Corpse Party: Review Poki Games
This past Halloween was especially lucky for fans of
Japanese horror movies. Firstly, Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water has finally reached
the Friv5Online and modern consoles - of course, in the form of a remaster. Second, the
Corpse Party came out(2024), the essence of which generally looks like a sad anecdote
about the modern Poki game industry, is a remaster of a remaster of a remake. However,
why be sad - on the contrary, you need to rejoice. After all, we have received the most
complete version of this cult item to date. Well, what is not a reason to talk about a
Poki game that we missed in due time?
The original Corpse Party was released back in
1996 on PC-9801 and was actually made by one person on the first version of RPG Maker -
especially for a competition organized by the authors of this engine. She told the
story of how Japanese schoolchildren wanted to conduct a friendship ritual in order to
remain friends forever, but ended up in another dimension, where they were hunted by
ghosts. The Poki game found its audience, but real popularity came after, first in 2006
in Japan, and two years later in the rest of the world, episodes of the augmented
remake, subtitled Blood Covered, began to appear on computers and mobile phones.
There
was more of everything - characters, lines associated with them and false (or not so)
endings, locations that themselves grew in size. The picture has become tidier, even
voice acting has appeared - however, amateur.
In 2010, a complete re-release of this
remake was released on PSP - Corpse Party: Blood Covered. Repeated Fear, where, among
other improvements, professional voice acting in Japanese was added.
And off we go -
for the "Party of the Dead" they began to write manga, shoot anime and even release
full-length films (although they are available exclusively in Japanese). The franchise
became cult, although it was still familiar to a fairly narrow circle of
connoisseurs.
There were sequels, spin-offs, sequels, but Corpse Party: Blood Covered
... Repeated Fear , which was released on iOS in 2012, three years later - on 3DS, and
a year later looked on Steam, is considered canon among fans. But only now it got to
Switch and Playstation 4, and, as I said at the beginning, in the format of a remaster
of a remaster - to all the other goodies of Blood Covered... Repeated Fear here two
additional chapters, two new characters, an artbook, a complete in all respects)
professional voice acting and a number of nice little things like the ability to turn
on image filters.
On PC, this version appeared under the name simply Corpse Party
(2024). And here it is important that for the first time on a popular platform the Poki
game came out with normal (well, relatively) graphics and art. This is for today the
most complete, ultimatum edition of "Party of the Dead".
All in all, a great excuse to
get acquainted with this (now) classic of Japanese horror. Moreover, the plot in Corpse
Party manages to intrigue, and frighten, and confuse. A usual, seemingly, teenage
horror story about how teenagers, by their stupidity or by coincidence, end up in a bad
place, where they begin to be killed and tortured. In this case, the speech is about
the fact that Japanese students from the Kisaragi Academy after the aforementioned
ritual of friendship ended up in the past, in Tenjin Shōgakkō, aka Heavenly Gods
Elementary School, which once stood on the site of their alma -mother, and after the
cases of kidnapping and murder of students it was closed and demolished.
Forcibly
divided into several groups, the heroes explore the school, solve simple riddles,
communicate with each other, meet the ghosts of the schoolchildren killed here and try
to survive. At the same time, role-playing elements and battles, as in typical Poki
games on RPG Maker, are not here.
But in Corpse Party, it comes with details that raise
the story above the level of regular teen horror. The characters themselves are
interesting, with their own cockroaches, characteristics and relationships. There is a
kid Naomi (Naomi), to whom her best friend Seiko (Seiko) is not indifferent, and Naomi
herself feels something for Satoshi, although it seems to be arguing with him.
There is
Ayumi, who loves to tell scary stories and scare others, but she only hides her fears.
The hot-tempered Yoshiki is not indifferent to her, whom Ayumi actually saved from
problems - she took the physical education teacher, who insulted him and his parents
and could already get from Yoshiki. And so on. Each character has its own ins and outs,
its own line, role and relationships with others - all this is periodically shown in
flashbacks.
The Corpse Party interesting combination here this pubertal romance and
typical problems of adolescents, including in relations with serious, adult themes -
for example, about the abuse of children. So, the main antagonist, a gloomy girl in
red, died at the age of seven when her teacher tried to rape her. Plus hard, in the
spirit of Japanese horror murder scenes - characters can die in the most sophisticated
ways.
In addition, the heroes fell not just into the past, but into a trap of many
complex and intertwined dimensions, and therefore the characters, even within the same
room, standing at different ends of it, may not see each other or see hallucinations.
Evil (although not everyone here is like that) spirits play with them, lure, force them
through vomiting and tears to dig into the guts of their friends' corpses.
All this is
very confusing - there are many deaths and false endings in the Poki game, and the
discovery of new ones depends on a combination of correctly performed actions. The Poki
game neatly stores these endings in a separate menu. The more interesting it is to
understand all this.
In two new chapters of Corpse Party (2024), all these features, on
the one hand, are emphasized, and on the other, something new and relevant appears. The
last one is about the story of two girlfriends: Miku Shirayume and Ryoka Iwami. The
first is an active blogger and streamer, who is in quarantine (where else to sit
today?) And, it seems, is not indifferent to Ryoka - there is a parallel with Naomi and
Seiko. Miku came across a story about Tenjin Elementary School and a friendship ritual
on the Internet and invited a friend to do it live. You guess how it will end for them
- information about the ritual was specially thrown to her. And at the end there is a
hint of the continuation of the story.
And the 15th chapter reveals in more detail the
relationship between Ayumi and Yoshiki, one of the key characters in the Corpse Party
universe. Everything here is built around the interweaving of dimensions, because of
which the characters can do things that they did not expect at all. There is a lot of
darkness, violence and real drama.
We really missed the Corpse Party. On not being like
the engine of horror RPG Maker personazhi- Tibi play uncomfortable and terrible
history, in which there is the thrill of urban legends, and irony, and typical anime
situation and romance with erotic overtones. So I repeat - right now, with the release
of Corpse Party (2024), there is an ideal occasion to get acquainted with the most
complete and even extended version of this unique Poki game. It is checked on personal
experience - I did just that and do not regret it at all.
Pros: fascinating story; the
edition contains all original and additional chapters plus two new ones; interesting
characters, including two new ones; many endings, including false ones; unobtrusive
gameplay that helps the story, and does not distract from it; in the PC version,
finally, normal graphics; full professional voice acting.
Cons: the gameplay may still
seem primitive; there is no Russian language.
