On paper, there’s nothing I should like about World of Horror.
There’s a cluttered screen, for starters, and an artificially retro aesthetic that I’ve seen once too many times before. It’s intimidating and brutally unforgiving, plus it also boasts my favourite unfavourite thing, RNG – dumb luck, in other words. I’ve died many, many times in gross – and grossly-unfair – battles, and as it’s only out in early access, it’s unpolished and teeth-clenchingly unstable, too.
So why am I still here, at 2 am, carefully working my way through this latest mystery, the Macabre Memoir of Morbid Mermaids, in the hope of finally – finally! – reaching its grim climax?
World of HorrorDevelopers: PanstaszPublisher: YsbrydPlatform: PCAvailability: Out now in Early Access
In spite of so many of my most undesirable gaming tropes, I’ve fallen hard for the World of Horror’s grim creations. It doesn’t look, nor play, like any horror I’ve experienced before, and while its instability has sent the adventure crashing several times – always taking my hard-earned progress with it, sadly – it’s a testament to the game’s creativity that I’m still here, still playing, still hooked, still wanting to find out what happens to this sleepy fishing village and its doomed inhabitants.
Doing the same thing over and over in the hope of somehow generating different results… that’s the definition of insanity, isn’t it? In my defence, though, while the location and availability of items vary with each playthrough, other events – such as the location of a baseball bat in the school, for instance, or a sanity-leeching denizen skulking in a locker – never change. You build up this knowledge slowly and organically each time you play and although yes, much is up to chance, the scant stability offered here ensures every fresh effort feels just that little bit less arduous.
WORLD OF HORROR – Early Access Release Trailer Watch on YouTube
Simultaneously both entirely original and a heartfelt homage, World of Horror is a stylish, intriguing experience that cherry-picks the best aspects from a variety of genres – RPG, roguelike, text adventures, card games – and mixes them together for an entirely new, if terrifying, flavour. At first, though, you won’t know what the hell to look at. It’s stitched together in an awkward, haphazard way, acknowledging that its “visual overload” may be “disorientating” but offering little to mitigate it. Persevere if you can. While admittedly a slow burn, there are some marvellously macabre stories sitting at the heart of World of Horror, and no matter how muted the palette of your ancient in-game CRT monitor, the stories it depicts are horrendously vivid in all the right ways.