When it came time to make up a “Best of 2011” list at the end of last year, a little PSP horror game from Team GrisGris, 5pb, and XSEED called Corpse Party was my #2 game for the year. My #1 game was Dark Souls—a choice that really required little justification, even among those who chose something else for that particular spot. Putting Corpse Party at #2, however, seemed crazy to many. First of all, it was on the PSP—and wasn’t that thing dead? Second, it looked like something from the 16-bit era of gaming—and gameplay-wise, played like something even older. Plus, not only was it on the PSP, but it was a horror game on the PSP. Does that concept even work?
Category: Survival Horror
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Corpse Party
It was just shy of 1am when I finally finished Corpse Party—or, should I say, finished it with an ending I could be satisfied with, versus the one I had received a few hours earlier that left me starting over the game’s final chapter. Having put off a necessary trip to the supermarket in order to correct my prior mistakes, I let the credits play until their end and then rushed out to my car to brave nighttime L.A. for milk and bread.
As I sat there in the driver’s seat, guiding my car along the nearly deserted road that lead to my closest shopping option that was still open, my mind drifted back to the game. I thought about its characters—who they were, what they had experienced, what horrors they had endured in trying (and, for some, failing) to survive what the game had put them through. Or, more precisely, what I had been forced to put them through.
I then realized something—this small wave of panic and despair was welling in my chest, all for some characters in some video game.
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Rule of Rose
Way back in 1999, I got my first taste of Konami’s new horror series Silent Hill. While the mechanics behind the game itself weren’t of the utmost quality, all of the story-line elements had been crafted with such care and dedication that Silent Hill was no longer a game, but a mental and emotional experience. I bring this up because my introduction to Rule of Rose brought up many of the exact same feelings. Not since the tale of Harry Mason and the search for his lost daughter has a horror title so perfectly, yet so seemingly easily, created an entire universe and mythos that clicks from the very moment it begins.
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