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I haven't played the PC version, but from my experience with the PSP version of the game, Corpse Party goes for the third type of "horror" games tend to offer. The first two are shock and fear, for silly jumpscares and psychological horror respectively.
Now of course some peopel might find either of those two within the game as well, but I rarely did.
With Corpse Party, I always felt it instead goes for "disgust". With its graphics and top-down perspective, it obviously would have trouble doing jumpscares, and while a "fear" component might be wanted, if you are at least somewhat genre savy with horror movies and games, that might not really work either.
Yet I still found Corpse Party to have a great atmosphere, using the third type, "disgust".
The bad ends, in their descriptions and sound effects (again, on the PSP version, I have no idea what of that is in the PC version) managed to get my imagination going in all the right ways to all the wrong places. The pictures painted in my head are more uncomfortable than what the game could ever hope to show on-screen. And then, the game uses that effect to make one uncomfortable with the bad ends and makes you want to avoid them, as well as quite a few other moments later down the game which would be spoilers.
This results in the above mentioned "creepy atomsphere", which I found to be quite amazing.
Now I can imagine that obviously this effect will heavily depend on one's own tolerance level for gore or descriptions thereof, as well as how much one lets their imagination get the better of them. As always, which of the three types of horror work is very subjective from person to person.
If it's not scary to you, good on you. You're not creeped out by things nor does your imagination run wild in the dark. That doesn't mean you also dictate whether or not things are scary to everyone around you.
Go play something else then
Tell me you didn't cringe at Ayumi and kishinuma meeting the sharp end of the wire garrot bub I dare you
Never got scared from watching horror movies for a long time.
SPOILERS
But during the Lab sequence, I knew that Anatomical model was going to do something, but it didn't move.
I went and got the key and going back up, it was there. It just stood there. I had to go near it but I was cautious. It's stuff like that which I really like about Corpse Party.
There is also the Piano in the Music Room that keeps playing, go up to it and it stops. And that's it. Leave and it starts again, it's never elaborated and as far as I'm aware it has no purpose.
You're also just not sure what to expect and what might lead to an untimely demise, it's graphic and in the PSP version I think the Voice Acting just adds so much to it as a whole.
Also "Bad Story" is subjective. I thought for the kind story it was, it was done well and I thought the characters themselves were also done well in the first game.
"The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. But the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part of our inmost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important, though not numerically great, minority of our species."
- HP Lovecraft
http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx
It's along the very lines of what's being stated here. Horror is not necessarily boiled down to gore, shock tactics, or fear effect. Horror can go beyond. What Corpse Party as a series works with is an element called Supernatural Horror, or the horror that is created by the unknown or the things at the edges of our imagination. From children ghosts who prey upon the innocent to the fear of what a simple noise down the end of a darkned hall might bring... this is the kind of horror that Corpse Party uses.
The elements of the gross (such as the blood, waste, and ichor of death) that it infuses the campaign in are merely tools made to increase the sense of dread and helplessness. This is a series that preys upon the unknown. A group of children are torn from a happy meeting and set to attempt to survive a malevolent dimension which feeds off their suffering and seeks, with every waking moment, to destroy them thoroughly. Some of the most horrific moments come not from the actions of undead or spooks in this game, but those of the very people we consider to be the heroes. The strong older boy who comes to save us might be a serial killer, the smart and well planned looking one is actually the sickest and most depraved, the weakest one might be our only real hope to live.
Corpse Party isn't afraid to use despair, disgust, and distaste to rock our psyches, it's not afraid to kill people off or let others live who you'd think should die. The unexpected is what you should expect, the unknown is what you should truly fear.
I hope that helps.
Also here's my thoughts on the same exact subject when the PSP version came out: http://screwattack.com/post/51218311
Just in regards to some of the situations it presents to you, I think part of that fear that it provides is the fact that you're forced to address it?
Like in most cases you'd obviously want to avoid places where you are hearing noises, but considering how the area is, you don't have much of a choice but to go in these directions you don't want to because their isn't anywhere else to go. It throws strange things at you and makes you have to confront them if you want to make it to the end.
Again I bring up the Science Lab. You know things are going to go south the moment you pick up that key at the bottom of the room, but it's your only means of progression and you're forced to confront something you don't fully understand or know what to expect.
I just love the games atmosphere and details such as charms on a couple of plot related doors that you don't get to interact with till later in the game and the Name Tag collection just add to it as well. A lot of people have died in that place and it helps build the feeling of isolation as well since a lot of the time you are playing as 1 - 2 characters at a time.