If you’re looking for a new spooky game in time for Halloween, look no further than World of Horror, a 1-bit survival horror adventure inspired by chilling stories of HP Lovecraft and Junji Ito.
World of Horror is a game that’s been in Early Access for a handful of years but has now crawled out of the choppy seas of game development, fully formed and ready to devour your time.
So here’s the set-up. You play as one of several teenage protagonists solving a pinboard full of local mysteries whose tendrils grip a seemingly quiet seaside town. I’m talking bloated corpses, melting men, ghost girls with curtains of long black hair, and other supernatural terrors. You need to defeat these evils by collecting objects, exploring different parts of town, and surviving encounters with horrible beings.
World of Horror is roguelike in structure, meaning when you start each run the game will select five stories from a larger pool of investigations. Playthroughs last between 30 minutes to over an hour – that is if you can survive. You solve each of these investigations by visiting different locations in town and then facing random encounters. The outcome of these random events relies on your character’s RPG-style stats. You’ll be tasked with navigating creepy hospitals, abandoned houses, and the local high school. Oof, I’m so freaked out by that high school – if you know, you know.
There’ll be times when you’ll be confronted with something truly horrifying and so must resort to combat, with the chilling rumours you’ve heard during your investigation materializing into shocking reality. These encounters are turn-based and you’ll be using a combination of attacking, defending, dodging as well as casting spells and curses. An action bar caps how many moves you can stack in a single sequence, and you then unleash it all in one turn.
These encounters are in a word, uh terrifying. In other games, usually, the ghosties remain mostly hidden, creating a tense atmosphere. But World of Horror doesn’t mess around, and you’re face to face with these monsters – wide smiles, stretched skin, swollen faces- you take in every single pixel that makes up their grotesque form. It’s like reading a Junji Ito manga and turning the page to a full-page panel of pure nightmare fuel.
Runs can be difficult at first, especially when you’re looking at an overwhelming interface. It’s a throwback to the designs of classic adventure games but at first glance, it’s a lot. But World of Horror’s tutorials do a relatively good job of onboarding you, and you quickly get to understand how to navigate the game’s labyrinth of symbols, buttons, and mechanics. At first, an object or action might seem kinda useless, that’s until you discover a hyper-specific situation where they can be game-changing, and even unlock new interactions and endings. Completing a run in World of Horror is a delicate balance of strategy and luck.
The game will dish out a handful of different mysteries each run, but due to its roguelike structure, you’ll bump into the same monsters and events quite a few times. For me, this repetition never dulled their impact, it just meant that I got another chance finding a better solution or gaining more insight into the best strategy. But the best thing about starting a new run is there’s always a chance you might encounter something new, a terror you’ve not seen before. And that’s the pull of World Of Horror – there’s always more lurking in its tangle of stories. And I want to seek out each and every one. If you want to join me on my kind of creepy quest, you can buy World of Horror over on Steam, Nintendo Switch and PS4.
