World of Horror Review (Alebak)
World of Horror is a good game and worth checking out into if you're looking for either something that you can play in bite sized chunks or general retro looking spookiness.
Premise is that there's nefarious stuff going on around town and its up to you to investigate, solve mysteries, save your home, and hopefully not die or go crazy in the process.
The bare bones of the gameplay is mostly you investigating areas which trigger a random event that you resolve, either with multiple choices, skill checks, or it's something that just happens and you're forced to live with it. There's a decent variety of events and each area has their own set so its really unlikely you'll see the same set of events twice. At the start of a run, after choose your character and background, you pick a mystery to investigate and the game prompts you to check out areas in a sequence to advance the mystery, with short text blurbs explaining whats happening so far and why you're going where you're going. "A kid was beaten by his classmates and you gotta find out why", time to check out the hospital. Advance the mystery enough and you resolve it, with most of them having different endings depending on the choices you make. Solve five mysteries and then there's one last gauntlet of challenges before the world can be saved.
Then there's combat, which is turn based and each turn giving you a budget of time to spend on actions in a sequence. There's different enemy types which have there own weaknesses, lots of weapons with their own stats, and generally a lot of different encounters, like fighting two things at once each with their own health and each doing a different damage type, or ghost encounters which need a different set of actions to deal with as opposed to corporeal enemies. You actually have a lot of options to work with, regular attacks, strong attacks costing more time but doing more damage, boosts to increase accuracy, preparing attacks so they have a 100% chance to hit, preparing to dodge or block, grabbing an improvised weapon, analyzing your enemy to learn if there's a weakness to exploit, and running away at the cost of Doom.
Doom is a pretty important mechanic in World of Horror, it represents how much time you have left before the cult succeeds and the god they worship is brought into the world, resulting in game over. Its there to keep you from wasting time or making things TOO easy for yourself. Things like shopping for items and resting at home increase doom, and there are random events that can increase doom, with the occasional rare event or item that can decrease doom. Some powerful spells increase doom as well, making them a real risk/reward option for dealing with problems.
In terms of art the game is stellar. The 1-bit (or 2-bit) style is based off of both old Japanese PC games and horror manga author Junji Ito, the guy who makes terrifying stories about spirals and also stories about his cats. There's a very good general tone of creepiness in the art, even when not facing off against a nightmare beast, some people just look "off". There's a lot of color pallets to choose from when playing the game if black and white isn't for you, which is a nice way to get some visual variety in and give the player more choice in customizing how they play.
Soundwise the game stays in the time period its trying to emulate, sounding like its been made with a soundchip instead of actual instruments. It's actually very fitting for the game, and each area has its own investigation and combat themes, I don't have much to say here beyond "It's good!"
Really my only gripes with the game are that some of the secrets are so are to figure out on your own that you're probably going to need a guide if you intend to unlock whatever blocked off by them. Then there's how runs can enter death spirals from random events and it feels like there's not much you can do about it. These complaints are minor when compared to how good the rest of the game is.
I give World of Horror four bottles thrown at a weird fish monster out of 5, would absolutely recommend.