Category: ghost stories

Corpse Party

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Corpse Party is a 16-bit RPG Maker horror adventure game from 1996 that was released on multiple platforms before finally finding its way, in a substantially updated form, to the Nintendo Switch. It shows its age, but it’s definitely worth playing if you’re into retro-styled horror adventure games.

Corpse Party is divided into five chapters, each of which stands as a discrete unit accompanied by its own set of save files that can be selected from the main menu. Every chapter has a number of optional bad endings, but you need to achieve the good ending in order to unlock access to the next chapter. If you’re using a walkthrough, each chapter takes roughly an hour to complete.

You play as various members of a group of high school students who stayed late after school one evening to tell ghost stories. They unfortunately trigger a curse that transports them to an abandoned elementary school building that was shut down in the 1970s after a grisly series of abductions and murders. Different students occupy different pocket dimensions of the school, which is almost entirely cut off from reality. To make matters worse, your group of students isn’t the first batch of kids to be spirited away to the school, which is littered with corpses and haunted by vengeful ghosts. Your goal is to help the kids escape the school… if that’s even possible.  

Corpse Party is extremely gory, and not all the kids are going to make it. The game contains intense depictions of mutilation and self-harm accompanied by vivid textual descriptions and occasional environmental illustrations of an uncomfortably graphic nature. The violence occupies an intersection between disturbing, gross, and campy, and I thought it was a lot of fun.

The main challenges of Corpse Party are of the standard “find a key to unlock the door” adventure game variety. The layout of the school changes from scene to scene, but it’s not large enough to get lost in. Aside from avoiding the occasional wandering ghost, there are no reflex challenges, and your characters are very rarely in any immediate danger. If there were jump scares, they didn’t register with me. The 16-bit character sprites are very cute, even when they’re depicting corpses.

As far as horror games go, Corpse Party is relatively chill, but with one caveat:

Corpse Party is completely linear and frustratingly opaque about what you need to do to trigger the next event in any given sequence. Unless you want to walk through endless dark hallways searching every square of the map, you’re going to need a walkthrough to get through the game. The walkthrough people use is (this one), but the walkthrough can sometimes be just as opaque as the game itself.

Personally speaking, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I managed to get through the first two chapters of Corpse Party without using a walkthrough. These initial two chapters stand on their own as a story, and I felt that they were actually the best part of the game. I think it’s probably safe to say that the opening of Corpse Party is more than enough to satisfy someone with a casual interest and playstyle.

The characters are usually divided into interesting pairs, and most of what you’ll do in the game consists of walking around inside the ruins of the school building while having conversations. The kids are very good about following horror movie rules – they don’t split up or do anything stupid – but they’re at the complete mercy of the ghosts of the original murder victims, who will change the layout of the school or create traps just to mess with them. For the most part, the kids are good and gentle and kind to one another, which makes it all the more upsetting when something bad happens.

The characterization and conversations aren’t that deep, however, so you never get so attached to any character that you don’t want to see them die. My favorite death is when one of the kids gets slammed against a wall so hard that his body explodes into red pulp, which all the rest of the kids have to walk through for the remainder of the game while navigating that particular hallway intersection.

Through disjointed and disconnected teamwork, your characters learn what actually happened to the ghosts haunting the school. For curious lore hunters, there are various bits of text scattered around, from newspaper clippings to messages left by other victims of the curse. These textual passages start off as grim and gradually grow more disturbing, and it’s always a pleasure to find something new to read. There’s also an optional collection quest that encourages you to find and interact with all the corpses in each chapter; and, if you like, you can return to the main menu and read about all the horrible ways these kids died.

It’s probably more accurate to call Corpse Party a “visual novel” as opposed to an “adventure game,” but it’s fun to explore the school while interacting with various objects in the environment. It’s also fun to gain access to new areas, both to learn more about the story and to see more of the game’s pixel art. One of my favorite areas is the outdoor pool in Chapter 4, which is filled with waterlogged corpses and preceded by a hellishly filthy locker room. Good times.

