spurred on from this game’s sound-only horror scenes.
What sounded like a gimmick in a press release at the time actually pays off; Corpse Party’s sound was recorded using binaural recording, which basically means multiple microphones were used, in addition to a bizarre mannequin-like structure, in an attempt to simulate depth and space. If done well, binaural recording is able to trick your brain into feeling like you’re in the room with what you’re listening to. Advancements in technology have helped this effect come to fruition in open spaces like IMAX theaters, but at home you’ll have to use headphones for it to work properly. It might be trivial now, but when playing a PSP game in 2011, I had never experienced it before.
The death scenes in Corpse Party are nasty. I’m talking bone-crunching, gagging, gurgling, shrieking, crying, suffocating, whatever you call the whimpering sounds a person makes on the runway to dying, the works. It sounds like the very talented voice cast are literally being tortured; for such a small-scale project it feels like these people are putting it all on the line for their art. Just look at this Reddit post I found from some poor sap stumbling over this game over a decade ago. “Whoever made this game is a [fucking] psychopath,” it says. That’s the vibe. If this wasn’t a horror game I’d suggest doing anything else with your time, for your own mental well-being.
But the fun thing about horror is you can find a fascinating intersection point between Bad Things and thought-provoking creative work. If you can handle it, there’s a special takeaway, a sense of awe at the ingenuity of people finding new ways to make something scary. From loading up a makeshift dummy with pig parts and corn syrup to simulate cannibalism on film to having an actor scream their lungs out into a microphone setup that looks like a crash test dummy wearing earbuds to simulate a child getting their tongue ripped out, humans have gone out of their way to push technological limits for the sake of being sickos. It’s an extreme level of “for the love of the game,” but it’s certainly more interesting than jump scares.
Corpse Party would go on to be a series for better or worse, with results all over the map. There’s even a movie, a manga, and an anime, all with varying degrees of grotesque gimmickry. Funnily enough it’s right in the middle of a ratings-adjacent controversy, with a new compilation release planned for Halloween and now ostensibly being cancelled off the face of Amazon. But there’s nothing quite like the original, or the original remake I guess. If you’re looking for something off the beaten path for spooky season this year, put down the latest Bloober Team joint and give Corpse Party a whirl instead. Turn the lights off, and, I cannot stress this enough, grab your best headphones. Seek out the bad ends. Will you thank me? Probably not.
