After promising previews, does the full release of Polish developer Panstasz’s World of Horror have enough cosmic terror in the tank to sustain an entire game? I don’t want to spoil it too much this early on, but yes, it seems it can.
The hook to World of Horror is twofold. Firstly it’s a throwback RPG text adventure from the ’80s, complete with seemingly obtuse puzzles designed to pull you in. Second, its overall tone and 1-bit visuals take great inspiration from the horror manga of Junji Ito. I don’t know about you, but that’s an enticing concoction in my book.
The authenticity of portraying a retro computer title is especially pleasing for a wizened player of games such as myself. It’s less of a nod to the haunting chiptune melodies and simple yet effective visuals of decades past, and more of a passionate embrace of them.
From the retro computer startup that frames your screen with a clunky old CRT monitor that flickers into life with a grainy, simple audiovisual bootup, World of Horror does not betray its style. When the Ito-inspired drawings first swim into view, accompanied by an eerie chiptune theme and awash with opening crawl exposition, you get a proper sense of a place in time, and even when the game modernizes certain mechanics to provide longevity, it’s done in such a thematically consistent manner that it’s hard to find fault with it.
World of Horror sees you plunged into the shoes of any number of poor saps trying to uncover the horrors that lurk beneath the surface of a small seaside town in 1980s Japan. The town has its stories of people affected by the strangeness that surrounds them, and they can play out in any order and with several consequences/rewards depending on how well you handle things.
It’s often a simple case of clicking on an item, text choice, or location, and seeing what path that takes you down. Encourage your curiosity and you may find information and/or items relevant to your current investigation, or indeed a later one. On the other hand, it could lead to your face being torn apart by a scissor-wielding maniac. World of Horror throws a lot of the same elements at you again and again, but thanks to the randomized nature of the stories, many different outcomes can be seen, including multiple endings for each investigation.
The idea is to solve and survive your set of investigations, and then hopefully rid the town of its curses, which are being caused by the presence of Old Gods. You can fight your way through some horrors, but ultimately, World of Horror needs your brain a bit more than your fists, and there are as many threats to your brain’s normal functions as there are to the rest of your body. If you can’t maintain your sanity or your stamina, you’ll succumb to the assault on your psyche, and well, it’s pretty much insinuated that the repercussions of your failure lead to rather unpleasant things for mankind. Balancing sanity, stamina, and health in combination with finding the right items and clues makes for a lot of early trial and error that often results in small explosions of joy when you get how to make it through a scenario unscathed.
It’s a touch intimidating to embrace though, especially if this kind of thing is relatively unknown to you. World of Horror does at least try to ease you into what it does with a three-tiered system of learning. First is a standalone episode, designed to show you the basics of what happens in a typical story. Secondly, there’s a broader mode closer to the ‘normal’ playing style, but it’s a touch more structured, and third is the regular, highly-randomized normal mode, which is as likely to scramble your brain as any number of Eldritch horror. There’s a fourth option that allows a modified campaign, but that’s not available at this time.
It pays to be invested in the bizarre universe World of Horror exists in, because otherwise, it’d be fair to say your patience can be tested. There’s a lot of repetition, even if small things change from playthrough to playthrough, and while some endings are fairly reachable, it requires a whole lot more work, and thus, more repeating of scenarios, to get the rest of them. It’s more a question of personal taste than a serious gameplay issue though, as there’s still plenty of variety to be found, especially when dealing with higher difficulty levels.
One thing that is a tad underwhelming, then it’s the basic combat. You do find weaponry and spells to help combat the evil entities found around the town, but at first, you’re armed with nothing more than your own fists and feet in turn-based combat. It’s honestly a bit dull at times, and the sooner you can get your hands on something more substantial the better.
That’s about the extent of World of Horror’s problems. It’s an exceptionally well-realized throwback to early text-based RPGs, and with simple images and descriptive text, it shows how the power of horror can be effectively channeled in any medium. There’s so little else out there like this nowadays, and considering just how many horror games are out there, that’s a key selling point. If you give yourself willingly to the Old Gods, World of Horror will be an immersive and intoxicating horror experience. It’s perhaps appropriate that the core of World of Horror comes from something ancient, and is reborn in a new and terrifying form.
World of Horror review code for PC provided by the publisher.
World of Horror is out February 20 on PC via Steam, and on PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch later in 2020.