PAX Aus 2024 Highlight – CORPOREAL

PAX Aus 2024 may have wrapped up a few days ago, but still, I’m thinking about my game of show. Developed and set in New Zealand, CORPOREAL is an eerie jaunt through a family’s history, channelling and using family photos to tell its supernatural story. 

This venture is the debut from Auckland developer Cold Out, and is also one that’s incredibly personal. You’re the sole survivor of horrific yet unexplained events in the 90s and years later you’re looking for answers in your family’s haunted photo album. Jumping from picture to picture, you must stitch together unique images by laying one over another. Points of interest in a scene will tell a story in and of itself. Most harrowing was a sequence where I layered over an image of the exterior of a house over a woman, creating a ghostly silhouette in the house’s front window.

CORPOREAL’s mood is incredibly enticing. In the opening moments of the demo, you’re sat on a chair and your image is reflected on a window. The rain is heavy outside and a ghostly figure of what appears to be the family matriarch stands behind you, placing a hand on your shoulder and requesting you solve the family’s mystery.

A lot of comparisons and inspirations were brought up when chatting with the developer while playing. What Remains of Edith Finch and Return of the Obra Dinn were just two of these and are both apt likenesses in the investigative feeling of tracking down what befell a group of people. The biggest likeness of all, however, comes from the unbelievably excellent Immortality. The scene investigation mechanics are strikingly similar, even in how it plays on a controller but that’s not to CORPOREAL’s detriment. Here, everything feels more puzzle-y and clever as instead of finding hidden imagery in the footage, you’re creating it.

Max, the core and largely solo developer that makes up Cold Out sheepishly confessed he felt the game didn’t demo all that best on the show floor because of the environment. I have to respectfully disagree. Despite the noise and droning going on all around me at PAX Aus 2024, CORPOREAL reeled me in and enveloped me in its limited timeframe.

CORPOREAL is another example of a New Zealand-made game kicking goals, but it’s also one of not all that many games that are set there too. It’s still some time before it’s set to come out and I’m sure my rambled post-PAX Aus 2024 brain and thoughts aren’t quite doing it justice. However, let me re-emphasise. This was the best of the best at PAX Indies this year. For mystery lovers, it’s undeniably worth wishlisting and keeping track of on Steam.

For more post-PAX Aus 2024 coverage, why not check out our thoughts on games like Untethered or The Rewinder 2?