Despite its frustrations, I really enjoyed Corpse Party, and the English translation created by XSeed is fantastic. While reading the game’s Wikipedia page (here), I learned that there’s a manga adaptation (here), and I had so much fun exploring this horrible haunted school that I started reading it. It’s just as ridiculous and over the top as you’d expect from a manga adaptation of a horror game, but each chapter has one or two really great horror scenes enhanced by lovingly detailed and disturbingly gruesome artwork.

Love in the Time of Gloom Spawn

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After years spent investigating the mysterious shrines of East Necula, Dr. Calip has joined the Zonai Survey Team’s efforts to study the Ring Ruins of Kakariko Village. The ancient structures are fascinating, but what has captured Calip’s attention is the chasm in the forest on the hill. While Calip has been gazing into the abyss, however, the leader of the Zonai Survey Team has been gazing at him.

As I grow more impatient with grand narratives of nation-building and heroic destiny, I’ve become more interested in how epic fantasy universes appear to normal people. Hyrule is especially fascinating as a case study, as the privileges enjoyed by Link clearly aren’t applicable to everyone else. This is especially true of the knowledge Link accumulates over his journey, during which the secrets of prior eras are revealed to him alone.

In the present postapocalyptic era of Breath of the Wild, it seems the only person trying to study and understand Hyrule is a scholar named Calip, who lives in an isolated cabin as he attempts to stage an archaeological investigation into the site of one of the ancient Sheikah shrines. As an academic, Calip is a pompous asshole. Regardless of “Dr.” Calip’s self-serving motives, I admire him as a character who investigates the world and tries to understand it instead of simply killing things and accumulating treasure.  

Perhaps because of the popularity of the fandom’s speculation and study of Hyrule, Tears of the Kingdom leans into the ethos of archaeological inquiry with the establishment of a large and diverse set of NPCs forming the Zonai Survey Team. This Sheikah-funded research organization is led by a brick house of a character named Tauro. Tauro has set himself up in Kakariko Village, which has been beset by ruins falling from sky islands and a giant pit opening in the forest on the eastern hill.

Given their interests, it’s only natural that Calip and Tauro would interact. When you read the diaries that Calip has left at his former cabin and at his desk in his office in Kakariko, you learn that Calip is undeniably attracted to Tauro, who apparently went out of his way to invite Calip to work with him. Late in the game, the two men abandon their duties to run off and do research together. I think is a sweet lowkey love story – and even Kotaku agrees, apparently!

The emphasis on archaeological excavation in Tears of the Kingdom is somewhat problematic. In essence, the kingdom of Hyrule had a state-building myth that justified its sovereignty over the surrounding regions, and the result of the archaeological study performed by state-sponsored Zonai Survey Team is the demonstration that these myths were true in the most literal sense. Yes, there are evil outsiders who will kill everyone if they get the chance; and yes, only the royal family and its servants can protect everyone; and yes, the royal family is literally descended from gods/dragons. It’s all kind of gross.

What I therefore appreciate about the implied love story between Calip and Tauro is that they turn their backs on the politics of ancient texts and leave Kakariko so that they can go out into the woods and look at ruins together. For them, curiosity about the world has nothing to do with national mythologies and everything to do with the connection they feel to the people who lived on the land before them – and the connection they have with each other.

Because I am apparently incapable of creating anything that doesn’t have monsters, however, the story I wrote about Calip and Tauro ended up being a horror story as much as it is a love story. It has a happy ending, but it also has a healthy dose of eldritch horrorterrors. Phantom Ganon also makes an appearance, because of course he does.

The story is complete at 4,000 words, and you can read it on AO3 here:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/51328888

The illustration is by the marvelously talented Martina Belli, whose magical artwork helped me bring these two characters and their story to life. Marty paints dynamic portraits of fantasy characters and dramatic science fiction scenes, and she excels at creating compositions that draw the viewer into the world of her art. It was a lot of fun to work with her, and I highly recommend following her creations on Twitter (here).

