The Real Horror is the Friends You Made Along the Way: Let's Play World of Horror

[Erisin]

What is World of Horror?

The Steam page states that “WORLD OF HORROR is a roguelite style horror RPG that challenges players to investigate a series of creepy and unusual occurrences arising in the town of Shiokawa, and consequently survive a cruel gauntlet of battles and challenges against the machinations of the Old Gods." The main game involves solving 5 separate mysteries, after which one may confront the Old God who is the main villain of their playthrough. Events that occur and the mysteries one receives are randomized, meaning that each playthrough of the game is different. World of Horror is heavily inspired by Junji Ito and Japanese urban legends, meaning that if you know those you should have some idea what you're getting into.

What makes this game good?
The main selling point of this game in my opinion is the atmosphere. Despite being designed entirely in MS Paint and looking like a DOS game, the art, gameplay and sound design helps create an experience that is unlike any other game I have played. The game also is immensely replayable, as on harder difficulties once you understand the flow of al the mysteries, it turns into a difficult RPG that involves heavy metagaming in order to complete.

How do you plan to LP a roguelite game?

While it'll be an incredible hassle to organize and record every single event and outcome that can occur within World of Horror, I intend to create a narrative playthrough with each individual character. I'll try to cover as much different ground with each one, and then I may cover extra material outside of these narratives. This is intended to be a fairly comprehensive but not a 100% completion of the game.

What makes you qualified to LP this game?

This is going to be my first LP ever, so not much, other than my experience with the game itself. Let me know if you have any suggestions for improving this LP.

Content Warnings

World of Horror contains multiple images of body horror and events where characters may commit suicide. These images may be shocking despite being a pixel art game, so if you are squeamish, you may not want to give this thread a read. I personally think that World of Horror tends to be on the tamer side of horror games, but YMMV so you have been warned.

One Last Notice

World of Horror is an early access game, meaning that some aspects of it will be incomplete. I believe there's enough of the game that it can be successfully LPed, but I will note when there's parts that will most likely be changed or added in the future.

As this is a narrative LP, I'll be making up a bit of story and characterization myself. Anything that is part of the game will be in normal text.
Any commentary or dialogue by me will be italicized.

Table of Contents
Introduction: Reporting's a Fine Job Mate (School Scissors Ending A)
Introduction.5: Kouji Never Leaves a Job Unfinished (School Scissors Ending B/C + Combat Mechanics)

[Erisin]

Introduction: Reporting's a Fine Job, Mate

Disclaimer

While this may be Kouji Tagawa's story, I'll give him a full run on a later date, when the save/load function gets re-implemented in the next update. This is here to give you all a small taste of what WOH is like, before we get into further depth. Basically a teaser/trial update.

BGM: Title Screen



Here's the title screen. We're going to click on the NEW STORY option.

BGM: Mode Select



This leads us to this menu of run choices. We can worry about these later - I'll just be following the on-screen advice and going with the "SPINE-CHILLING STORY OF SCHOOL SCISSORS" option. This lets us play a singular mystery as a sort of appetizer - eventually we'll be clearing these 5 at a time. You can see our man Kouji Tagawa sweating on the left portrait.

BGM: Home

As a side note, the OST dynamically shifts speed dependent on what screen you're on. The music I'm listening to on this screen is actually slightly slower and pitched down from the one linked - I don't know any good way to share the slightly different music.



Clicking on the button brings us to the rest screen. We'll only be here briefly this time, but you'll see this screen many times later on in this LP. Let's look around some of the menus before we click on the Story So Far. The game starts us off looking at our status and our Spell List, of which we can see that we have the spell Cauterize.

The Status Screen holds many important details for our character. I'll list them out here.

STA (Stamina) represents our physical health. Let it drop to 0, and we die, netting us a game over.
REA (Reason) represents our mental health. Let it drop to 0, and we go insane, also netting us a game over.

These act as our two main health bars.

The game also has DND type stats that can be seen around Kouji's character portrait. These are somewhat self-explanatory, but I'll list them here as well.

STR (Strength) represents our physical strength. It's used to in any checks that require hard physical exertion, and is also the stat checked for most weapons.
DEX (Dexterity) represents our physical agility. It's used to in any checks that require fast movement, quick reactions or precise actions.
PER (Perception) represents our ability to perceive things. It's used to in any checks that require noticing objects out of place.
KNW (Knowledge) represents our intelligence. It's used to in any checks that require knowing something or solving something.
CHA (Charisma) represents our ability to persuade people. It's used to in any checks that require interacting with others. No weapons scale off this stat.
FND (Funds) represents our current funds. It's not really a true stat, but instead tracks our money.
LUK (Luck) is a hidden stat that is used for Luck checks. Anything that doesn't fall into any other category usually checks this - there's not much you can do about this stat for the most part.

