WORLD OF HORROR

This game was fun three years ago, and it's still fun today. Thank you panstasz for just appearing out of nowhere and dropping a new update. 10/10

WORLD OF HORROR was developed by panstasz and published by Ysbryd Games and PLAYISM. It released in 2023 to cautiously optimistic reviews. To me, WORLD OF HORROR exemplifies everything wrong with the Roguelite genre. The stellar presentation, both with the incredible 1-bit pixel art and the soundtrack, could've made for a genuinely effective Horror Anthology visual novel or longer visual novel story, in the vein of "What if Junji Ito's "Uzumaki" was a choose your own adventure game with multiple endings?" Instead, it's an experience entirely cheapened by RNG, where anything interesting only happens if you're lucky to experience it, combat sucks, everything takes a year to do (it's an insipid roguelite, combined with the sluggish pace of your average VN after all) and the things that do happen regularly (i.e. your main scenarios) are so repetitive that it feels like its own Psychological Horror. Playing WORLD OF HORROR is an excercise in a million sighs, with each one hiding behind it the implied, forlorn exclamation of "oh, what could've been!" And, after a hundred or so yawns, as your vision begins to blur and your eyes slowly become half-shut, you can just about swear that the "HORROR" in the game's title, slowly rearranges itself into the word "BOREDOM", for that is all that this game is: a WORLD OF BOREDOM; and that's a damn shame. Another hefty serving of great potential ground into dust by the Roguelite slop mill.

Decent enough game, but the developer promised an update and abandoned it instead.

Been playing on and off since Early Access and had high hopes and enjoyed it for a while but every year dev failed to give meaningful updateS. It's 2025 dev has no other known projects and cannot finish a pixel game that has been in development since before 2020. SHAMEFUL

A pixelart masterpiece where you fight the embodiment of nightmares tooth and nail. Scrounge for a broken bottle to fight off the sniffling gardener because you didn't visit doge mart. Lead an army of gullible students you rizzed to defeat the class of 1971. Dig through the trash to prove your local ramen shop is overrated. Become cursed to always fail, defy the lizard god, feel something wriggling under your skin, get lost in another dimension, and win anyway.

As someone who came to love the game from finding out about it years ago, I have to say you should not buy this game for the sole fact that you should not reward the behavior of this Developer. This game is still not completed even after finally coming out of early access, where it's been in over years. Many features and quality of life features are still not in the game, the Dev has been radio silent since February of 2024 only now in June of 2025 to drop a tone deaf post shilling overpriced merch with no news on the future status of the game. This game could have been A classic if it's potential wasn't wasted over years of letting it die in A corner collecting dust.

I really wanted to like this game man. The art and atmosphere is really good, but that's kind of this game's only draw. The gameplay is incredibly shallow. Only 20 mysteries, which don't change at all between playthroughs, and you see 5 every run. On my 3rd run I got 3 repeat mysteries, meaning over half of my playthrough was exactly the same as before. Combat is literally just you clicking the same three buttons every turn. Either dodge & attack (maybe prepare your attack too if you're feeling spicy!), or just attack. The end of a run, the lighthouse, is also incredibly anticlimactic. There are "trials" that just check if certain stats are high enough, and if you fail you just take a little damage. This would be cool if it was buttering you up for a boss fight, but once you reach the top floor of the lighthouse the run just ends, a winner is you. It's like, "oh i'm done lol" Maybe it's more interesting on a higher difficulty? I've only played Initiate. I just imagine the higher difficulties maybe needing you to click Rest a few more times though. I'm still beating my runs with a healthy margin of Doom leftover. Something that might also be fixed by higher difficulty but I don't have the drive to bother finding out: Each mystery has multiple endings, but except in the tutorial I've never gotten any ending lower than Ending A. Which is so lame because I wasn't really trying at all. I just stumbled into the golden ending each time and it felt unearned. I feel bad giving this a bad review, because the game is really pretty and the premise is excellent, but it just isn't worth $20.