Imagine watching a horror film. Its atmosphere and violence tug at your gut, inciting unease over the brutal suffering of characters you've grown to love. As you sit, perched on the edge of your chair, the hero stumbles down a hallway running from certain death that claws at his feet. At the last moment, just when he hopes to escape, he dies. A grisly death.

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But he wasn't supposed to die at that particular point in the film. So you rewind the movie and re-watch the last 20 minutes leading into his untimely demise hoping that something changes along the way. This is the Corpse Party experience. For all its unique, gory, unsettling moments of horror, sudden "Game Overs" undo some of the tension that this PSP download works so hard to build. And yet even in fits of frustration, the atmosphere of Corpse Party still haunts the mind and demonstrates the power of simple visuals paired with effective text and sound.The story of Corpse Party starts late at night in Kisaragi Academy, a normal Japanese high school. While telling ghost stories together, a group of students decide to perform a ritual to ensure their friendship endures over time. Immediately after performing the incantations, an earthquake devastates the school and the friends find themselves in the dilapidated Heavenly Host Elementary School -- a building demolished decades earlier.Over the next 10 hours (give or take), your job is to keep these friends alive while navigating the cursed halls of Heavenly Host. Blood, hunger, and betrayal threaten the sanity of each character and any action you take could lead right into death's waiting arms.In keeping with Corpse Party's 16-bit roots, the visuals you'll find here stay with simple 2D sprites and backgrounds, which might seem odd compared to modern horror games. But shortly after its opening sequence Corpse Party reveals its greatest strength: it gives you just enough details to chill you, and leaves the rest up to your imagination.Corpse Party toys with text and sound in ways that most video games today just don't do. I couldn't imagine playing it without a top-of-the-line pair of headphones. Voices flicker and echo between your ears, black screens and textual cues ignite your senses of smell and touch -- even the music will react to the sight of a dead body. Playing Corpse Party means investing as much time in reading and listening as you do in controlling a character and searching objects.The frustration comes from hitting one of Corpse Party's many dead ends. You might interact with the wrong object, get caught by a ghost, or just do things out of order -- all lead to the actual death of the characters (in gruesome detail) and a reloaded save file. This might set you back 20 minutes, and with no way to skip previously read dialogue and cutscenes, repeated deaths can push even the most peaceful player to bouts of gaming rage.This issue aggravates further because these deaths come at unexpected points with no warning to help protect players from a slight misstep. Sometimes Corpse Party even tricks you into these dead ends. This might enhance the feeling of suspense during play, but it makes each death a serious time investment -- unusual for a portable platform normally reserved for bite-sized sessions.