World of Horror review - atmospheric retro dread as fleeting as a nightmare

Come, take a flick through World of Horror's rolodex of nightmares; see faces flayed by vengeful wives, wild-eyed teachers with rictus grins, soul-bartering telemarketers, trypophobia-inducing latticework rendered across human skin, and other lurid things.

It is 198X and the world is on the cusp of a technological revolution (and Eldritch annihilation, but we'll get to that in a bit), caught between the superstitions of the old world and the suspicions of the new; a place where diabolical rituals are still performed by the light of the moon, while Bulletin Board Systems send murderous dial-up messages from beyond the veil. It's also a world immediately indebted, both visually and tonally, to manga horror master Junji Ito, whose stories of everyday mundanity succumbing to grotesque excess here shape countless original horrors drawing upon influences as wide as Lovecraft, Japanese folklore, urban legends, and creepy pasta. Yet for all its reverential pilfering, World of Horror - which technically falls under the banner of rogue-like RPG, even if its text-heavy, point-and-click design feels like something else entirely - still manages to conjure a wonderfully idiosyncratic mood of its own.

A lot of that is down to its grungy, lo-fi presentation, of course, with World of Horror's retro aesthetic evoking the feeling of a cursed computer game running on an ancient desktop machine spat up from the very depths of hell; it's minimalism and maximalism slammed together in uneasy ways, a jostling interface paired with sparsely evocative text married to an engulfing chiptune drone underscoring a stark 1-bit art style that's all the more sinister in the horrifying details its two-tone colour palette can't quite adequately convey. It's utterly cohesive in its unsettling chaos and entirely appropriate to the game's inherently fragmentary form.

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