Xseed announced they will bring over Corpse Party: Book of Shadows today, which means we can finally talk about the sequel! Corpse Party: Book of Shadows picks up right after Corpse Party. The story was made internally at Mages instead of by Team GrisGris and they also changed the viewpoint to a first person perspective for Book of Shadows. In this interview, we talked to producer Yasuhiko Nomura about the changes and asked him what he thinks is the most important element for a horror game.
How does Corpse Party: Book of Shadows connect to Corpse Party?
Yasuhiko Nomura, Producer at Mages/5pb: Corpse Party has a lot of endings including a true ending and a loop ending. Corpse Party: Book of Shadows picks up from the true end, but it also accounts for some of the endings too. It’s structured in a way that it sort of brings all of the stories together.
Why did you want to continue Corpse Party with Corpse Party: Book of Shadows?
One of the main motivating factors is some of the characters in Corpse Party die very quickly without much back story. For example, [names removed since it’s a spoiler]. We wanted to follow up and enhance that story with more background for the characters so they don’t feel as one dimensional.
Why did you drop the sprite style from Corpse Party in favor of a new graphic style?
Corpse Party was a PC game created by GrisGris that we ported to PSP. Book of Shadows is a game we created ourselves from scratch. We wanted incorporate our experience working on a lot of adventure games into Book of Shadows, our original Corpse Party title.
What is the scariest part in Corpse Party: Book of Shadows?
It’s hard to pinpoint any one part, but we thought a lot of the horror elements in Book of Shadows are not what you can see, but what is implied, what you can hear, and what you think is coming. Those were the scariest parts of Corpse Party and we wanted to incorporate all of those elements into Book of Shadows too.
Even though GrisGris wasn’t behind Corpse Party: Book of Shadows, it was Mages, a different developer we wanted to keep in similar enough that players from the original Corpse Party will be satisfied with similar elements in Book of Shadows.
One of the elements in Corpse Party was going around and checking items. Reading descriptions and figuring out what their uses are and for clues. Book of Shadows does this as well, which fit well with our adventure background. Although we wouldn’t consider this a visual novel since you can move around and check items. Corpse Party had a lot of skeletons to check, but I don’t think it was necessarily that scary. That is was one element I wanted to make scarier in Corpse Party: Book of Shadows. There are lots of skeletons as well, but this time we gave it more of a realistic feel.
What is the most important element you need to make a horror game feel scary?
I would say the most important element is sound and background music. Even when something is not necessarily going on on-screen we can create an eerie environment just by the sounds and music we play or don’t play.
Published: Oct 22, 2012 05:11 pm