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!
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.
Corpse Factory contains examples of:
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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.
- 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
- Abusive Workplace: Aoi works at a maid cafe and she is trying to get out of it due to being routinely harassed and groped by a family member of hers and her boss threatening to call the police if she leaves because the training she was put through would be considered stealing from the company. Noriko has been desperate about her getting out of there. It gets better for her after a change in management.
- Age-Gap Romance: Kojiro attempts this with Noriko with them being 34 and 20 respectively.
- And Now for Someone Completely Different: The prologue focuses on Emi Katsuno. After her death proves her to be a Decoy Protagonist, the story's main protagonist is Noriko Kurosawa. Kojiro and Aoi also get a chapter from their perspective each. Nonetheless, Noriko has the longest chapter dedicated for her.
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: The reasons Noriko gives for hating her sister Yuriko and thinking she deserves to die are all things that reasonably peg her as a horrible person like beating up homeless people, stealing from stores, and bullying her as a child. Then she ends with the utterly petty reason of never calling her.
- Asshole Victim: Noriko typically uses the Corpse Girl website to target anyone she gets even if they are innocent, but there are moments where the targets are people who deserve to be killed:
- Kotomi Ida, Shinya and Noriko's boss, was a sexual predator using her position to harass Shinya. She also pushed the blame on Aoi flaking onto him to hinder his career prospects simply as another reason to keep him under her thumb. No one is really upset that she got killed. Tomoe, who requested the death, emphatically owns up to it when confronted by Noriko and shows none of the guilt she had about when she requested another random woman she worked with.
- Yuriko Kurusawa was a remorseless delinquent who bullied her sister, shoplifted, and beat up homeless people in her spare time. In the prologue, she is also shown framing Emi for stealing from the job just to get her fired and make off with the money herself. She later requests the death of Emi purely out of spite and adds her accomplices in the store theft to keep them quiet. Suffice to say, letting her bleed out from the neck was more than earned.
- Bait-and-Switch: With Shinya's insistence on being friends with Noriko on Noise, she and Tomoe assume that he's actually in love with her and wants to be her boyfriend. That is completely shattered when he reveals he's in love with Tomoe.
- Big Bad Wannabe: Noriko wants Corpse Girl to be a household name that inspires fear in the hearts and minds of anyone who knows about her. However, her tactics of sending a photo of a corpse to inspire people to kill themselves aren't very successful. Even after getting a corpse sent to her victims, her success dwindles since people know her tactics and aren't scared. And the biggest kicker is that even her successful jobs can't be attributed to her. They were performed by the Human Removal Service, particularly Aoi, to manipulate her.
- Collective Identity:
- Corpse Girl was originally just Noriko, but it soon becomes her along with Tomoe and Kojiro leading the charge on the operation.
- Despite being led to believe the Herald is one person, the reality is that it is several girls who commit the murders for the Human Removal Service.
- Crapsack World: You can count the number of sane and well-adjusted members of society with your fingers. The story is full of bullies and abusers of all types as well as people with all kinds of mental issues - from ones that hinder their own lives to ones that cause them to harm others, like the imposter syndrome; even bystanders rarely report suspicious behavior. Not to mention, most characters are involved in crimes in some way, and most importantly, the cast is full of both direct and indirect serial killers, with a whole secret Human Removal Service to boot, which gets so many clients interested in getting someone else killed that it even beats the previous interest of the Corpse Girl's website. Several characters also show fascination with the dead and macabre in general, steal cadavers from morgues, and lack empathy even for their closest allies. Even Shinya's sense of justice is so strong that he wants Noriko dead by the end of the story.
- Distant Finale: The epilogue, which is gotten after achieving any ending, takes place a year and three months after the events of the game.
- Double Standard: Rape, Female on Male: Averted with Kotomi Ida sexually harassing Shinya Fujikawa. It is treated with the same amount of scorn as Aoi getting harassed by the customer at work and the scene of it happening is portrayed as disturbing.
- Dramatic Irony: During Kojiro's chapter, he starts thinking that Corpse Girl is a separate third party pulling the strings when Noriko starts talking about Corpse Girl as someone else and says that she told her to start killing. This concerns him and he tells Tomoe that they should be concerned about the possibility of this third party coming after them should they quit. We know from playing Noriko's chapter that this isn't the case and is just a sign of her ever-worsening mental state. Something Kojiro realizes when he confronts her about it and notices that she doesn't even realize she's talking about Corpse Girl as someone else.
- 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.
- Evil vs. Evil: The main conflict in the latter half of the story involves Corpse Girl competing with the Human Removal Service for the more successful Murder, Inc. operation.
