A few days before Halloween, I was given the task of reviewing Corpse Party: Blood Curse, the sequel to Corpse Party: Book of Shadows and the final chapter of the Heavenly Host Elementary School saga, but little did I know that its spooky arrival would deliver a curse of its own. At first my Vita would not boot up. The day after, when it finally worked, I got struck by the flu as the game was installing! Stuck cowering under the bed sheets, just like Ayumi does in Blood Curse, meant a review of the game was put on hold. Thankfully though, unlike the game’s young protagonist, I’m ready to deliver my verdict and didn’t need to spend two months in hospital after a ghastly incident involving a book, a curse and the Heavenly Host Elementary School!
Playing Corpse Party: Blood Curse is kind of like reading a book, which isn’t at all surprising considering GrindHouses’ survival horror game is billed as a ‘visual novel’. However, with the first three to four hours consisting of little more than reading text on the screen, with about five minutes of interaction, I did wonder if there was actually any gameplay at all! It turns out there is, but Blood Curse is definitely a slow burner.
Aside from its narrative, Blood Curse’s biggest horror is the loading times. For a game that is so minimalistic, you would think that the loading times would be next to nothing, but that isn’t the case. If you have played any old RPG in existence then you will know that a level loads pretty swiftly, I’ll use Grandia as an example, a game that has a large environment and huge amounts of interaction and takes about 14 seconds to load, or two seconds to load an interior to a building. Corpse Party has environments ranging from smaller than the screen itself to a decent size, perhaps a school’s floor space, several times the width of the screen, so there’s still a fairly large area to explore. Nevertheless, there is so little to do in each area after the initial walkthrough that you’ll encounter load times frequently.
Not only does it take six seconds to load into an extremely small area, but it’s even worse having to wait for a couple seconds every time you enter the menu. Sure, entering a menu might be acceptable, but not when it takes a couple more seconds to go to the next menu screen, or another couple to go back, and then another couple of seconds to get to another part of the menu… it might seem trivial at first but the curse of ‘The Book of Shadows’ seems very strong with this one.
Thankfully, it’s not all doom and gloom. While it does take an unprecedented time from the start of the game, pressing “X” for over 3 hours, and then finally starting some gameplay, the story of Corpse Party: Blood Drive is actually quite intriguing.
The game puts you in the role of a young girl named Ayumi, who has just been released from hospital after two months, shortly after the “Heavenly Host” incident that cost the lives of four of her friends and her sister. Once Ayumi escaped the school and it fell to ruin, she thought that it would be the end of everything along with the The Book of Shadows buried beneath it. This was not to be the case and the school still happens to be erected.
After being told that the dead can be brought back to life, Ayumi was teleported to the school with her sister’s former bodyguard Misuto. Her other friends that were also involved in the “Heavenly Host” incident decide to find a way back to the school to rescue her.
The story gets better and better the further you delve into it, with many exciting twists to keep the narrative feeling fresh, but what’s hampering this title from being something that it could so have easily lived up to is its flawed genius.
Littered throughout the game are traps, spikes, and glass fragments that can incur an HP drop on your character. There are also ghosts that can chase you around, not only in the hallways, but also into the next room. This is generally a nice way to keep the player on their toes and searching for places to hide, except this is where one of the issues lie.
As you wander around the school, the framerate runs at a steady pace (not high but steady) but in the dark! It’s strange that you’re given a flashlight yet you don’t even need to use it as the school seems bright enough as it is. Now, whip out your torch and then suddenly those traps you weren’t afraid of are deadly because the framerate suddenly tanks to a slideshow. It’s a shame because the lighting from the torch is really well done, displaying the game’s real-time shadows impressively.
With such a performance hit though, you felt an immediate change in controller response, it was simply awful. To be honest it would be much better to play the game without the flashlight on anyway, and all the items that you can pick up flash a bright yellow/orange anyway.
Speaking of items, there was a point in Chapter Three where I couldn’t continue any further unless I found a way to get through a door. In order to get through the door I needed matches and an oil lamp, items that you didn’t know existed until you somehow flukily found them on a radiator and on a shelf. It doesn’t exactly help that the radiator and the shelf look exactly the same as every other radiator and shelf in the whole game! What made it worse is the fact that I was wandering for a good hour trying to figure out a way to get through that door, and it was because two items were hidden and didn’t give that item flash colour.
Another thing I couldn’t quite understand is the fact that the flashlight eventually runs out meaning that you then require batteries. I don’t understand the reasoning in computer games that flashlight batteries drain so fast. Even though you won’t really run out of batteries any time soon, unless you get completely lost, the developer decided to add a little helpful Select button for you, but what does it do? Infinite battery life for your torch… it’s like they couldn’t decide on what to do.
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Back to the traps though. As mentioned earlier, they are pretty easy to avoid, but there’s one issue that made it a right horror show most of the time, the camera angle. Too often walls constantly blocked my view, not knowing that my next step could be on a spike or wood flooring. The angle of the camera is such that when you get closer to the south side of any level, instead of panning the camera more vertically, it instead clips behind the wall and you’re left blind for a portion of the screen.
One of the better game mechanics is when you have to hide in cupboards. OK, we all know it’s been done before but for this kind of title the way they implement it is intriguing. It works like this – a deathly spirit decides to spot you, setting off a begroaning moan. It then runs after you, so your best option is to hightail it to the closest cupboard without being spotted. As the corpse treacles past you, cues appear on screen representing their distance from you. The cues range from blue (being the furthest away), green, yellow, and then red. If you get caught in the cupboard then you’re pulled out of it and get a massive hit to your HP pool.
The problem with this is as soon as you hear a groan you really need to disappear fast because 99% of the time you get caught in the cupboard. The camera again causes confusion, because you don’t know where the ghost is, and you don’t know if it can see you enter the cupboard or not making it very hit or miss. If you do happen to survive the ordeal by the time it hits the red cue, it stays red for so long that you may as well put down your Vita, go to the kitchen, make a cup of tea, come back and sometimes it will still be a red queue. The longest it stayed red for me was some 10 minutes!
While the story is fantastic and probably the only reason to go through the ordeal of playing Blood Drive, I did actually like the graphics too. Sure, they’re Chibi-based (big heads and small bodies) but that is what gives it its charm, even if having Chibi characters in a horror game is pretty much like having an army of clowns driving tanks.
Events in the game were also poorly contrived. Instead of leading up to something big that was going to happen, they’re suddenly shun upon you and, unless you save beforehand, you most likely have to go through picking up every object, seeing every scene and script, going through all of the sobbing and crying, everything just to get to that spot again.
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Speaking of game saving, Blood Drive would have been much better with a quick save feature instead of waiting long periods of time before finding that lit candle where you can finally save your game, assuming you were lucky enough to get that far. What’s even worse is that when you get thrust into a major event and you haven’t saved, it should allow you to quickly restart that section instead of trundling through all of that speech again, instead, you’re thrust into a loading screen of about six seconds..
If you’re a fan of the original Corpse Party games, then Blood Drive will most likely only appeal to you, others should look elsewhere. Overall, it’s a horrific mess that could have and should have been so much more if it was more refined. It’s true saving grace is the story which, for any Corpse Party fan, brings the saga to a fitting conclusion.