This review contains spoilers
Beneath the surface-level grime and gore liberally splattered all over its cursed elementary school, beneath the torture and suffering experienced by its cast of teenage characters, Corpse Party possesses a libidinal drive to explore one existential question, posed simultaneously at the player and backwards at the game's developers: why are we engaging with this game about suffering? Why do you want to see material in which characters suffer? What happens to you when you either write or experience a story about suffering? And most importantly of all, why would a person enjoy engaging with a game about suffering, in its development or in the playing of it?
Corpse Party is a sprite-based game about a group of teenagers who get trapped within a haunted elementary school, and are made to both witness and endure extreme physical and psychological suffering. The haunted school is possessed by the ghosts of tortured children, who are compelled by the haunted school to torture and kill anyone else who becomes trapped there, producing yet more ghosts who trap and kill yet more people, creating a kind of escalatory economy of murderers.
Late in Corpse Party's story, the player learns that the trapped ghosts aren't inherently vengeful, but that they're directed to be vengeful by the school itself; more specifically, they succumb to a process the game refers to as 'darkening,' in which the entities that exist in the school, living or dead, are forced to become more vicious and psycopathic. This means that the perpetual acts of violence which permeate the school are not produced by the inherent desires of the survivors and ghosts, but are instead inherited by the survivors and ghosts from the school. Even once the player drills down into the lore of the game and experiences the true ending, in which the ghost at the center of the narrative is exorcized and the story concludes, there is no true, originary act of cruelty that compelled all of the suffering within the game to occur, but instead that there was one act of cruelty which compelled this particular instance of suffering to radiate outwards into the world, which absorbed more and more people into itself and its economy of suffering.
In other words, there is no 'true end' to the haunted school, no final act of good that can sufficiently act as an oppositional force negating the ultimate evil depicted by the game. Further, anyone who dies within the school is both permanently erased from living memory and is forced to live out the pain of their death for eternity. Corpse Party is a game of helplessness all the way down, rendering any positive outcome for any given character incidental. The future potential for suffering is the only impermeable thing; this is a bleak game.
Not all characters are destroyed by the ghosts, but are instead destroyed by other, potentially 'darkened,' survivors. One of the more notable survivors is a teenager named Morishige. Because Corpse Party relies heavily on character archetypes, Morishige can be summarized as the 'serious academic' teen in the cast.
Morishige is unique in that he survives most of the threats in the school, never seems to come into contact with any of the school's ghosts, never seems to experience 'darkening' as far as we can perceived, and yet is 'othered,' both literally and structurally, by the characters and by the game. Characters who come into contact with Morishige agree that, as if out of nowhere, he's begun to act creepy as hell. He chases after the player character at a certain point in the story, and so becomes the only member of the cast to embody the role of an antagonist. He is also the only character in the game who reveals his secret motivations to the player without the player needing to take any special action; he is, in fact, fundamentally unknowable to everyone except the player, to whom he reveals his inner desires via monologue.
When the player first encounters Morishige, he is standing near a pile of human viscera with a smile on his face, taking snapshots of it with his flip phone. He refuses to join the player characters when they encounter him, and makes vaguely unsettling comments when questioned about his motivations. We find out towards the climax, during a genuinely absurd bit of writing, that viewing the destroyed bodies of other people brings Morishige a sense of emotional security and pleasure, a kind of profoundly unsettling schadenfreude. If Morishige can apprehend the suffering of others and enjoy it, he feels reassured of his good fortune relative to the sufferer, creating a sadistic positive reinforcement mechanism. The mechanism seems to stabilize Morishige up until he realizes one of the bodies he's been leering at is the love of his life, at which point he experiences every empathetic response to suffering he had deferred through his voyeurism throughout the game, which psychologically annihilates him, likely driving him towards suicide.
