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World of Horror is a very unique horror game with its style of gameplay, it’s a rogue-like with a choose-your-own-adventure style. The game also takes inspiration from Junji Ito’s work and the Clthul Mythos as well and blends them together into a very nice horror game with some interesting ideas.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Creepy atmosphere that works very well
Interesting gameplay where choices matter heavily
Multiple endings you can achieve
Fantastic black and white pixel art style

Cons

No character development in the story
The game can get quite difficult with RNG
UI is ok, there is a little too much on the screen


Story/Gameplay

I’ll be handling this review in a unique way because the story and the gameplay are tied together. The old gods have reawakened, the world is in a spiraling mess, in hospitals, abandoned classrooms, quiet apartments, and dark forests. Strange events have been occurring and it’s up to you to solve these cases to try and prevent the inevitable.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3313225628
You can play as 14 different characters and each character has a unique story to them and different mysteries for you to solve. Though, the characters themselves don’t have any sort of development to them. Although to be fair, I don’t think that was the intention of the game fully, as I believe they wanted to focus more on the atmosphere of the game.
However, to unlock certain characters, you need to get certain achievements in the game to get them. Which may require you to do a few runs on certain things because the game randomly generates what happens for certain events. Although even with all that, it should be possible to get them even with what I just said.
Now the game has three specific phases to it, the Planning phase, the Investigation phase, and the Combat phase. The Planning phase will be at your house where you can do things, like take a bath, go to the lighthouse, or choose your next mystery. That’s where the Investigation phase begins, and you are free to select the location to go to.
The game does have a set path that it recommends you go to but you are free to choose wherever you want to go to. The game has these random events that will determine what the player does and what kind of effect they get. Each location you go to has a certain event associated with it and an option for you to choose from. To solve cases you will need to find certain clues and to get these clues, you will need to resolve a certain event that the game gives you.
The events as a whole are random and there are certain scenarios where the ending is obvious, it’s still random on what the game gives you. Then there is combat, the game is turned-based, and you have offensive, defensive, support, and spiritual abilities. All of these actions are arranged in a 9x9 grid and some abilities are only available for certain encounters. You will need to prepare a sequence of attacks and click the LAUNCH SEQUENCE button for the game to do the actions that you want.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3313226708
You have at least 200 time units to use on certain actions and each action will use a certain amount. Once your sequence is over, the enemy can then attack you, you can reduce the damage you receive by using defensive actions. You can also cast spells and use throwing items, but they are not tied to the action sequence or the time unit. So you are free to cast as many spells or use as many throwing items as you want.
All of these actions have some sort of mathematics to them but that is a whole other thing to explain in this review and would take way too long for it to do that. Once combat is over, you will gain experience points, and some enemies will give you certain items. You can use the experience you get to level up certain stats. Some enemies can also alter certain actions for you, like ghosts for example. Where your attacks won’t be able to hurt them unless you are playing as certain characters as they can or by hurting them in another manner.
When leveling up, you can select one perk from three, there are generic perks that are available for all characters in the game. However, there are also character-exclusive perks that you can also select for a certain character. Each character has three or four perks unless you are playing as Toshiaki Wakematsu, who has six unique perks to him.
There is a ton that World of Horror has to offer but I just can’t explain everything that the game has. Although there are two issues that I do want to address with the game, the game can get quite difficult on its RNG. Now this is a minor issue as some people may enjoy the complete randomness that the game has to offer. Although with that said, there are just some things that the game will throw at you that can completely kill the run so be careful.
The UI that the game has is ok, I do think it’s a little cluttered as there is so much on the screen to click and such. This is also another minor issue but just a little something that got to me in some ways.
Although the issue I want to talk about mainly is the developer of this game, they have been known to say things and then just disappear. Now you may have known I said there were achievements earlier in the game, well there are no Steam achievements, but they were promised that they would be in the game. There was supposed to be an update in March for this game, but March has come and gone and we are in the mid to late month of August at the time of this review. The game is still very fun but those are the issues that the game is plagued with that do hold it back.

Graphics and Performance

The art style that the game has is very beautiful and creepy, the black and white pixel graphics make the areas unsettling. I tested the game on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB, AMD Ryzen 5 1500X Quad-Core Processor 3.50, and 16 GB of RAM, I had no issues while I was playing, and the game should be able to run on any PC.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3313227545

Final Verdict

All in all World of Horror is a fantastic love letter to Junji Ito and to the Cthulhu Mythos. The game has a very nice horror-like charm to it that will be sure to please any horror fans. There is even mod support for the game so if you want to install some mods to enhance your experience in the game, they are there to make the game more fun.
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