6-7 tends to be an average value for a stat, characterizing our man Kouji smart, strong and perceptive, but a bit slow.

Finally, not on our status screen but similarly important is the DOOM meter. This is visible on the top of the screen, and goes up to 100%. Once it hits that value, your run ends. It acts as sort of a timer, but we won't have to worry about it during this clear. While it takes a lot longer to game over due to DOOM, it is much harder to recover than REA or STA.

I don't want your eyes to glaze over yet, so we'll go over more mechanics later.



Alright, just need one more good article and I should have enough for next week's paper. OH THAT REMINDS ME.



You knew your friend was up to something when he left you his notebook full of cryptic notes. 'I can send her back where she belongs' he claimed.
After he disappeared too, you decided to study the notebook for clues. It details a ritual that can stop the wicked woman once and for all. What's the worst thing that could happen?

Shinji was always a bit of a doofus. Let me go clean that up real quick.

BGM: School Mystery



At the bottom of the text box we have our 4 options for exploring the mystery. These are:

ACCESS YOUR STORAGE
EXPLORE SCHOOL
PERFORM THE RITUAL
CHECK OUT THE SCHOOL LOCKERS

I think I'll go canvas the surroundings before exploring the school any further.

ACCESS YOUR STORAGE



Let's see what Shinji was up to before he left.



Aaaaaand my friends managed to mess it up twice in a row. At least we got some useful-looking info out of it.

CHECK OUT THE SCHOOL LOCKERS



I think I'll check the ones with sigils on them. Classic horror indicators, really.



BUH

-1 REA



Nice, a wooden bat. I'll equip it just in case.



Guess my rampant looting ends here. I'LL BE BACK FOR YOU LATER.

PERFORM THE RITUAL

The ritual is not ready.

And I guess we're ready to go now.

EXPLORE THE SCHOOL





Seen enough horror movies at this point to know that going off with the creepy peeps is a bad idea.

decline



Then again, I think accepting would be in my arm's best interest.

help her



Ugliest baby I've ever seen.



Someone has to clean up this mess.

EXPLORE THE SCHOOL





stare in disbelief



Ugliest math proof I've ever seen, too.



If you noticed, we got a new option on this menu.

PEEK OUTSIDE



SCREW YOU TOO, DUDE.

You shouldn't risk that again.

EXPLORE THE SCHOOL

In the interest of saving space. I'll usually start omitting the transition screens for events. They usually don't do anything. Usually.



I'm just gonna... if I don't see them they don't see me.

try to sneak



AGH. MY EMPLOYABILITY NO at least these are some sweet tats.

We got cursed and the curse now shows up on our status screen, along with on our character. Cursed signs, huh? Let's take a look at what that means.



This could be bad if we were doing a full playthrough. For us it functionally is a sweet head tattoo though.



Pressing the 1 and 2 buttons let us change the foreground and the background of the sigil on the chalkboard.

There we go and wait a second. I recall it looking a bit different in the diary, lemme just



As a side note, the it should be correct message has shown for me sometimes when it's incorrect. If you want to clear this mystery with the best ending just double check for yourself.

EXPLORE THE SCHOOL



Stole from some lockers, might as well steal from the school while we're at it.

And another event which needs a tiny key. Very tragic.

break the window to grab it



Who's gonna report it missing? Not me for sure.



Think someone out there has made a 'snapping scissors asmr video'?. Just curious.

EXPLORE THE SCHOOL



The music slows down dramatically at this portion, leading into...

BGM: School Combat



our first encounter. I'll create a full combat breakdown later, but for now you'll get a primer.

I KNEW I SHOULDN'T HAVE TRUSTED THAT SUBSTITUTE TEACHER!

On the top left you can see our enemy stats. The Forgotten Specimen has

14 HP: Pretty self explanatory - knock it down to 0 and we win, though sometimes there's other methods of winning as well.
-1 REA: The projected damage per turn of the enemy, assuming it uses normal attacks. Enemies will sometimes do other actions instead.
20 power: The difficulty of hitting the enemy. The formula using this is kind of funky, but for us it is reducing our hit chance by 10%

On the bottom right, we have our time gauge and our action menu. The time gauge measures how many actions we can take per turn - we can sequence up as many actions as we want (up to 8) but each one costs a certain amount of time, and we cannot go over 200 total time units. We're looking at our offensive combat options right now, and I'll only take a look at these for now.

KICK: Confusingly represented by the punch icon, this unarmed strike has a fixed chance to hit - we cannot change its accuracy with our levels, though it will scale with enemy power. It normally does 2 damage.
ATTACK WITH YOUR WEAPON: This is your standard attack, and is dependent off your weapon. Our bat does 4 damage with a 60% chance to hit.
STRONG ATTACK This attack costs more time than your normal attack, but does more damage. Our bat has a strong attack for 6 damage with 60% chance to hit.
PREPARE YOUR ATTACK: Guarantees your next hit.
SHOOT: Only available with a firearm equipped. We don't have one for now.
ATTACK BOOST: Each attack boost costs less than to prepare an attack, but it only boosts accuracy by 10%.

