Corpse Party (2021) A horror classic that hurts

It starts with a paper charm and a chant to keep a friendship forever. Then the floor opens, and Ayumi and her friends are scattered through Heavenly Host Elementary, an alternate version of a school that stood on the site of their own long ago, where children were murdered. The building is sealed, the halls are full of bodies, and the spirits of the dead children want more of them. Your only way out is to dig into the chilling details of those murders: what happened, who did it, and why the school keeps claiming new victims. The mystery unfolds chapter by chapter, and every answer makes the place worse.

This is a battleless RPG crossed with a point-and-click adventure: walk the halls, search every corner, pick up what matters, and choose what to say and do. The catch is that many choices kill you. Each chapter has a true ending and several wrong ends, and the game rarely tells you which action is the fatal one. A cutscene starting can mean a plot twist or a gruesome death, and then it is back to your last save. That dread of losing an hour to one bad guess is exactly what makes it tense, and the extra chapters and multiple endings give you reasons to come back and try a different path.

This is a visual novel at heart: the story carries everything, told through text, illustrated scenes and character portraits, with the cast fully voiced in Japanese. The horror lives in the writing as much as the pixels, in descriptions of deaths that are far more graphic than the 16-bit sprites ever show, leaving your imagination to fill the rest. Put on headphones and the binaural 3D recording does the rest: screams and bone-crunching effects sit around you like simulated surround sound, and you will keep checking over your shoulder. There are almost no jump scares here. The dread builds slowly, and it sticks.