Visual Novel / CORPSE FACTORY

Revenge at your fingertips.

Request a Death
Fill out your victim's information and upload a photo of them.
Your victim will receive a photo of their own corpse shortly before they die.
Watch out! Dont be an idiot and enter your own information, or you will be cursed!

— The website's instructions

The year is 20XX. In Tokyo, there are rumors surrounding an obscure website, saying it allows its users to request the death of someone they wish to be gone. All that's needed is the photo of the victim, and the website promises to have them dead. Within days, the victim is found dead and in possession of a photo of their own corpse — stamped with a date hours before they're dead.

Noriko Kurosawa, a cold and introverted woman, is seemingly a normal corporate employee. However, she is secretly Corpse Girl, the one behind the dark website dedicated to killing innocent people. You, the player, control her as she works through her goal to escalate the website to fame. Along her side is Kojiro, a strange and detached morgue attendant who secretly idolizes Corpse Girl; Aoi Satou, a friend of Noriko who relies on her a bit much, yet has no clue of her involvement of the murders; and Tomoe Watanabe, a co-worker of Noriko who harasses her at every opportunity.

Corpse Factory (stylized as CORPSE FACTORY) is a psychological horror Visual Novel created by River Crow Studio. It was funded through a Kickstarter campaign, and despite not reaching the stretch goal, will come with full English voice acting. The game was released on May 31, 2022, on Steam and the Nintendo Switch. A free demo is available on Steam, featuring the prologue where a woman named Emi Katsuno tries to get revenge on her co-workers.

Visit the game's website here and watch the trailer.

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Corpse Factory contains examples of:

Demo/Prologue

• Alpha Bitch: All three of Emi's coworkers, but Kurosawa takes the cake. She bullies homeless people at the train station, steals from stores, and Emi believes she's been to jail once or twice. In the prologue, she has Emi process a fake refund and frames her for trying to steal the money. If that wasn't enough, she sends Emi a photo of herself with the money and a shit-eating grin.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: The demo focuses on Emi Katsuno rather than the game's protagonist, Noriko. In fact, other than Aoi, none of the major characters appear in the demo.
• At Least I Admit It: Emi admits that while her all co-workers act fake, she’s fake towards others as well. However, she points out that she’s only bad towards people she doesn’t like, not everyone she meets.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Amano. When she's introduced, she greets Emi by reminding her she's late again.
• Butt-Monkey: Poor, poor Emi. She's a college dropout who's deep in debt and has to work with the worst co-workers anyone could have. In the prologue itself, she gets framed for stealing money and loses her job. It doesn’t end there. She then tries to use the website to get revenge on Kurosawa, but ends up getting killed first.
• Cliffhanger: The prologue ends with Emi killing herself and wondering how she’ll never know something before getting cut off.
• Driven to Suicide: At the end of the prologue, Emi jumps from her apartment floor and lands headfirst onto the ground after seeing her own corpse delivered in a bodybag.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Aoi Satou, one of the main characters for the game, appears when Emi bumps into her after getting fired. She's also the one to introduce Emi to the website.
• Establishing Character Moment: The very first line of the game pretty much tells you how much Emi despises her co-workers:
  I know those bitches have been talking about me behind my back.
• Girl Posse: Kurosawa, Amano, and Sachiko. Not only are they horrible people, but they frame Emi and get her fired from her job.
• Gold Digger: Kurosawa.
  Emi: She seems to have a new sugar daddy every few weeks, some poor old fool that she strings along and milks dry.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Aoi. She has blonde hair and is an absolute sweetheart. She helps out Emi after she gets fired, and even tells her about Corpse Girl's Website if she wants revenge.
• Heel–Face Turn: Sachiko, who has a history of abusing customers, suddenly announces to Emi she's quitting her job to focus on becoming a better person. It's subverted when it's revealed to be a lie as she helps Kurosawa frame Emi.
• Killed Mid-Sentence:
  Emi: A blinking light from a nearby parked car kind of irritates me, but then my vision turns blue or black and my only concern is how I’ll never truly know what (camera pans out to reveal Emi’s dead body)
• Mind Screw: As the prologue nears the end, it gets... confusing, to say the least. Emi puts in Kurosawa's information on the website, yet she ends up getting a picture of her own corpse. She then hears her doorbell ring, and finds a cart with a bodybag. When she opens it up, she sees her own dead body. The inner dialogue she has then describes how two of her exist: the Emi who's dead, and the Emi who's alive. After deciding it's best to be double dead rather than be half dead and alive, she throws herself from her apartment floor. Yeah.
• Never Trust a Trailer: The trailer contains many scenes that aren't shown in the demo. The only ones that do appear contain Emi.
• Nice Girl: Aoi, one of — if not, the nicest and morally decent person to appear in the prologue. She helps out Emi after she gets fired, and worries for Emi's well-being rather than her own after they collide with each other.
• Precision F-Strike: Emi lets out quite a few curse words in her dialogue, most notably when she calls Kurosawa a bitch in front of her, which momentarily takes her back.
• Refuge in Audacity:
  • Sachiko slaps customers out of frustration. There are even rumors that she strangled the manager, and he's too afraid to fire her.
  • As mentioned above, Kurosawa has done many horrible things such as shoplifting, and she might have done time before. And yet she still has a job.
• Stress Vomit: Emi throws up after seeing the bodybag at her door.
• Wham Shot: Emi receiving a picture of her own corpse, indicating she is going to die soon.
  • Emi opening up the bodybag delivered to her, which reveals her own dead body.

