I’ve been waiting to get my hands on this for years. It spent ages in early access on steam, I had a go at the demo but apart from that I’ve been patiently waiting for the planned console port, and it’s finally here. I was going to unlock everything before I reviewed it, but unfortunately glitches are preventing me from doing so. More on that later.
Put simply, it’s like if the board game Arkham Horror was transplanted from 20s New England to 80s Japan, and written and drawn by Junji Ito. You pick a protagonist from a list of young adults with their own unique skills, pick a backstory that has a potentially drastic effect on gameplay, then set out to solve five horror-themed mysteries in the town of Shiokawa. There’s a whole bunch of gory, spooky bullshit going down in the otherwise sleepy seaside town, and solving each mystery gets you a set of keys you need to enter the lighthouse, ascend to the top and stop the incursion of your chosen Old God; eldritch horrors who, if allowed to awaken, will wipe out life on earth in a variety of entertaining ways.
Right off the bat the tutorial gets you into the swing of things. It’s a series of increasingly large and complex playthroughs starting with just playing the most curated mystery that’s set entirely in one location and teaches you the basic mechanics and ending with a full playthrough with everything customised by the player. This is all optional; you can skip straight to the full playthrough but it’s worth working your way through them to get to grips with how the game works. There’s a lot of text on screen; stats, a log of all your actions, status ailments in the form of injuries and curses, what items you have, what perks you’ve taken, your health, sanity and “Doom”. That’s before you even get into a fight, where you have a whole load of options depending on what you’re fighting, what you’re fighting it with, how high the threat level of the area is and whether anyone’s helping you out. It’s tied together with gorgeous 1-bit artwork and music, but there is a lot of text to read, and you really need to get used to it in order to get the most out of the game. The gameplay loop involves “Investigating” areas by completing a random event there; some of them are tied to your character, old god or background, but a lot of them are universal. This is where the meat of the game lies, and one of its strongest horror elements. The game treats these as cannon, because any positive or negative effects of them carry forward, but the mystery playing out in text at the top of the screen never takes them into account. During my investigation of a suspicious new ramen joint, in between ordering and receiving my food I suddenly appeared on a subway train where I found a box with my name on it and containing something awful, then right afterwards I blipped right back to the ramen line like nothing happened. Whatever you’re doing can and will be interrupted by, to name a few examples, you running into old friends, being attacked by body-horror monstrosities or finding strange, eldritch entities and objects. Some of them can have a positive outcome if your stats are right, others just always hurt you, like for example finding an anatomical model of a torso that seems to be alive. All of this, combined with the protagonists explicitly becoming tired, frustrated and freaked out by what’s happening lends the whole thing an almost dream-like quality, where it feels like whatever god you’re trying to stop is playing tricks on you, only the scars left show it was all too real. Each mystery has multiple endings that are often tied into optional objectives, though there’s very little actual detective work required on the part of the player. Personally I didn’t mind that at all; the mysteries are well-written, spooky stories and investigating them opens you up to all the other scary stuff the game has to offer, but don’t go in expecting Sinking City or anything like that.
Combat is a turn-based affair, with all the player’s actions relying on timing; some characters are faster than others and perks can speed up your combat actions. Most characters can dodge and attack once in one turn, or prep that one attack so it always hits (normally it’s based on a percentage chance tied to the skill the weapon relies on), but as you get faster you can string together strong blows and cut enemies down in seconds, which is especially useful with the stronger ones and bosses. Every enemy does damage that depletes your health and/or sanity, or increases your “Doom” meter; a percentage at the top of the screen that raises with each area you investigate and lowers under certain circumstances. It represents how close your chosen old god is to waking up, and once it hits 100% it’s game over, no questions asked. Each old god has their own unique complication; things like making you unable to run from combat or increasing the doom penalty of resting to regain health and sanity, which is crucial as the mysteries go on.
So then, that all sounds good, but what about those bugs? I ran into two. Firstly, when I fortunately hadn’t unlocked all that much I discovered that quitting to menu during a run just wipes your save; everything you’ve unlocked vanishes. I came back from that and started knocking off achievements (in-game ones that are each tied to an unlockable) left and right, only to discover that two of them disappeared after turning the game off. One of them, beating three particular enemies to unlock the game’s version of Cthulhu, vanished repeatedly. As much as I’d like to unlock everything I can’t because in its current state the game won’t let me, and although the developer is aware of at least the first bug, at the time of writing there isn’t a patch.
That’s a pretty big issue, but I still love World of Horror. In its current state I’d say wait for a patch, but when there is one I fully recommend it; it lived up to my expectations. It’s a gorgeously drawn, scored and written slice of horror goodness that combines the best of Junji Ito and H.P Lovecraft into a unique, satisfying hybrid of text-based adventure and RPG. Games like this don’t come around very often; this is a real gem. Just a shame about the bugs.
By James Lambert
@jameslambert18
The Reviewing Floor 