Maybe, or maybe, I will push on, save the world, and most people will be completely unaware that anything strange was happening. Maybe.
It is this uncertainty that makes World of Horror, a game best described as a head-on collision between Junji Ito's imaginative cosmic horror and HP Lovecraft's tentacle-laden Cthulhu mythos, so fascinating. Each mystery unfolds in any number of ways, depending on a combination of your actions in the moment and whether you dare to serve a dangerous additional purpose that might help the town but put yourself in danger in the process.
This bit of initiative in an adventure game is exciting, but it also makes "World of Horror" scarier. You can't just click on the creepy pictures until the end (or until you die): you have to actually read the burnt notes you find for clues, listen to the gossip, and remember what was actually said, and if you have the awareness and equipment to do so, perhaps you can use this information to bring the mystery to would lead us to a better conclusion. One of my "favorite" climaxes involves my poor character desperately sticking a needle in someone's eye to save them from an even more gruesome fate.
I'm right there at that moment and hesitate just a moment before telling myself that this is the worst thing that could happen to them. The match may be unpredictable, but I am always at the blackened center of this supernatural storm. I am always the only one who makes a real difference.
Gore, ghouls, and randomized micro-narratives may help or hinder my progress, but there is a rigid structure to World of Horror that keeps this Eldritch uncertainty from becoming a mishmash of incoherent monsters. I always have five mysteries to solve, each with its own unique goal, unique encounter, and ending. Then I must use the key obtained by solving the riddles to open the door to the lighthouse and hopefully save the universe. Whatever happens, don't be afraid that strange things will happen in this game. They know that with a little more effort they can pull it off, or at least lose their sanity in a productive way.
All of this impending doom is conveyed using a world made of heavily dithered black-and-white pixel art, the kind of graphics usually found on dusty 5-inch floppy disks. It may sound simplistic, but nothing could be more appropriate for this game. Every scene is detailed enough to make me not want to look at the hungry eyes staring through the distorted marks on someone's face, while leaving a void of nothingness that only makes my already nightmare-inclined imagination scramble to fill in the gaps. I may not always know what exactly I am seeing, but I know in my bones that it is truly terrifying.
Rather than following a typical flowing narrative, World of Horror's story follows a similar minimalist style, creating a disturbing sense of being lost and hunted. This inconsistency is actually an advantage. It makes it easier to weave the intentionally fragmented fragments into a kind of improvised dreamlike whole. From opening the bill, to finding the bloody box, to meeting a man ready to trade my memories for cold hard cash may not make much sense, but it does make me feel as if I am in danger, as if reality is on the verge of collapse and nowhere is safe.
While shadows inevitably loom, the achievement system in World of Horror makes death feel like a victory of sorts. Regardless of whether or not you banish the ancient horror, certain actions during play (saving someone, poking something you shouldn't, dying in a certain way) unlock new spells, costumes, items, and more. Even when you succumb to madness in another plane of existence and play ends prematurely, there is always some reward waiting in the immediate vicinity. No matter what you do, the game keeps getting more diverse and interesting. Ancient gods to fight, mysteries to solve, characters to play, and customizable background stories to accompany them - there are plenty of ways to make each run feel as fresh as a newborn shoggoth. You can even adjust the overall difficulty level at the start of play. It's a practical, patience-saving alternative to the usual roguelike setup of repeatedly grinding until you're strong enough to succeed no matter what, or blindly immersing yourself in play and hoping you get lucky this time.
Rather than being cosmically cursed, I only rarely stumbled upon moments that felt poorly designed. While there is a lot going on in World of Horror, a carefully balanced game is not one of them. Spells generally don't seem to justify the drain on reason required to cast them, and properly dealing with ghosts in a series of claps and bow combat is not worth the trouble. However, in a rogue light, which lasts only about 30 minutes at best when successful, it is snowballingly unlikely that such problems will persist long enough to be a real problem, and there are more than enough alternative ways to damage and heal. If anything, repeated play only reveals that the game is more unbalanced in my favor than its dire guise would have led me to believe at first.
Even with these flaws, World of Horror is a great horror adventure, a wonderful piece of work in which every dark curse feels like another claw tightening around a character's throat, and hard-won benefits feel frighteningly temporary. It may not last long on its own, but it's a very easy game to play all night long.
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