WORLD OF HORROR: An Investigative Interactive RPG of Junji Ito and Lovecraft’s dreams

“Armed with clues, spells, and your dwindling sanity, you’ll investigate mysteries across the city… and in realms beyond.”

Home is your comforting headquarters and here you will select a mystery to investigate as you explore a range of locales, like a hospitals to even a rural village, to have a variety of interesting encounters. These encounters frequently require basic choices, some needing special items or skill checks from attributes, to resolve these: an enthralling adventure into strange, weird events serving to build up the narrative. Although some events are redundant (i.e. discovering the corpse of a police officer) to the detriment of a dynamic world, it is nevertheless engaging for the duration of any original playthrough well worth the admission.

You will have allies, perks, spells, six attributes, special actions, rituals and items all complementing your adventure as the RPG framework (in this amalgamation of game genres from text-based RPG adventures to visual novels). Although these do enhance the experience thematically as pertinent to the lore, they are the weakest mechanic in terms of entertainment as slightly archaic. There will also be no complex and cohesive sequences of puzzles to achieve results as an elaborate system, it is much more simplistic as turn-based tactical combat with simple choices or utilizing special items/weapon.

Rituals, and sacred objects, are a fascinating perspective to exorcise particular enemies of certain properties, however, deserving more attention. You will balance the doom of the town, your sanity and stamina (as health) to feebly survive a relentless difficulty. One will be precariously using every lead and resource to resolve a plethora of crises emerging.

Survival horror has long indulged the tropes of cumbersome combat, unintuitively fickle puzzles and resource management to amplify the desperation from a reduction of power in honing any mechanics smoothly. World of Horror does this to a degree that does not override all else to become a hopeless annoyance. Knowledge of the world, too, as you learn mechanics is crucial for progression in a manner to integrate a cerebral overlay to contemplating the way forward – this will counteract the RNG sure to frustrate any tendency for power gaming.

As an investigative narrative experience, World of Horror combines two predominant spheres of horror icons, H. P. Lovecraft and Junji Ito, for a profound homage. It is an design of an intricate world augmented from their genius: an adventure in a stylish Japanese province, which follows a 80’s vibe for a groovy vaporwave feel from CRT monitors to Takumi’s AE86, that’s intriguing, unnerving and intense.

Although combat and survival may prove frustrating and incoherent, they are nevertheless secondary to the crafted world that’s a flawless framework to expand an evident focus, the interactive experience: a World of Horror. The framework has infinite potential for complex tales to engender a deep realm, spooky enemies to impose on the player’s imagination, unsettling items to lead curiosity of more knowledge and disturbing events to shape the atmosphere. This is ultimately a setup for a narrative horror sandbox unlike any other, the only limitation being the creativity for further story and art to depict these.

The respect for Japanese culture is also charmingly the perfect adaptation of quaint town life (this was an aspect Higurashi achieved brilliantly) in the architecture to the locales, culturally incorporating particular urban legends of the country for a tangible folklore. Additionally, this is more suitably modern in origin such as Kuchisake-onna and Aka Manto over the traditional, historic figures such as Yuki-onna or the yūrei of Botan Dōrō.

There will be pop cultural references throughout such as the meme hound of a Shiba Inu (who we know controls Silent Hill), Kiryu Kazuma of the Yakuza franchise as a universe that also created an intimate district we all love to revisit and an early CreepyPasta in Japan of the ‘the Red Room’ online. These are a cute fan service to delight anybody with likely interlinked interests to the nature of this product.

If you enjoy the world for the ambience and lore, repetition is no issue, especially considering procedural elements as in roguelikes where elements such as the Old God modify scenario variables, to learn more and explore deeper. Players will be rewarded with a variety of endings alongside disparate experiences in every playthrough. Modifiers are comprehensive, too, to alter the experience and experiment. These will sure be supplemented with modding in the future for a diverse experience in each run whereby the calculated narrative is the enticing surprise.

You have mystical items and narrative objects – each perfectly embedded into the world as relevant while not overbearing fantastically in motifs to breach the genre of magic realism – to aid your journey into this subtly esoteric world of the occult – carefully balanced between realism and the supernatural to not diverge from reality to an extent immersion (via relation to the world) is affected.