Full Game

• Distant Finale: The epilogue, which is gotten after achieving any ending, takes place a year and three months after the events of the game.
• The End... Or Is It?: Both Ending A and Ending C have Kojiro getting in contact with Noriko and Aoi, respectively, in order to get them to resume their prior work - despite both wanting to move on in their own ways.
• Multiple Endings:
  • Ending A [True]: Gotten after choosing not to follow after a despondent Aoi, letting Tamora take you to her house to protect her from Corpse Girl, and being direct with Shinya about his relationship troubles. After having plenty of time to reflect in the hospital, Noriko renounces her identity as Corpse Girl. After receiving a Corpse Girl-style corpse photo from an unknown number, she finds Aoi, fully lost in her identity as Noriko herself, and kills her and buries her along with the body from Kojiro's Room Full of Crazy in her apartment's backyard garden as a symbolic representation to destroy the Corpse Girl persona once and for all. to eliminate all traces of the Corpse Girl persona. As she prepares to move into a new apartment and the long road to dealing with her various psychological problems, she gets a call from Kojiro....
  • Bonus Ending: Directly following Ending A, Tomoe reconnects with Shinya, and together, they interrogate Junpei, who decided it would be a wise idea to simply walk into a police station, claim he has vital evidence regarding the Human Removal Service, and then claim he knows nothing. After some Good Cop/Bad Cop, Tomoe and Shinya get Junpei to confess the identity of the Human Removal Service's leader: Elliot Sinclair.
  • Ending B [False]: Gotten by selecting a mixture of choices which will and will not get you Ending A. Starts off similar to Ending A, except Noriko doesn't receive a corpse photo from Aoi. Instead, she notices a nearby apartment door ajar...and finds her mother having hung herself successfully.
  • Ending C [HELL]: Gotten by selecting all choices which will not get you Ending A. Aoi, having fully lost her original identity, lives the life of Noriko, with no-one seeming to be the wiser. Though she finds some strange remnants of her old life, such as the real Noriko calling her, and Noriko's old apartment having Aoi's old tablet in it, filled with noise messages from Junpei wondering why she stopped talking to him. She then asks her 'family', the corpses of Yuriko and Asuna, about dinner plans...only for Asuna, having been hung not long before this ending, regaining consciousness long enough to yell at a confused Aoi that she is not her daughter and wondering where the hell she is. Then Kojiro walks in on the scene and tells Aoi to drop her "Noriko" identity and return to work as a Herald....
• Murder, Inc.:
  • Corpse Girl is an atypical murder-by-request operation, given Noriko and her group only kill through psychological tactics designed to cause the victims to off themselves.
  • The Human Removal Service is a large group of assassins-by-request who become the main rival to Corpse Girl. Given they keep a low profile and actually kill people, it's unsurprising.
• Room Full of Crazy: Kojiro's shrine to his dead sister. Not only does he have numerous photos of corpses from Nobel Sinclair's books, he has his sister's corpse hung up like a marionette.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Once Corpse Girl goes mainstream, the group's mortality rate and requests drop precipitously. Turns out only relying on scaring people into killing themselves doesn't work very well when everyone knows your tactics. In contrast, their rival, the Human Removal Service, has a far higher mortality rate because they keep their existence hush-hush and they actually kill their requested targets.
• Tomato Surprise: The epilogue reveals Kojiro to have not only survived the mortuary fire, but to be none other than Eliot Sinclair, the author behind the photo manipulation book which helped inspire Noriko to become Corpse Girl, and is the current leader of the Human Removal Service.
• Villain Protagonist: You play as three of them over the course of the game: Noriko, the creator and leader of Corpse Girl, Kojiro, Noriko's right-hand man, and Aoi, a Herald for the Human Removal Service.
• Wham Episode: The epilogue is narrated by none other than Elliot Sinclair, who reveals that after he survived the house fire in which he was presumed dead, he created Kojiro as a secret identity to escape his past. Now, having survived the events of the game, as well as being the head of the Human Removal Service for a full year, he's decided to discard the "Kojiro" identity and return to the public eye with an in-universe novelization of the game's events, titled "Corpse Factory".

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