- Fire-Forged Friends: Played with for Tomoe and Noriko. They eventually become friends when Tomoe thinks Corpse Girl is going to kill her and decides to protect her. After Noriko reveals she's Corpse Girl and plans to take care of Kotomi Ida for sexually harassing Shinya, they get even closer and Tomoe joins in on the operation.
- Incompatible Orientation:
- Noriko is in love with Aoi, but Aoi doesn't seem to be interested in women.
- Kojiro is enamored with Noriko despite the fact that she hasn't really shown any interest in men.
- Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: After finding Junpei to get information about the Human Removal Service, Kojiro beats the crap out of him when he attempts to fight him just to get the information. This beatdown resulted in a couple broken fingers and ribs while he was kicking him while he was down. He eventually answers one of his questions, but Kojiro accidentally beats him unconscious before attempting to kill him.
- Lonely Bachelor Pad: When we see Kojiro's living arrangement, it is a very basic apartment with no furniture other than a chair, a TV, and a small coffee table with empty coffee cups everywhere. Definitely different from his original apartment, Noriko's current apartment.
- 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: Nobel 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. Upon realizing that it isn't her mother but some random woman, Noriko starts displaying a disturbing fascination with the corpse that leads to her wanting to take it out for dinner.
- 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....
- Mundanger: Despite the premise being a website that kills you after sending a picture of your dead body, there are no supernatural elements to the story. Much of the disturbing content comes from the actions of mentally disturbed people acting in rather mundane ways.
- 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.
- Naked Nutter: During one of her mental breakdowns after finding out Ari has a boyfriend, Noriko gets naked and climbs into a body-bag to surprise Kojiro and entice him to join her while in the van with other dead bodies. He and Tomoe are understandably concerned.
- Nightmare Fetishist: Noriko and Kojiro both display an unhealthy fascination with the macabre and are obsessed with death.
- Noodle Incident: Tomoe mentions having seen dead bodies before she joined Corpse Girl, but this is never elaborated upon.
- Not Quite Dead: Two instances in the epilogues.
- Despite having her stomach ripped open by Aoi, it turns out that Noriko survived.
- Kojiro survived the morgue being burned down and cutting off his arm.
- Odd Couple: Tomoe and Shinya. Despite the two being polar opposites on the surface, the two are utterly smitten with each other, much to the surprise of Noriko.
- Odd Friendship:
- Noriko and Aoi at least on the surface. Noriko is a rather aloof and withdrawn person with rather morbid fascinations, but she nonetheless cares for Aoi, a very sweet and gentle girl. However, Aoi has always secretly hated Noriko.
- Noriko and Tomoe start at odds, even resulting in the latter assaulting the former in the parking lot for no other reason than petty hatred. However, as the story progresses, they become genuine friends and eventual partners in the Corpse Girl operation.
- Precision F-Strike:
- Noriko hasn’t sworn a lot in the game up to a certain point, but the first major one she has is an Atomic F-Bomb she lets out. During a mental breakdown in the mall about one of her targets not dying when she sent the corpse photo, she eventually screams, "WHY WON’T YOU FUCKING DIE?!" marking the severity of how fed up she is. She swears more later.
- Aoi generally doesn’t swear, even when her chapter shows her thoughts to be somewhat foul-mouthed. However, she only has one voiced f-bomb in the game when she calmly tells Noriko, "I'm going to fucking murder you in your sleep."
- Room Full of Crazy: Kojiro's shrine to his dead girlfriend. Not only does he have numerous photos of corpses from Nobel Sinclair's books, but he also has his girlfriend's corpse hung up like a marionette.
- Samus Is a Girl: While Junpei describes the Herald with male pronouns, it turns out that it's actually Aoi and many other girls who work as the Herald.
- Shown Their Work: With the depiction of Noriko's eating disorder and body dysmorphia as well as Aoi's OCD. Many have noted how well those topics were handled.
- 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.
- Title Drop: Two instances. The first is some time after the Corpse Girl operation gets the factory. Kojiro mentions that Noriko likes to call it the Corpse Factory. The second is when Kojiro is revealed to be Nobel Sinclair and he writes the events of the game in a book titled Corpse Factory.
- Tomato Surprise: The epilogue reveals Kojiro to have not only survived the mortuary fire, but to be none other than Nobel 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.
- Underestimating Intelligence: Inverted when it comes to Kojiro and Noriko. He thinks that Corpse Girl is some kind of criminal mastermind who has everything figured out. After finding out that she has no control over the deaths and is quite short-sighted, he is thoroughly disappointed and almost quits working with her until Tomoe convinces him otherwise.
- 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 Nobel 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".
