Come, take a flick through World of Horror’s rolodex of nightmares; see faces flayed by vengeful wives, wild-eyed teachers with rictus grins, soul-bartering telemarketers, trypophobia-inducing latticework rendered across human skin, and other lurid things.
It is 198X and the world is on the cusp of a technological revolution (and Eldritch annihilation, but we’ll get to that), caught between the superstitions of the old world and the suspicions of the new; a place where diabolical rituals are still performed by the light of the moon, while Bulletin Board Systems send murderous dial-up messages from beyond the veil. It’s also a world immediately indebted, both visually and tonally, to manga horror master Junji Ito, whose stories of everyday mundanity succumbing to the grotesque here shape countless original horrors drawing upon influences as wide as Lovecraft, Japanese folklore, urban legends, and creepy pasta. Yet for all its reverential pilfering, World of Horror – which technically falls under the banner of rogue-like RPG, even if its text-heavy, point-and-click design feels like something else entirely – still manages to conjure a wonderfully idiosyncratic mood of its own.
World of Horror reviewDeveloper: Paweł KoźmińskiPublisher: Ysbryd GamesPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PS4,Switch and PC(Steam).
A lot of that is down to its grungy, lo-fi presentation, of course, with World of Horror’s retro aesthetic evoking the feeling of a cursed computer game running on an ancient desktop machine spat up from the very depths of hell; it’s minimalism and maximalism slammed together in uneasy ways, a jostling interface paired with sparsely evocative text married to an engulfing chiptune drone underscoring a stark 1-bit art style that’s all the more sinister in the horrifying details its two-tone colour palette can’t quite adequately convey. It’s utterly cohesive in its unsettling chaos and entirely appropriate to the game’s inherently fragmentary form.
Structurally, you see, World of Horror foregoes tight narrative cohesion in favour of a looser story framework summoning forth a ceaseless parade of randomised, wildly imaginative grotesqueries like an ever-churning fever dream. Yes, it’s an RPG of sorts, and a rogue-lite one at that, but more than anything – once you strip away its lo-fi flourishes and flapping folds of skin – it’s a spritely little story engine shaped from countless roiling parts that swell and subside to form an endlessly shifting tale of cosmic peril.