World of Horror is one of the strangest experiences I’ve played this year. From developer panstasz, World of Horror markets itself as a combination of the works of Junji Ito, H.P. Lovecraft, and ’80s text-based adventures. I’m admittedly a fan of all of those things but very rarely are any of them pulled off with an inkling of success in modern gaming. So with an open mind I booted up World of Horror and was met with the most unexpected gaming experience.
Visually, World of Horror is a lot to take in. The game employs a 1 or 2-bit art style that instantly evokes feelings of booting up a game from a floppy disk. From here I was overwhelmed with menus upon menus upon more menus. Thankfully choosing the “normal” difficulty activates a brief but intuitive tutorial that walks you through every element of the user interface. Before I knew it, I was off to the races and falling deep into the World of Horror.
World of Horror tasks you with solving five mysteries before the rise of an old god. You’ll be given an entirely disposable character and put into terrifying situations such as investigating a cult at a festival or your uncle’s funeral where something strange is afoot. Gameplay in these scenarios involves you going from environment to environment and having a random set of encounters that will either help you or hinder you in your journey to stop the old god from rising and (presumably) ending the world.
It’s a simple set up and execution. A lot of World of Horror feels like a randomized tabletop role-playing game. Enter a situation, read a description, make a skill check (aka dice roll), see the results and move on. It quickly establishes a rhythm that’s addicting and had me on edge wondering what was around every corner.
Combat in World of Horror is no-frills action. Encounters play out in a turn-based fashion where the actions you choose will be queued up and executed based on the amount of action points you have. For example: my character is equipped with a baseball bat and I enter a combat encounter with a horrifying creature. I select “normal hit, “attack boost” and finally “strong hit, which uses up the last of my action points. Hitting “execute” causes all of my actions to play out and allows the monster to respond before I can issue more commands. This is also where the random RNG and calculator comes into play as the game will decide when your attacks or spells hit and when they don’t; same goes for every single foe you’ll be fighting.
It’s these elements that add up together to make World of Horror play less like a video game and more like a board game like Arkham Horror with a bigger emphasis on random encounters than traditional storytelling.
When playing through the campaign you’re at the mercy of random encounters and events, to the point that a run may last you anywhere from 2 hours to 10 mins depending on your luck. You can try to play as smart as you can but sometimes World of Horror just deals you a shitty hand and before you know it you’re hitting restart on your campaign. If you’re expecting a deep or engaging piece of storytelling, World of Horror will not provide that.
World of Horror is a delightful experience if you know what it is going into the game, however. It recreates the feeling of those obtuse text-based adventure games combined with the feeling of a brutally difficult board game. Though it wastes its storytelling potential by having a random nature, I can’t help but be charmed by its killer art style inspired by Junji Ito and H.P. Lovecraft. World of Horror also has an addictive nature that kept me engrossed and clicking through to the end.
World of Horror launched October 19 for the PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, the Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam, GOG and itch.io.
Review code provided by the publisher.
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