Preview: World of Horror is for horror fans who don’t want to escape
Source: Panstasz/Ysbryd Games
There are two kinds of horror: the ones where the heroes defeat the evil and get out alive and the ones where they don’t. Arguably, the most satisfying from a horror standpoint are the latter. Doesn’t true terror come from a place that feels claustrophobic and narrow, a place from which you can’t escape?
In World of Horror, a game developed by Polish developer Pawel “Panstasz” Kozminski and published by Ysbryd Games currently in early access, revels in creating scenarios where living at the end is close to impossible. It’s heavily inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Junji Ito, among other sources like classic Japanese mythology. It wraps it all in a retro, choose-your-own-adventure-style, HyperCard-influenced package. You choose between a few characters and have to face against elder Gods and other powerful beings in several scenarios. You’ll face disturbing, uncanny, sometimes gory images that’ll stick around behind your eyes when you close them and battles that you can’t win and will still be wondering about after you shut the game down.
The best part? No matter which story you end up in, you’ll face a challenge, and you’ll most likely die. No, really — that’s the fun of it.
The terror is in the strategy
Players can try different combinations of moves or ways to interact with an encounter so that playing missions over again feels different every time.
Once you figure out what the game wants you to do, it tends to fall somewhere in the middle. A normal campaign (there are a few different ways to play, including a tutorial mode that gives you one scenario so you can get a feel of the game) involves your character having to solve five mysteries to stop the rise of a random cosmic Old God. As you solve the mysteries and go through different scenarios, the Eldritch terror gets stronger, putting limits on how you play. In the meantime, you have to just get through the game without dying, which will happen often. Then you restart a campaign and play through it again, albeit with small tweaks like the mysteries presented and the character you play.
A typical scenario involves you exploring a locale and running into several strange encounters. Sometimes it’s more benign, like when you have to go up against a stubborn receptionist at your school to gain access to critical information. In others, it’s a matter of life or death where you have to battle a creature, which, in most cases, involves running away. At the end of each mystery, you have to face a final boss. What that means depends on the story you’re working through.
For example, in the first mystery, called Spine-Chilling Story of School Scissors, you have to solve the mystery of a boy’s disappearance at your school, and it ends with you coming face to face with Kuchisake-onna, a.k.a. The Slit-Mouthed Woman. On the way, you have to find tools to engage in a ritual to get rid of her, but often come up against other creatures that stifle your progress. It’s easy to die before even facing Kuchisake-onna since you might not find a proper weapon.
Source: Panstasz/Ysbryd GamesCombat involves filling up a bar each turn.
This ensures that you won’t skate to the end of each mystery without a scratch, but it also works to change up the gameplay. Players can try different combinations of moves or ways to interact with an encounter so that playing missions over again feels different every time. It also helps to get towards multiple endings (most of the mysteries have at least two). This obviously re-ups the replay value, but it helps push players towards experiencing a greater breadth of what World of Horror has to offer. It’s a lot.
The horror at the heart of World of Horror
Source: Panstasz/Ysbryd Games
While the creator of World of Horror isn’t Japanese, the influences are apparent. Panstasz knows the proper artworks and myths to pull from, creating an amalgamation of the spookiest imagery. There’s stuff in here that’s reminiscent of authors like Kazuo Umezu (specifically The Drifting Classroom) and other J-Horror classics like the Ju-on (Grudge, for American audiences) franchise. There’s the aforementioned Kuchisake-onna, and even Akai-Kami-Aoi-Kami, a.k.a. the Red Paper Blue Paper toilet ghost. Despite the latter being one of the more laughable ghosts in Japanese folklore by modern standards, the game still manages to make them horrifying with uncanny artwork. Despite the limited technical aspects of making a retro-styled game, the creatures are still well-detailed. Even just coming across a normal person with large, bulging eyes or slightly off-kilter teeth can be terrifying.
There are some more obvious horror attributes on display here; a couple of jumpscares pop up while unnerving 16-bit-esque music continually runs in the background. There’s not a lot of subtlety in how it portrays terror. It is constant and in a myriad of horrid forms. However, at its heart, World of Horror is dedicated to a specific type and sticks with it. The stakes are high, as you have to escape. Even when you understand that it’s nearly impossible to get out alive, the tension continues to rise. Even if you know you can’t win, you want to keep trying.
Bottom line
Source: Panstasz/Ysbryd Games
Put simply, this is a game that knows what it’s doing when it comes to creating the horror in the title. It has issues in other areas. Since it’s in early access, you’ll run into some bugs or instances where a basic feature might assist you. There are also story bits that don’t exactly line up or are clearly missing. However, since the game is a work in progress, you can see where the team is working on it. For example, the first day I played, I wished there was a save feature and, lo’ and behold, the next day it arrived in an update. The team working on the game, which includes people from publisher Ysbryd Games, is also being transparent about all the bugs they’re working on if you just hop over to the Steam discussion board.
Despite technical issues and this feeling that I’ll never be able to beat the game no matter how hard I try, I’m excited to see this game hit a full release. At the very least, players will get more mysteries to solve, more endings to find, and more scenarios to just get lost in.
World of Horror is currently available to buy on Steam and Itch.io. It’s set to hit PC, PlayStation 4, and the Nintendo Switch sometime in 2020.
For horror fans
World of Horror
There’s no escape
Do you like not being able to escape a cosmic horror? Do you like Junji Ito and imagery that haunts your nightmares? World of Horror might be worth your time.