Morishige's characterization is an act of autocritique within Corpse Party. He embodies the role of the player, an interested observer who experiences enjoyment in the act of visually apprehending suffering. This passive, sociopathic enjoyment Morishige experiences is depicted within the game as an evil act, which ironically condemns him to a fate worse than death, to empathetically experience the most tremendously damaging act of self-destruction, forever. Yet, in essence, Morishige does what it is the player does - he intentionally apprehends the suffering of others, because he wants to do it, because he enjoys it. There is a direct relationship between Morishige's fictional apprehension of suffering and the player's material, real-life apprehension of Corpse Party. The character closest to the player, the one whose actions mirror those of the player, is, in the language of the game, a character who has done something wrong, who deserves to be punished for a transgression. Corpse Party possesses a libidinal, almost pyschosexual desire to depict or even fetishize suffering - with Morishige, it drags the player into its mess, attaching the player into an apparatus of shame and psychological self-flagellation.
Corpse Party's understanding of horror as a genre - and more specifically, Corpse Party's understanding of itself, of why a human being would engage with it, think about it, and yes, enjoy it - is insufficient. People do not, generally speaking, engage with horror media because it fulfills bloodlust, or because they're indulging in a psychosexual craving to witness suffering. If we're going to psychoanalyze the act of intentionally watching horror media, of intentionally watching the suffering of others (and, to be clear, I do not believe it is possible to reduce that act to a single motivation which all people who engage with horror media experience), then the common academic understanding would be that it provides the potential for catharsis, that you don't witness the suffering of others because you displace yourself from their emotional experience and consume their suffering from the outside-in, but instead that you see yourself, directly, within the people who are made to suffer, and in them see your capacity to endure whatever the horror media in question depicts as the worst possible thing.
Lacking that more complex understanding of horror, Corpse Party ends in a bizarre anti-climax. The surviving characters simply go home and feel uncomfortable about what happened. Even moreso than Morishige, Corpse Party's climax reveals its own fatal flaw: it cannot imagine a world complex enough to contain the capacity for positives in its world of apocalyptic negatives.
I liked Corpse Party a lot. It's an exquisitely economical game, and its ability to squeeze so much use out of such modest narrative components is an achievement in horror storytelling. Yet, at the core of it, it's also a kind of brazenly unhinged act of simulated voyeurism that is, at certain crucial points in its story, consumed by its fetishistic narratorial voice and overall bizarre fixation with violence.
Corpse Party is a sprite-based game about a group of teenagers who get trapped within a haunted elementary school, and are made to both witness and endure extreme physical and psychological suffering. The haunted school is possessed by the ghosts of tortured children, who are compelled by the haunted school to torture and kill anyone else who becomes trapped there, producing yet more ghosts who trap and kill yet more people, creating a kind of escalatory economy of murderers.
Late in Corpse Party's story, the player learns that the trapped ghosts aren't inherently vengeful, but that they're directed to be vengeful by the school itself; more specifically, they succumb to a process the game refers to as 'darkening,' in which the entities that exist in the school, living or dead, are forced to become more vicious and psycopathic. This means that the perpetual acts of violence which permeate the school are not produced by the inherent desires of the survivors and ghosts, but are instead inherited by the survivors and ghosts from the school. Even once the player drills down into the lore of the game and experiences the true ending, in which the ghost at the center of the narrative is exorcized and the story concludes, there is no true, originary act of cruelty that compelled all of the suffering within the game to occur, but instead that there was one act of cruelty which compelled this particular instance of suffering to radiate outwards into the world, which absorbed more and more people into itself and its economy of suffering.
In other words, there is no 'true end' to the haunted school, no final act of good that can sufficiently act as an oppositional force negating the ultimate evil depicted by the game. Further, anyone who dies within the school is both permanently erased from living memory and is forced to live out the pain of their death for eternity. Corpse Party is a game of helplessness all the way down, rendering any positive outcome for any given character incidental. The future potential for suffering is the only impermeable thing; this is a bleak game.
Not all characters are destroyed by the ghosts, but are instead destroyed by other, potentially 'darkened,' survivors. One of the more notable survivors is a teenager named Morishige. Because Corpse Party relies heavily on character archetypes, Morishige can be summarized as the 'serious academic' teen in the cast.
