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World Of Horror review: a weird and wonderful horror adventure in time for HalloweenThe combat is kind of annoying but it almost doesn’t matter
The combat is kind of annoying but it almost doesn’t matter
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ysbryd Games
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ysbryd Games
But if you adopt a sort of Soulsian mindset, failure is what allows you to learn. World Of Horror has a surprising number of variables and a deliberately inscrutable interface that requires a lot of peering at small icons (which will not, I imagine, be tremendously accessible if you have any problems with your vision). Each time you start a new run you’ll get five cases pulled from a pool, which all have multiple endings. You might have a different Old God to contend with, which will apply different effects on the town as time goes on, like making the water supply grim so you can’t have a relaxing bath between cases (which is quite important). You also have more normal stats, apart from Reason and Stamina, that govern your success against different actions - things like Strength, Knowledge, Dexterity for dodging and Luck for, well, Luck.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ysbryd Games
World Of Horror has a massive range of colour options, in one and two bit varieties. They can really change how the game feels, and heighten the already-successful retro feeling. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ysbryd Games
You have an inventory of a very few items, can accrue stat-affecting injuries of both natural and supernatural kind - blood loss; literally not having a face - and items that do various things, like a ring that increases your Dexterity, but caps your maximum Stamina, which is your health. You’ll probably spend your first attempt learning the basics without too much experimentation, but it’s worth burning at least one go to poke things with a little cackle to find out how they wobble. An investigation will send you to specific locations, but you could instead go to the hospital and discover you can cure wounds. You could go to the shop and buy salt to use against a ghost, or stock up on spells in the library. If you go to the schoolyard you can recruit friends to help you.
Stacked on top of that is the towering monument of your own poor decisions. In one game I encountered the aforementioned mermaid obsessive early on, and, not having my wits about me, found him in a weakened state without a good weapon. Rather than fight him I saw that I had a story-specific option in combat to knock over a lamp and set myself on fire. This resulted in an entire section of the school closing down, meaning I couldn’t visit the yard for help. There are a quite a few things like this, and cases can technically resolve with you, e.g., having left the group ofBlair Witch-esque lost teens trapped in the forest. Still get your key, though.
Extra curricularAs you play you unlock characters and scenarios beyond the basic ‘five cases’ classic Coke style, which you can set up for a custom run at the world. It’s another layer of experimentation that rings out more game from the game.Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ysbryd Games
It sounds overwhelming but within the clear objectve of ‘solve five cases and save the world’ it’s actually incredibly freeing. Each new start is like another step in opening an elegant puzzle box, and the objective becomes not saving the world in an individual run, but finding everything you can in World Of Horror itself.
It’s a shame that the combat doesn’t stay as engaging. Every time you investigate a location you’ll trigger a random event, which might be ‘there’s something weird in the swimming pool’, with an option to look or back away that will test one of your stats, or might be ‘you just found some corpses, congratulations!’ and just give you a negative effect anyway. These are spooky and fun, except when it’s a random enemy e.g. a schoolgirl with a weirdly wide smile. Their inclusion works to increase threat, and to add steps to that dance, but the combat itself is repetitive. It’s a turn-based process, where each turn you queue up actions that take up space on a time bar - for example, the ‘prepare an attack’ guarantees a hit but means you can only do one attack in the turn, as does a dodge. Once your bar is full you hit execute, absorb the enemy round, and go again. You end up doing the same few combinations quite a lot - if not running away to avoid the encounter entirely.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ysbryd Games
Even so, this is a remarkablehorror gamewith many lovely, nasty facets to discover. From the tense music, the deployment of rare sound effects and animations, and the sparse but effective writing in combination with the clarity of the art, World Of Horror is doing some fabulous things. It’s game that is absolutely being what it wants to be. And because of that, some of you are going to hate it.
