I’ll be honest; I’m a big horror game fan and not that many games have truly terrified me this year. Of course there’s the occasional action horror game like Dead Island and Dead Space 2 which provides jump-out-of-your-seat scares, but none of these games force the feeling of dread and absolute terror throughout the entire adventure quite like Corpse Party.

To millions of you who haven’t heard about it, Corpse Party is a PSN-exclusive PSP game that combines Asian supernatural and North American gore-horror elements, Corpse Party is like a 16-bit interactive amalgamation of modern and classic horror.

The deeper into the story the players get, the more mysteries there are and the more tension builds. Decisions made earlier in the game lead to consequences that affect the lives of those still alive. Supernatural apparitions intensify and the evil became stronger. If that wasn’t horrible enough, those whose mind has been touched by the curse become violent killers themselves. It’s up to the last remaining characters to solve the mystery of the cursed location in order for all of them to escape the nightmare.

Players take control of a number of characters throughout the game’s five chapters. With each chapter having two to four controllable characters at once. As mentioned earlier, Corpse Party is a horror adventure in the same vein as Clock Tower, so every one of the player’s decisions carry weight within the game world. One decision made half an hour before could result in a grisly death for the character being controlled.

Now isn’t it high-time that we received a PSP game that truly took our decisions in-game and made them important? The PS3 has Heavy Rain, The Xbox 360 has the Fable Series/Mass Effect; why did it take this long for PSP owners to get a game that has deep storytelling, tension-filled environments, and genuinely horrifying scares?

And it’s a damn remake of a game from 1996.

What the hell Sony? Sure you gave us Silent Hill: Origins and Shattered Memories (both made in USA), but other than that, many of the greatest horror stories told on the portable system are coming from Japan. In Japan, visual novels (or interactive novel) as well as adventure games are popular with the portable/handheld gaming crowd because it’s easy to start and stop when on the go. But those games rarely ever see release in North America. Is it because publishers believe players don’t read any more?

I’ll tell you this right now, written horror is more effective than visual. Why? Because it stimulates the readers imagination into creating the scares based on their own fears and trepidation. If you’ve ever watched the film “The Ring” and compared it to the original novel it’s based from, the book is always better because the author wrote the story in a way that kept readers on edge the entire length of the book. There were no “safe” scenes, no time to breathe a sigh of relief; it was tension, pure and simple.

It’s too bad that western horror games rely more on gore and jump scares and less on supernatural and prolonged tension. I honestly believe that a horror title is all the more effective when the scares are left to the player’s immagination. I found that I was more perturbed by Corpse Party’s death scenes in which most of the horrific parts were that of a dark screen (with accompanying sounds) and a description of what was about to happen. Players with overactive imaginations (like myself) definitely dig this type of horror over ones that have blood and guts everywhere.

Corpse Party is pretty much a love-letter to games like Clock Tower, Sweet Home, and Higurashi: When They Cry. Games that didn’t need shiny HD graphics to tell truly horrifying stories. Games that didn’t need shoehorned action/first-person gunplay to appease the North American sensibilities and our fascination with guns and blowing stuff up.

When I want to experience genuine horror stories, I don’t want to be able to kill the antagonists; that just defeats the purpose of having them in the story. I don’t have guns, I sure don’t have any explosive barrels anywhere close by. And I’m damn sure my martial arts training won’t help with anything supernatural so I don’t need to fight them. I want them on my trail, so close that I can feel their deathly grip on my neck the entire adventure, so close that every decision I make is a life or death one.

Don’t you?