Afterdream

~ Kathryn ~ 1 Comment

Afterdream is a 2D horror adventure game with puzzle elements and lo-fi pixelated graphics that takes between two to three hours to finish. It’s on Steam, but I played it on Nintendo Switch and had a fantastic time. Afterdream drops you right into the story and immediately grabs your attention, and its pacing is impeccable. The horror is mostly atmospheric, but the game features a great set of jumpscares mixed with short segments of heightened tension.

Afterdream isn’t for people who can’t tolerate horror, but I’d happily recommend it to anyone else who’s interested in trying out a short, original, and creative story game. The puzzles are fun but not too difficult, and the environmental design is really something special.

You play as a woman named Jennifer who wakes up in a filthy derelict room wearing a suit she doesn’t own. During the intermittent frame story, Jennifer relates this situation to an older man who seems to be a psychiatrist, claiming that she’s experienced an unusually realistic nightmare.

Within this nightmare, Jennifer’s job is to navigate a series of haunted houses while finding a series of objects for a series of NPCs. There are no Professor Layton style puzzles relating to number games or spatial arrangement challenges; rather, Afterdream’s puzzles are mainly fetch quests reminiscent of old-school adventure games in which a certain object needs to be applied to a certain environmental obstacle, like a key being needed to unlock a door.

The challenge, such as it is, lies in being able to form a mental map of each area and remembering what goes where. The game mechanics are extremely simple and intuitive, and there are no inventory limits or menu screens to distract the player from the immersive environment. It’s always clear what you can interact with, and the in-game text isn’t cryptic about what needs to happen.

The haunted houses don’t reveal their secrets willingly, but Jennifer is aided by a Polaroid ghost camera that she can use to scan her surroundings. The oddities exposed through the camera’s viewfinder become real once photographed. You might hear an odd ticking sound, for example, in which case your camera will reveal a ghostly clock on the wall. It’s a neat game mechanic, and it’s put to good use in a nice variety of situations.

Jennifer begins in an old and rotting apartment building and then progresses to a fancier but similarly ruined mansion, wherein a helpful ghost tells her that she’s been given an opportunity to make contact with the spirit of her recently deceased father. In order to summon his ghost, Jennifer must first find a special “portal object” hidden within the liminal space between life and the afterlife. Unfortunately, no one can say what this object looks like or where it’s hidden.

Still, Jennifer has no choice but to keep moving forward through progressively spookier areas. As a special present to me personally, there’s a dark and grimy sewer level, and it’s wonderful. There’s also a “creepy little town” level, and it’s beautiful and I love it.

Even though the game is divided into discrete stages, its story isn’t formulaic. To lighten the heavy atmosphere, the writing employs humor at key moments, with both Jennifer and the NPC ghosts occasionally poking fun at the absurdity of various situations. I really enjoyed the instances when I thought something horrible was going to happen but everything actually turned out to be perfectly wholesome. The pacing is excellent, with plenty of fun character interactions and chill periods of downtime between the creepy bits and jumpscares.

Afterdream is the perfect length for its story, and its gameplay goes from strength to strength as its setting becomes stranger and more disturbing. It might not be to the taste of people looking for more action or more explicit horror, but it was perfect for me.

One final thing: When I first saw the game’s trailer, I was like, “This looks cool, but I hope you can turn off the strobe effects.” And thankfully, you can in fact turn off the strobe effects. It’s always nice when game developers take this sort of accessibility issue into consideration.

List of Cozy Horror Games on Sidequest

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

To celebrate Halloween and everything autumn, Sidequest created a list of cozy horror games for people who enjoy the themes and aesthetics of spooky season but aren’t into jumpscares or explicitly ghoulish imagery. I love every game on this list, and I had a lot of fun writing about three favorites of my own. Here’s a set of excerpts:

Six Cats Under

Despite its grim premise, Six Cats Under is a chill game with cute pixel graphics and an ambient lo-fi soundtrack. Even watching a short playthrough on YouTube is relaxing.

