Game: World of Horror
Developed By: panstasz
Published By: Ysbryd Games
Release Date: 2/20/2020

World of Horror, recently released on Steam Early Access, is incredibly addictive.

You wouldn’t expect this at first glance. It’s a brutally difficult roguelike, rendered in one or two-bit graphics that make it look and play like someone emulated their favorite Japanese horror RPG from the ‘80s, with all the retro interface and design that entails. It looks, upon opening it up, like a game made for a very specific audience who will “get” it and fiercely defend it. But once you actually start to play the game and make it through the difficulty barrier of those early deaths (and there will be early deaths), it opens up immensely, turning it into a gruesome and tough but incredibly rewarding experience that only deepens the more you play.

The plot of World of Horror is a fairly simple one. You are a paranormal investigator tasked with solving five mysteries in the seaside city of Shiokawa. Each one of these mysteries, which play out as short horror-adventure games, ties into a larger mystery surrounding a different randomly-chosen elder god. Solve the mystery, and you get a key to the lighthouse where you can finally disrupt the summoning ritual and banish the Elder God back to whence they came. Fail, and you die in one of a number of horrible ways, from being bashed in the head by a baseball bat-wielding stalker to getting infected by a horrifying plague of holes straight out of a Junji Ito story. Depending on how you play, you can unlock a number of achievements that add more “cards” to the story, a set of optional random encounters that add new elements and items to the game.

World of Horror plays out on its impressively detailed screens through a point-and-click interface, hearkening back to classic horror manga and PC games, each screen painstakingly rendered in 1 or 2-bit graphics using black-and-white shading. You select various icons and actions from your various menus, manage your inventory (four items at a time, plus your Item Storage box), and use a variety of spells and items to keep your characters (one of seven, with eight optional backgrounds to spice up your playthrough). Mousing over any icon or option tells you what it does, and while the game expects you to read through all the material you get and take a careful look at your surroundings and the screens they have on offer, it’s a very intuitive system. It does require a lot of reading carefully and figuring out what option does what, but as long as you pay attention to what’s on the screen, especially at the bottom of it and during the (rather frequent) combat sequences. Combat is handled by putting together a sequence of moves based on a time bar, assembling your defensive and offensive actions into a sequence before letting it rip and hoping for the best.

And there’s a lot of “hoping for the best.” The game is random and kind of unforgiving, and while the interface is intuitive, some things you have to figure out as you go. Mysteries, for instance, have multiple endings you can unlock and each run means considering which ones you play in which order— do you go for the grueling battle against a demon from outside space and time first, and then set up the breather at the end? Do you do the mystery where your impending doom (a percentage which serves as a time limit for the game, it reaches full and you lose) will skyrocket and then hope you can get it to go down as you do more mysteries? Do you dare risk the mystery where you’ve died repeatedly and barely ended up solving so you can get it out of the way, or risk coming to it weakened but with higher abilities? But while careful planning will help with a lot of this, sometimes the random events are just downright nasty, adding high percentages to the impending doom meter or ripping your stamina and sanity apart just moments from the end of the scenario. This is especially nasty in combat, where an enemy with a high rating will absolutely wipe the floor with you and shrug off your hits as if they’re nothing, even with the numerous combat buffs you can add.

That, if anything, is World of Horror’s one flaw, is its difficulty and random elements. A playthrough can have you quickly screwed over without any way to fix it as the Old God decides to take away your ability to buy items and heal between mysteries quickly, take on too many curses to feasibly complete things, or just end up in combat encounter after combat encounter until eventually you’ve used up your items and the option to run or use your spells will either kill you or advance the doom meter to the point where you won’t win regardless. It’s frustrating sometimes, the way that enemies seem to curbstomp you quickly and the game gleefully shoves you through a gauntlet of terrifying baddies or a bad bounce leaves you scrambling to figure out what to do next. It also presents a cliff that makes it difficult to progress, even the tutorial is one of the most straightforward but grueling levels in the game (“School Scissors, a desperate race to banish the Japanese legend known as the Slit-Mouthed Woman) , pitting you against several tough combats and a terrifying final battle. It’d also be cool if there were more ways to reduce Doom or alleviate Curses, a kind of injury that seems permanent because, as the flavor text says, “modern medicine isn’t useful here.”

But no one said horror manga or cosmic horror stories were happy affairs, and in this at least, it’s accurate. It’s also incredibly satisfying to beat the mysteries and amass yourself a huge variety of allies and weapons, making careful choices and playing smart until you make it to the top of the lighthouse and finally kick over the summoning circle. It allows for both the happiest possible ending and the most depressing, along with everything in between, and that’s actually pretty cool. It also does a great job with generating narrative. The flavor text is a blast to read as you move from location to location, showing the advancement of the mystery as you go, and it’s cool that even turning on the TV in your apartment adds volumes to the story. I’ve played as scalpel-wielding nursing students, occultist transfer students who always seem to end up dead or insane, a swim team captain armed with an interdimensional katana who wiped the floor with an Alexandrian god of fire, and that’s just scratching the surface. Each story feels unique, and as the game’s in early access, I can’t wait to see what they add. Each achievement also adds things to further playthroughs, from new backgrounds that allow for different styles of play (taking more injuries, a lot more cultists coming after you, etc) to new characters, to even more events and abilities. It’s cool to find something you hadn’t before, and there even seems to be a system for unlocking more Elder Gods to fight and a larger bestiary to send against you, deepening each game as you desperately fight against the elder beasts again.

While World of Horror is still in Early Access, what is available is impressive enough that if it keeps up, the full game is going to be a powerhouse. It’s already fully realized, and has enough variety (there’s an entire second “timeline” that shifts the action to Tokyo on top of the other wide range of content) that it’s just as exciting as any other roguelike or horror game on the market. I can’t wait to see what surprises are added to the game, and I hope it’s just as impressive on the full release.

Final score (for now):

The Good:
- Incredibly detailed and gruesome retro-styled graphics and interface
- Wide variety of unlockables and events
- Narrative and theme hang together incredibly well, making for an awesome retro-horror experience
- Addictive gameplay with a lot of hidden depth

The Bad:
- It’s got a difficulty cliff more than a difficulty curve
- Combat can get frustratingly difficult at times
- RNG hates you, but not always in a fun way

World of Horror - A First Look Review