“Corpse Party” starts with a group of eight Japanese high school students and one teacher. One of the girls in the group is transferring to another high school, so they all decide to perform a ritual to keep their friendship intact, even if they wont be close to each other. Sadly, 30 years before all this happened, the school was a sight for horrible kidnapping and the murder of many elementary school children. After the events of that, the school was torn down and the new high school was built in its place. But the horrors still remained.

After performing the seemingly harmless ritual, an earthquake occurs which splits them all up and transports them all to the old school. They’ve been split up and are unsure if this is just a nightmare, if it’s really happening, or if the true nature of their predicament lies somewhere in between. Now they must try to figure out how to reunite and escape before they succumb to the spirits that haunt them.

The plot of Corpse Party is broken up into five chapters, and in each one the games controls different members of the gang. For the most part, this is a story-driven, puzzle-solving game where you need to scour the school looking for specific objects to progress the story.

What makes the game so interesting is how the environments change from chapter to chapter and character to character. These students are technically all in the same school. The game explains that the students have been split up into different dimensions, but the layout for one group may be entirely different from that of another group. In one chapter, you may have easy access to the infirmary, but in another one it is completely out of reach.

Not only does the school shift from one chapter to the next, but also even within a given section. Earthquakes might occur that alter where a character can go. Other tricks include having areas magically appear or disappear. The gamer may visit a section and a door materializes, but when they return, the door is mysteriously absent. Because of theses changes, it is easy to get lost while walking, especially later in the game when parts of the school change a few times.

While the story runs mainly in a linear way, there are many ways in which “Corpse Party” can run. In each chapter there are many ways in which you can finish. There may be items that’ll help your character but are not necessary to advance. Decisions such as giving a character a certain item, reading certain journal entries, and visiting certain places can change the outcome that you face. But there are also decisions that you can make that’ll make you character die and the appearance of wrong end.

Even when the character has technically died and gamers are forced to reload the game, they don’t get a basic end cut scene or death animation if they don’t reach the correct ending. These “wrong end” situations have gamers watching and or listening to the characters scream for their lives as they face their doom. There are more than a dozen different “wrong end” sequences throughout the game and very different ways of getting them. In fact, there are many wrong endings that finish the story. Getting the correct ending forces you to make the right choices.

Although the story flows at a nice pace and the various endings in each chapter strongly encourage a second, third or fourth go-round, the placement of save points makes having to go through a particular area multiple times a bit of a hassle. In one area in chapter four, a character has only a limited amount of time and is faced with a situation that could play out three ways. If you make the wrong decision or fail to complete the task within the given time, you have to go through the entire lead-up sequence from the previous save point, which can be annoying.

Replaying these moments again is even more noticeable considering that most ending sequences, good or bad, last at least a minute. Add the fact that you must return to the main menu and reload the earlier save, which wastes time that could be better spent elsewhere.

Corpse Party’s main story can take roughly six to eight hours if you manage to stay alive and avoid mistakes. There are student ID cards littered throughout each chapter that can be collected. These don’t serve much purpose outside of giving you an idea of the other kids who have also fallen victim to the horror. Completing chapters and experiencing certain endings, both good and bad, unlocks additional chapters that shed some light on those fallen characters. These chapters vary from having you complete a task to having you watch little vignettes. These are nice additions that help explain some of the actions of the characters you meet along the way.

Giving the rarity of shocking games like this. “Corpse Party” brings a fresh new change to the video game world. Whether, you want to have a few good scares or just want to try something new. Corpse Party is a welcome game for anyone and everyone.

The official trailer for the game below