What Remains of Edith Finch

This is the perfect Pacific Northwest Gothic setting for a haunted house story, but Edith’s former home is actually quite beautiful and charming. Adding to the game’s coziness is its comfortable two-hour playtime, as well its clearly signposted guidance along the critical path.

Night in the Woods

Although you’ll gradually uncover the town’s secrets during the days leading to and following Halloween, your main goal is to reconnect with old friends in dead malls and empty grocery store parking lots after spending your afternoons strolling through streets filled with gorgeous fall foliage.

I think it’s worth commenting on my criteria for what makes a game “cozy.”

Accessibility is a major factor. You should be able to play a cozy game at your own pace without having to worry about the anxiety of time limits or the frustration of losing progress. Another key element of cozy games is their ability to inspire a sense of comfort through visual presentation. “Cozy graphics” aren’t disposable Instagram aesthetics, but rather a commitment to a distinct visual style that feels hand-crafted and deliberate in its expression of the game’s themes.  

More than anything, a cozy game uses its relaxed vibes to create a safe space to ask meaningful questions that the player wouldn’t have the energy to engage with otherwise. Cozy games should be thought-provoking but casual, like a conversation with a friend in front of a fire.  “Cozy horror” isn’t an oxymoron, then, as cozy games are perfect for the long nights when you can bundle up, get comfortable, and take the time to study the shadows lurking in the darkness.

You can check out Sidequest’s full list of cozy horror games here:
https://sidequest.zone/2023/10/30/sidequests-favorite-cozy-horror-games-for-weenies/

Review of A Guest in the House on WWAC

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

I had the pleasure of writing a review of Emily Carroll’s darkly brilliant graphic novel, A Guest in the House, for Women Write About Comics. The story gazes into the moonlit shadows of “traditional” families, and it’s gothic horror at its sexiest and most subversive. Here’s an excerpt from my review:

Carroll’s visual representation of Abby’s inner world is brilliantly strange and gorgeously queer. In her more introspective moments, Abby indulges in a fantasy of herself as a heroic knight fighting dragons, who lay waiting for her, hot and wet in their dark caves. Having slain a dragon while remaining protected and genderless inside her full-body armor, Abby seeks comfort in the arms of the beautiful ladies that await her arrival. While the majority of the artwork in A Guest in the House is painted in black ink with gradations of gray, Abby’s fantasies practically scream from the page in lurid full color that slowly begins to bleed into Abby’s waking life.

You can read the full review here:
https://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/2023/10/a-guest-in-the-house-review/

If you’re interested, I also recommend checking out Emily Carroll’s website (here) for a curated selection of horror art and short comics. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it’s one of the best sites on the internet.

While I was writing this review, I told a friend that A Guest in the House is like Dark Souls, but if Dark Souls were about a housewife in rural Canada in the 1990s. I stand by this evaluation, and I think it makes sense given the artist’s love of FromSoft games. Carroll recently released a short fancomic about Bloodborne, and you can download it for free from Itchio (here). As with A Guest in the House, I might offer a content warning for body horror and violence, but the art and writing are gorgeous.

They Only Come Out at Night

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Grog has noticed a number of peculiarities in Kakariko Village. Eerie lights flicker in the mountain valley after dark. Murky black water fills the old stone well that no one uses. Golden spiders spin their webs under the eaves of abandoned buildings. Little does Grog know that the legendary Sheikah of Kakariko still live, and that they are watching.

I’m one of the many children of the 1990s who read Stephen King way too young. I think I must have been ten years old when I first encountered the IT, and I read the novel like it was Harry Potter. I was too young to understand a lot of what was going on, but what I took away from the story was a lifelong fascination with haunted towns.

This is one of the many reasons why I love Kakariko Village in Ocarina of Time. Like Derry, Kakariko seems pleasant and idyllic in the daytime, but all manner of horrors creep through its sewers. Over the course of his journey through Hyrule, Link learns that Kakariko is a Disneyland-style stage setting that covers an underground labyrinth of corpse-choked dungeons. Impa opened the depopulated village to the refugees from the civil war that left Link an orphan, which means many of the people living in Kakariko have no idea what their homes are standing on top of.