Morishige is unique in that he survives most of the threats in the school, never seems to come into contact with any of the school's ghosts, never seems to experience 'darkening' as far as we can perceived, and yet is 'othered,' both literally and structurally, by the characters and by the game. Characters who come into contact with Morishige agree that, as if out of nowhere, he's begun to act creepy as hell. He chases after the player character at a certain point in the story, and so becomes the only member of the cast to embody the role of an antagonist. He is also the only character in the game who reveals his secret motivations to the player without the player needing to take any special action; he is, in fact, fundamentally unknowable to everyone except the player, to whom he reveals his inner desires via monologue.
When the player first encounters Morishige, he is standing near a pile of human viscera with a smile on his face, taking snapshots of it with his flip phone. He refuses to join the player characters when they encounter him, and makes vaguely unsettling comments when questioned about his motivations. We find out towards the climax, during a genuinely absurd bit of writing, that viewing the destroyed bodies of other people brings Morishige a sense of emotional security and pleasure, a kind of profoundly unsettling schadenfreude. If Morishige can apprehend the suffering of others and enjoy it, he feels reassured of his good fortune relative to the sufferer, creating a sadistic positive reinforcement mechanism. The mechanism seems to stabilize Morishige up until he realizes one of the bodies he's been leering at is the love of his life, at which point he experiences every empathetic response to suffering he had deferred through his voyeurism throughout the game, which psychologically annihilates him, likely driving him towards suicide.
Morishige's characterization is an act of autocritique within Corpse Party. He embodies the role of the player, an interested observer who experiences enjoyment in the act of visually apprehending suffering. This passive, sociopathic enjoyment Morishige experiences is depicted within the game as an evil act, which ironically condemns him to a fate worse than death, to empathetically experience the most tremendously damaging act of self-destruction, forever. Yet, in essence, Morishige does what it is the player does - he intentionally apprehends the suffering of others, because he wants to do it, because he enjoys it. There is a direct relationship between Morishige's fictional apprehension of suffering and the player's material, real-life apprehension of Corpse Party. The character closest to the player, the one whose actions mirror those of the player, is, in the language of the game, a character who has done something wrong, who deserves to be punished for a transgression. Corpse Party possesses a libidinal, almost pyschosexual desire to depict or even fetishize suffering - with Morishige, it drags the player into its mess, attaching the player into an apparatus of shame and psychological self-flagellation.
Corpse Party's understanding of horror as a genre - and more specifically, Corpse Party's understanding of itself, of why a human being would engage with it, think about it, and yes, enjoy it - is insufficient. People do not, generally speaking, engage with horror media because it fulfills bloodlust, or because they're indulging in a psychosexual craving to witness suffering. If we're going to psychoanalyze the act of intentionally watching horror media, of intentionally watching the suffering of others (and, to be clear, I do not believe it is possible to reduce that act to a single motivation which all people who engage with horror media experience), then the common academic understanding would be that it provides the potential for catharsis, that you don't witness the suffering of others because you displace yourself from their emotional experience and consume their suffering from the outside-in, but instead that you see yourself, directly, within the people who are made to suffer, and in them see your capacity to endure whatever the horror media in question depicts as the worst possible thing.
Lacking that more complex understanding of horror, Corpse Party ends in a bizarre anti-climax. The surviving characters simply go home and feel uncomfortable about what happened. Even moreso than Morishige, Corpse Party's climax reveals its own fatal flaw: it cannot imagine a world complex enough to contain the capacity for positives in its world of apocalyptic negatives.
I liked Corpse Party a lot. It's an exquisitely economical game, and its ability to squeeze so much use out of such modest narrative components is an achievement in horror storytelling. Yet, at the core of it, it's also a kind of brazenly unhinged act of simulated voyeurism that is, at certain crucial points in its story, consumed by its fetishistic narratorial voice and overall bizarre fixation with violence.