Corpse Factory Review

A couple of weeks ago, I played Corpse Factory, A VN by River Crow Studio.

Art

Corpse Factory has well-done character designs, sprites and backgrounds. The backgrounds are visually appealing, and the designs are attractive. Everyone you care about has unique designs, and the quality of all this art is consistent throughout the entire visual novel.

Sound

The soundtrack was also well done. Though it was less recognizable than the art, however, that might just be a "me" problem. The songs fit the scenes well and did a lot to contribute to the atmosphere that Corpse Factory spends a lot of time building up.

User Interface

The UI feels rudimentary. The rest of the visual novel feels quite professional, so I was surprised by how bare-bones UI was. Corpse Factory sort of adheres to the standards set by its predecessors. It features all that you'd expect, but absent are bells and whistles such as being able to jump to a scene through the Log. I'm also a huge stickler for what I view are "standard" key binds, and so right-click being unmapped is a major annoyance for me. While the UI serves its purpose I feel like more time could have been spent getting it more in line with what you'd expect from the Japanese VNs it draws inspiration from.

Another concern I had was loading times. I want to make clear that this is not a Unity thing, I assume it has to do with all the voice lines and how and when they choose to load them into memory. Either way, the result is that at some transitions you are presented with a loading screen. What is worth commenting on, is that sometimes these transition screens exist long enough for me to start to wonder what exactly the game is doing. I don't think this is proper for a VN, and while I'm in the middle of reading, I shouldn't have to deal with any loading whatsoever.

Voice Acting

A point of contention (perhaps) to the interested party might be that Corpse Factory features only English voice acting. I enjoyed every moment Tomoe was on screen. Her vulgarity and sincerity made for a relatively unique character which I thought Maya Faye did an amazing job with. Noriko and the others were portrayed excellently by what honestly was a star-studded cast featuring actors associated with well-known roles such as Ann Takamaki, Zenitsu Agatsuma, Kanao Tsuyuri, Aqua, and Subaru Natsuki. Overall, the English voice acting was highly unusual but thoroughly enjoyable. I can only hope that such an effort can continue to be made going forward. I can't imagine how prohibitively expensive voice acting must cost.

Story

Corpse Factory is around 12 hours, which means that it tells a shorter story. I tend to play longer VNs and so while I have to remember to take into account its shorter runtime, I still overall feel whelmed by what I experienced.

The mistake I made (I feel) is that I approached Corpse Factory's story as a mystery to solve. By doing this I found that the story was predictable, and therefore felt like most of the story just existed to set up twists that were so obvious I started to wonder if I was just getting mad over something the story was never trying to be.

While I'm no media analyst it's better to approach Corpse Factory as a character study. Fundamentally the story is about Noriko Kurosawa and what she has been through, is suffering from and what she intends to do. Simultaneously, the story explores other characters and their struggles and how they deal with their traumas and demons.

Corpse Factory, uses its premise (that is, a supernatural hit-man for-hire site) to talk about mental health and in this area, I think Corpse Factory succeeds.

TL;DR

I think I approached Corpse Factory expecting the wrong thing. Even if I were in the right mindset, Corpse Factory does suffer from its writing at times, which is quite unfortunate especially when it's fundamentally all about the characters. Overall the experience is a nice one. It feels quite high quality and it's self-evident that a lot of time was spent making this VN what it is today.

If the premise sounds interesting to you, I'd say give the VN a shot. I'm interested in seeing what future visual novels River Crow Studio produces.

5 / 10