I’m curious about the perspective of normal people who live in fantastic worlds, and I’m particularly interested in Grog, the odd young man who greets Link at the entrance to Kakariko after dark. His dialog is iconic: “People are disgusting. My own father and mother are disgusting. You must be disgusting, too!”

When Link returns to Kakariko after seven years, Grog is nowhere in sight. No longer a surly teenager who resents his parents, Grog has gotten himself caught up in some truly strange business. It was only when I played Ocarina of Time as an adult that I was able to put together all the pieces of Grog’s story, which ends with his death (or perhaps suicide) in the Lost Woods.

I think Grog’s unfortunate fate is representative of what happens to people in Hyrule who see too much or ask too many questions. He’s therefore a fun character to use to look at Kakariko from an outsider’s perspective while speculating on what may have happened to the Sheikah. “They Only Come Out at Night” uses some of my favorite Stephen King tropes to tell a story about a deeply haunted village, and I really enjoyed writing it.

If you’re interested in peering into the shadows, the story is on AO3 here:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/51149224

I wrote this piece for The Eyes of Hyrule, a Legend of Zelda fanzine about the mysterious Sheikah clan. The zine will hold leftover sales on Etsy (here) during November, and you can check out more of the work appearing in the zine on Twitter (here) and on Tumblr (here).

For the story illustration, I was fortunate to be able to join forces with Frankiesbugs, a true master of cute and creepy art. You can follow their work on Instagram (here) and on Tumblr (here). I also recommend checking out their current video game project in development, which is on Steam (here) and on Instagram (here).

List of Free Short Horror Games on Sidequest

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I’m excited to share a project I’ve been working on for several months: an annotated list of ten retro horror games that are free to play on Itchio. I posted reviews of many of these games here on this blog over the summer, and I’m grateful to the amazing editors at Sidequest for allowing me to refine my thoughts and present everything in one article.

To me, one of the fun things about indie retro horror games is that many of them deliver their central idea with as much concision and impact as possible, allowing the player to become thoroughly spooked in one sitting. So that readers can get a decent idea of what to expect, I organized my list according to roughly how long each game takes to play.

If you’re interested, you can check out the article here:
https://sidequest.zone/2023/10/23/ten-short-horror-games-on-itchio/

I really enjoyed putting this list together, and I’m looking forward to making another one next year!

The Kumo Diary

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

A professor’s assistant at Tokyo Imperial University uncovers a curious manuscript whose author weaves an elegant tale of the twilight years of the Heian court. As she reads between the gossamer lines of the narrator’s account of a moonlit assignation, the quiet and unassuming scholar reflects on what happens in the shadows cast by civilization and enlightenment.

This story is a play on The Tale of Genji that I contributed to Carpe Noctem: Vampires Through the Ages, an anthology of historical fantasy fiction, illustrations, and comics about vampires in historically specific settings.

I wouldn’t say I’m a “fan” of The Tale of Genji in the same way that I’m a fan of the Legend of Zelda series, but I’ve read multiple translations of the book and enjoyed them all. When you engage with a story so deeply, it’s difficult not to come up with fun theories. I certainly wouldn’t be the first person in Japanese literary history to make this suggestion, but please consider: Why are the characters in The Tale of Genji always described as being so pale, and why are many of them only active between dusk and dawn?

“The Kumo Diary” is set in the Meiji period (1868-1912), Japan’s industrial era of “civilization and enlightenment.” As Japan attempted to establish itself as a nation that could compete with Western powers, its intelligentsia were motivated to create a unified “Japanese culture.” The Tale of Genji occupied an interesting place in this movement. On one hand, it could easily be regarded as the quintessential work of classical Japanese literature. On the other hand, its plot is largely concerned with the love affairs of a rotating cast of beautiful but neurotic women. Japanese scholars were therefore tasked with making The Tale of Genji a respectable classic to be held in esteem by a modern nation.

