The old god stirs. Click to reveal its podcast.
Welcome back to the podcast and happy Halloween! For our final horror game this year, we’re going to be talking about World of Horror. As a disclaimer, this game is technically still in early access, and we end up discussing it as though it’s a full release, so consider that some of the things we’re talking about may end up changing by the time a version 1.0 comes out. World of Horror is a throwback CRPG reimagined as a Roguelike game, with short replay times and a huge number of random elements. In the game, you are tasked with solving five mysteries to enter a lighthouse and prevent the return of a Lovecraftian old god. “Solving mysteries” in this case meaning surviving a number of random encounters while the story of your mystery solving is told to you by text. Not having to actively solve the case doesn’t mean the game doesn’t take brainpower to get through though. In addition to making some choices that will affect the outcome of the mystery and determine what ending you get for each one, you need to manage resources and make smart decisions (or at least, be ready to remember what decisions led to what outcomes) to survive through the session. While the game mechanically is a callback, the art style also, while rendered in the 1-bit style of old PC games, references manga artist Junji Ito, who proves to be a significant inspiration for both the look and themes of the game, with “cosmic” and “body” being the horrors du jour. All in all it’s a fascinating game to play that may fall just a bit short in the content department at the time, but it embraces community made content and still has some updates ahead that could really elevate it. We’re going to be talking about the slow drip of unlocks that make the game feel a little stale on multiple playthroughs, how the obfuscation of mechanics and the old style aesthetic lend themselves to the mystery inherent to cosmic horror stories, and we discuss the ins and outs of the Clap Bow system.
Thank you for joining us this week and this year for our annual month of scary games. This was, to my mind, a really solid selection for the season with a lot of variation on style and type of horror, proving that things can be frightening in a ton of different ways, and this genre of game is one that I wouldn’t consider at the top of my list for horror. And yet, it ended up being very good anyway. What do you think? Were you drawn in by the Ito-inspired art style to this very strange title? Do you think the game contains enough things to keep you interested for long periods, or better yet, have you delved into the community made content? Let us know in the Discord or down in the comment section! Next time, we’re fulfilling a promise we made last month and actually talking about New Pokémon Snap, and rounding out our discussion of Snap-likes. We hope you’ll join us for that and thanks for listening!