izigame.me

World of Horror is a strange little game with a very satisfying core gameplay loop and a banging aesthetic, featuring a great graphical style (apparently somehow done in MS Paint?? amazing), charming character designs, and engaging soundtrack. It definitely has its problems, and plenty of them, but what it does well, it does very well.
The game is focused on making the best of bad situations, racing against time, and surviving an endless onslaught of bad news, before pressing your few lucky breaks to finally survive by the skin of your teeth. The rhythm of simple, choice-based events and occasional combat is reminiscent of FTL (if less deep), and somehow manages to almost never feel frustrating.
Runs take less than an hour, which takes the sting out of chronic bad luck, and there are plenty of unlocks to make your many early losses less painful as you learn the ropes. There are many events whose only function is dealing unavoidable damage, but they're consistent enough that they feel much less like "screw you" RNG moments and more like another tick of the clock. It's what you signed up for. It's why you're here.
That said, the game is about as scary as trick or treaters. The setting is totally incoherent, with each random event being completely unrelated to any other, as if each is its own micro-story set in its own universe that disappears as soon as you conclude it. The result is an environment with no narrative and no tension, a constant dull hum of low intensity strangeness dressed up as cosmic horror. The only actual story being told is that you're playing a difficult video game. Despite the name, there is no World and there is no Horror.
The gameplay itself has plenty of weird problems, most of which are rookie game design mistakes.
Many of the missions have poorly thought out elements: one mystery's good ending requires an item from a different mystery's good ending, except you only get five randomly selected mysteries per run, so if you don't have both of them available, you're out of luck. And a number of mysteries have no options for healing, which can and will screw you in ways the RNG can't. There are also a lot of well documented bugs that have sat unfixed for years. None of them are gamebreaking and you'll never get softlocked, but there's really no excuse for an item to still be healing the wrong stat after two years.
And much of the game's learning curve comes not from the intended difficulty, but from learning how to navigate the unintuitive and inefficient UI (I'm 22 hours in and it still takes me a few tries to find what I need) and it's very common for people to come to the game and have no idea how to start playing.
With the game's version sitting at 0.9.9, presumably on the verge of leaving Early Access, what it needs more than anything is an update focused not on new additions but only fixing bugs and rebalancing existing content. This game has been in development for a very long time. It'll take some dedicated, boring effort to get all of its accumulated content on the same page, but I don't think the game will be worthy of official release until it happens. (This is a solo developer project, but I actually think it would benefit a lot from having a second person.)
Despite all of that, the game is still absolutely worth picking up in its current state. The core gameplay and beautiful art are easily worth the price of admission, and if you think you might like it, you almost certainly will.