With Halloween barely a few days in the past, ghosts, ghouls and scary things may have had their moment, with the multitudes of plastic tat now relegated to the discount shelves at your local Tesco, but that doesn't make horror any less relevant, whether it's a film, a book or a game. Talking of horror games, we are probably THE least likely person ever to review one - terrified of literally everything, and unable to tolerate anything scarier than an episode of Goosebumps, we're not really into things that go bump in the night. You won't get us within a mile of a Resident Evil game, nor will we watch someone play Silent Hill without copious quantities of pillows to hide behind. And yet, through a bizarre twist of fate, we also happen to be Everybody Plays' resident expert on all things Corpse Party, a series of Japanese horror visual novels set in a creepy, murderous school. What can we say - we really like visual novels, and are willing to try some things a little out of our comfort zone to get our next fix. We just play it with the light on, and nowhere near bed time, that's all.
#creepy, but also a bit too much like Sackboy
Set some two months after the events of the second game, Corpse Party: Book of Shadows, Corpse Party: Blood Drive picks up with the remaining survivors of the tragedies of the first two games trying to pick up the pieces of their lives and move on. As a quick recap, the game follows Ayumi Shinozaki, a school girl who, along with her friends, enjoy dabbling in the occult - until one day, they open up a rather sinister dimensional rift in the form of Heavenly Host Elementary school, with many of their friends, teachers and more lost their lives within its haunted halls. Driven semi-crazy by grief and drawn in by the prospect of saving her dead friends, Ayumi heads back to Heavenly Host once more, in search of a black magic tome called the Book of Shadows, which holds the key ritual for bringing back her pals - or so she hopes.
If the story sounds kind of confusing, it's because it is - Corpse Party: Blood Drive is very much the end of a trilogy, wrapping up the loose ends from the previous two PSP games, and as such can be a little hard to follow, at least at first. Assuming as it does that you're already familiar with The Book of Shadows, Heavenly Host Elementary, the events that transpired their, and all the names - first and second - of everyone in your little group, whether living or dead, the first couple of hours can be fairly impenetrable, especially as so many of the young girls look pretty much interchangeable, with the same school uniform and same blue-ish hair. Had we not dabbled in (and ultimately chickened out of) the previous games in the past, we think we would have been totally lost.
Obligatory creepy tentacles.
Fortunately, things do start making a bit more sense and the game starts to hit its stride once the first couple of chapters are under your belt. With people making their way into the dark, deadly void that is Heavenly Host Elementary at a rate of knots, you'll find yourself wandering its disturbing halls, checking every nook and cranny for the way to go next. Corpse Party may be a pretty wordy game, driven by it's story first and foremost, but that doesn't mean you don't get your fair share of survival horror-esque exploration, simple puzzle-solving and potentially deadly decisions to make. Armed with a (limited battery powered) torch, you walk through the school halls, dodging spike traps, broken floorboards and tripwires, peeking in classrooms and picking up all kinds of potentially useful items along the way, whether it's a loose floorboard that can be used to bridge a gap or a powerful gas lamp from the science lap, perfect for burning your way through a door sealed by thick human hair.
But you're not alone in Heavenly Host Elementary either. Alongside the corpses of your forerunners that litter the halls, you'll sometimes come across ghosts, ghouls and spirits, some malevolent, some helpful and some downright violent. Whether they're telling you where to find a key or chasing you through the halls hell-bent on revenge, there's always a slight feeling of foreboding when you catch sight of their eerie blue light, because you never quite know how the encounter will turn out. And when it goes bad, you're often left running as fast as you can, searching for a cupboard or something to hide in, hoping the ghost in question isn't bright enough to follow you into a particular classroom, lest it'll be having your brains for breakfast.
Yeah, that's pretty much what we thought the first time we saw it too...
While the ghosts do add a sort of sense of peril to the proceedings, sometimes they can be as much a source of frustration as anything else, chasing you down halls with nary a locker to hide inside. Or there's the occasion where you basically need to leg it past them, into the unknown, before you can get on with the game, somewhat unintuitively. In fact, you'll often find Corpse Party's 'puzzles' all too often fall into the wandering around aimlessly waiting for something to happen, without a clue where or what you're supposed to be doing next. All too often, you're simply searching for the right spot to trigger a cutscene for the plot to move forward, without so much as a hint as to where you should head next, turning the game from atmospheric to irritating in a few minutes.
That said, if there's one thing Corpse Party does well, it's cultivating a suitably grim and gripping atmosphere. Often you'll find yourself taking a deep breath before you open a classroom door, or more than a little petrified about approaching a screaming ghost - while some of the rather sinister scenery you'll find around Heavenly Host, from crucified children to the bizarre internal organ strewn walls, makes you do a double take. Sometimes you'll be asked to make some on the spot decisions too, where the wrong move could cost you your life in a rather grisly end - such as physically trying to restrain your partner as they try to run headlong into a cupboard - a cupboard that appears to be screaming with the voice of one of your long lost friends from before, a voice which turns out to be nothing more than a rather elaborate, and potentially grisly, trick. There's a definite feeling that Heavenly Host Elementary is out to get you, and the game's multitude of wrong ends, where you die in all kinds of gruesome ways, helps cement that feeling too.
Dawdle too long and Haruyuki will just charge on in any way...
But perhaps the biggest thing that detracts from the atmosphere is the sheer amount of loading times you'll sit through during an hour or two of playing Blood Drive. While the game is still perfectly playable, you do find that pretty much everything you do, whether it's going into a nearby classroom, crossing over into a new area or simply opening up your inventory to check your health, will end in a loading time. And every chapter you finish kicks you back to the title screen of the game, via some more irksome load screens, to manually select the next chapter, rather than just automatically carrying on to the next part of the story. Sometimes it feels like you spend more time looking at the same dull loading screen of the same 'scary' face more than you actually spend looking around Heavenly Host Elementary, which is a shame.
Corpse Party: Blood Drive isn't necessarily a bad game - just one that's quite hard to get into for people who aren't already familiar with the first two entries in the series. Definitely one for the fans, it does little to right the problems of it's predecessors, often leaving you wandering around aimlessly, unsure of what to do next, but when it works, it does create a suitably sinister atmosphere, all wrapped up in a gripping story. A bit of a Marmite game, Blood Drive is best left to those already familiar with Heavenly Host, the Book of Shadows and Sachiko Ever After - if it tickles your fancy, we'd recommend picking up the first two games off the Playstation Store first.
Format Reviewed: PS Vita