Action speed scales off a stat depending on an action. The higher a stat, the less time it takes to do. In our case, our bat's speed depends on its strength, leaving us with a cost of 59t for a normal swing and 92t for a strong swing.

Accuracy scales off your character's level - our character is level 1. Each level grants 10% more accuracy. The accuracy for a normal and strong swing is always the same.

The obvious thing to do in combat is to minmax your character's damage per turn - it isn't always the correct choice, but it'll do for now.




I do 3 normal attacks with a couple of attack boosts weaved in. This means our first hit should deal 4 damage with a 60% chance, and our next 2 deal 4 each for 70%.



2 of our blows land, leaving the Forgotten Specimen at 6 hp. He deals 1 reason damage to us in return.

Woulda hit the first one if it wasn't for the sun in my eyes.

With 6 hp left, we can prepare/attack + prepare/attack to kill him this turn. In retrospect, I should've also done this last turn to guarantee a 2 turn kill. I forget to grab a screenshot of this, woops. Anyway,

EAT BAT. Heh, eat bat. I'm so clever.



In combat, we go first followed by our enemy. This means that if we kill an enemy we prevent damage for that turn, with one exception that we'll go over much later. This encounter also dropped us an item, which I'm pretty sure is guaranteed.



Ah. Wonderful.



Don't think I'll be using this anytime soon.

BGM: School Mystery



It's time. I'm ready. Let's do this.

PERFORM THE RITUAL



This part is accompanied by some loud banging noises which were spooky the first time I played. Listening to it as I type out this update is more irritating, though.

WHO GOES THERE.



This screen has the Scissors Lady over there reform her face as you enter the screen. Didn't catch it this time, but I'll try to grab it next time we do this mystery.

SHINJI SCAMMED ME I THOUGHT IT WAS SUPPOSED TO STOP HER ENTIRELY



y'know uh beauty is in the eye of the beholder

BGM: School Combat



Scissors Lady is significantly more threatening than brain jar boy, featuring 6 more power and dealing 2 damage to both our reason and stamina. 20 hp means that we'll need at least 3 turns to kill her.

Learning from my mistakes in the last fight, I go for the trust prep/attack combo. You can save combos with the save icon, letting you load them in following turns if you so wish.




HEY BATTA BATTA HEY BATTA BATTA SWING



Only 2 more turns for the guaranteed kill, let's not mess this up now.



Your character portrait changes as your STA or REA decreases. Kouji has bags under his eyes now. One more swing and



Is this bat made outta rock cause it sure beat scissors.



Shinji, you really think I'd let you off your 15 dollar debt? Let's get outta here before the cops ask more questions.



No clue why this screen in particular got shrunk but oh well

Another mystery solved, another scoop collected, as my old man would say.

Because we're doing the tutorial mission, our adventure ends here for now. This update covered a good amount to what a mystery might entail, and I hope you enjoyed it. It might not seem too hard for now, but trust me, we're brushing over the mechanics of the game.

And that's all for this update, folks. But what if we messed up the ritual? Find out on the next mini-update, coming out as soon as it's ready.

[Erisin]

AH I MESSED UP SIZING MY ANIMS I'll fix that after I take a break been working on this one for a while
edit: and also I'll use pngs next time

[clearcardinal]

This reminds me a bit of Detention. Look forward to future updates!

[JamieTheD]

World of Horror is a fun ol' game about beating cosmic horrors. I still come back to it every now and again to see how it's doing. And I do love its take on Ito-esque, Lovecraft-esque, and urban legend-esque enemies. Because obviously, this is the Scissor Woman, well known in ghost stories for either fatally stabbing people, or cutting their faces in much the same way hers was in life, given a wider smile before she took her own life, then started going round asking people if they're beautiful.

Protip: Do not answer this question.

[Robindaybird]

Oh this game is pretty amazing even if some things are kind of obtuse - I thiiiiiink I 100% what's available now, but I'm here to look at people's reactions

[Erisin]

Small Update:

Combination of getting busy with a new class I'm teaching and holiday shenanigans and the delay on the planned pre-christmas update by Panstasz (being the sole developer does that) means that I still haven't had a chance to put out an update. I'm still working on something but also I want to be up to date with any planned mechanics changes and I've just been swamped. You should be able to expect something new early January.

[Kibayasu]

Hope things are going well, just read through the first post there. That's actually quite a bit different the last time I saw someone go through the tutorial scenario. Wonder what else has changed since the last time.