Scholars had been compiling and revising the chapters of The Tale of Genji for centuries, so it was necessary to create a “definitive” version of the text. While I was studying the history of The Tale of Genji, I couldn’t help but wonder about all the apocryphal chapters that never made it into the canonical text.

It took me ten years, but finally I wrote one of these apocryphal chapters myself. I embedded the so-called “Kumo Diary” into a frame story about a woman who finds the manuscript and decides not to share it with the stodgy male professor who employs her. It’s interesting to imagine there being a secret history of The Tale of Genji, and I really enjoyed writing the ending of my story. After all, who’s to say there aren’t demonic women pulling the strings from the shadows? If they do their work correctly, we’d never know they were there at all.

I’ve posted the story on AO3, and you can read it here:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/50802628

The illustration is by the darkly brilliant Paristandard, whose creepy and creative illustrations can be found (on Twitter), (on Tumblr), and (on Instagram). It was an amazing experience to work with them, and I can’t recommend them enough for character designs, book covers, short comics, and other illustration projects. For this project in particular, the historical specificity of their costume design was uncanny, and I am in awe.

Terrible People

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Terrible People collects six short and eerie tales of dark fantasy, unfortunate encounters, and horrible life choices. The writing is accessible to teenagers and adults alike, and there’s a diversity of death, poison, and murder for everyone to enjoy.

Terrible People is my fifth zine of original short fiction, and it’s the first that feels like a real short story collection. Each of the stories in this zine was accepted for publication elsewhere; but unfortunately, every single one of these publications was cursed. To give an example, one online magazine closed their website and deleted their social media accounts less than a month after they accepted one of these stories. To give another example, a small press that published an anthology with another of the stories burned down, meaning that almost all copies of the book were destroyed.  

Perhaps I’m tempting fate by printing these stories on my own. Who can say?

If you’d like to order a (totally not cursed) copy of the zine, it’s on Etsy here:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/1556837985/terrible-people-horror-fiction-zine

At 52 pages, the zine is relatively lengthy, which means I was able to give it a spine. This necessitated extra formatting work, and I feel like I’m slowly starting to understand the art of book design. What I’m thinking of doing in the near future is making a short chapbook from a single story and experimenting with the formatting until it looks more like an actual book. Terrible People is probably the last zine I’m going to make that has the style of formatting I’m using now, which I actually quite like.

I’ve been thinking that perhaps it might be nice to set up a micropress one day. For the time being, however, I’m content simply to continue writing these strange little stories while hoping that the curse haunting my attempts to publish them eventually dissipates.    

Review of The Hills of Estrella Roja on WWAC

~ Kathryn

I recently had the immense honor of being able to review emerging artist Ashley Robin Franklin’s brilliant Southwest Gothic graphic novel, The Hills of Estrella Roja, for Women Write About Comics.

Here’s an excerpt:

Even as Kat and Mari enjoy queer teen solidarity, they’re inducted into an adult world of queerness that was previously denied to them. Mari’s side of the story is especially interesting in this regard, as she gradually comes to understand that her identity isn’t just a matter of her own lived experiences, but also a product of the heritage shaped by the experiences of her extended family. The art of The Hills of Estrella Roja cleverly suggests connections between generations in subtle allusions and callbacks while immersing the characters in a gorgeous world that constantly reaches out (sometimes literally!) to pull Mari and Kat deeper into the natural environment that surrounds them.

You can read the full review here:
https://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/2023/08/the-hills-of-estrella-roja-review/

As always, I have nothing but gratitude for my editor, Kat Overland. Kat gave me the go-ahead to write a review of Franklin’s minicomic Fruiting Bodies and then helped me get in touch with Clarion Books to request an advance review copy of The Hills of Estrella Roja. I’m not used to playing in the big leagues, so Kat’s support was invaluable, as were their notes as a native Texan. For excellent taste and good-sense takes on comics, politics, and pop culture, you can follow Kat on Twitter (here) and on Bluesky (here).

You can follow Ashley Robin Franklin on Instagram (here), where she posts cute and colorful botanical studies and shorter autobiographical comics that are touching, relatable, and well worth reading.