Today we’re going to talk about The Children of Clay, a very short horror adventure game that came out earlier this year.
You play an archaeologist studying a strange artifact. After a brief bit of text to set up the premise, you’re given control to start investigating.
You have a magnifying glass, a collection of reference books, and a few other tools. With only a bit of guidance, it does a good job of making you feel like a detective. To use the reference books, for example, you have to type in the key word you want to look up.
It also uses stop motion animation, which is interesting.
Now, when I say it’s very short, I mean it takes less then 15 minutes to complete. However, it packs an impressively creepy atmosphere into those 15 minutes. Without being a truly Lovecraftian game, it captured that sort of essence of investigating the unknown. I’d love to see what this developer could do with a full-length horror game.
The Children of Clay is short, free, and creepy. It’s the perfect game to check out this October.
Earlier this year, I learned about a short horror game called ZENO, so I decided to play it this October!
(I mistakenly thought it was an RPG because of the way it’s described, but it’s really more of a horror adventure game. It was just made with RPG Maker.)
Two young men wake up together in a mysterious facility, with no memory of who they are or how they got there. The door is locked and won’t open until they’ve been handcuffed to each other, after which point they leave and find files telling them who they are – and one of them is a genius psychiatrist while the other is a homicidal maniac.
They have to work together to get out by solving puzzles to unlock each new floor of the facility.
There are threats in the facility, as well, so from time to time you’ll be chased and need to run from screen to screen until you lose your pursuer.
While not excessively dark, the story deals with horror themes like murder and cannibalism. It has some interesting twists and quite a few endings. After I finished the game with the normal endings, I used a guide to get the true ending (although there are still several endings I didn’t seek out).
My one criticism of Zeno was going to be the English translation, since a lot of lines were awkward or used abbreviations (“sth” for “something” was a common one, but a character responding to a very serious revelation with “I C” made me laugh out loud), but after finishing it I learned that in the time since I downloaded it, a newly proofread version was made available. That’ll teach me not to download a game months ahead of time and not check the page again before playing it! I haven’t tried the proofread version, but it should be an improvement.
Anyway, ZENO is an enjoyable short horror game that I was already going to recommend playing despite the translation issues, so now I’m even more confident in my recommendation. It seems there are also some side games, so I may check those out sometime as well.
Not to be confused with Corpse Party (although the name did throw me for a loop the first few times I saw it), Corpse Factory is a visual novel I’ve been curious about ever since it came out.
It recently had a good sale on the eShop, so I picked it up to play this October.
Corpse Factory is about a mysterious website where it’s claimed you can submit someone’s picture and phone number to request their death, and not only will they die, but they’ll also receive a photo of their corpse first.
That sets up what sounds like an eerie urban legend with the hint of something supernatural at work… but that’s not really the sort of game this is. After the prologue, which sets up the concept, the game switches to the viewpoint of Noriko, the woman running the site, and we learn she uses incredibly realistic photo manipulation to create the corpse photos in the hopes of shocking/scaring the target into suicide.
It’s clear pretty quickly that Noriko is… somewhat unbalanced. Her viewpoint, her visceral glee at the thought of indirectly causing people’s deaths, and her occasional breakdowns create an unsettling and often macabre atmosphere.
I also absolutely love the eerie song used for the intro.
Eventually, she realizes she’ll need help if she wants this to be as successful as possible, and so she forms a team with a couple other characters willing to assist her questionable operation.
For quite a while, Corpse Factory has an intense atmosphere due to following characters whose goals are so disturbing, with a persistent sense that things could come crumbling down at any moment.
Unfortunately, in the later parts of the story, it doesn’t hold up as well. Some plot points feel a bit too contrived, and some twists seem almost like they were added to solely be a twist, without enough care taken to make sure they fit with everything else.
Click for major Corpse Factory spoilers
Aoi being behind Corpse Girl’s successes just felt weird. It’s an interesting twist that Noriko was just delusional about her success even back then, but it takes something away from those early parts of the story. And if she and the Human Removal Service are basically just hitmen, how do they stay undetected for so long?
In general, the early parts have a sense of paranoia that Noriko will slip up and bring the police down on her head, but in later parts it seems like they can do just about anything without the police figuring it out. How did Junpei steal all the corpses from the morgue without it leading to a huge investigation? For that matter, once Noriko & co started leaving the corpses at the scenes, how did the police not determine the identity of any of those bodies and trace them back to the morgue?
Speaking of bodies not being tracked down, how did Kojiro drag his girlfriend’s body through the street back to his apartment with numerous witnesses seeing them, and yet no one ever investigated what happened to her body?
And speaking of Kojiro… I liked the epilogue twist that he was Nobel Sinclair, but making him the leader of HRS felt unnecessary and confusing. It doesn’t make sense that he was their leader during the main events of the game, so if this is a recent development, who was in charge before?
(Despite those criticisms, I liked Kojiro quite a bit… even if I felt the story started to fall apart a bit in the second act, I enjoyed getting his point of view.)
While I have some criticisms with how the later parts of the story turned out, I did enjoy the journey there. It’s worth playing for the early parts of the story and the characters, if nothing else. Three choices during the game determine which ending you get, although I was able to watch all the endings from the menu after I finished.
In short, Corpse Factory falls apart a bit in the latter half of the game, but it’s an eerie visual novel worth checking out nevertheless.
Today we’re going to talk about The Children of Clay, a very short horror adventure game that came out earlier this year.
