DrowZ reviews: World of Horror and Phasmophobia

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For the second entry in The Cement Mixer's unnamed month of horror, I decided to bounce around a couple of horror games: World of Horror and Phasmophobia. I actually have also been playing Darkwood, but I wound up writing that piece for another website, which I'll link to in a future post.

World of Horror is an early access indie adventure game reminiscent of old DOS RPGs and Junji Ito's work where you are tasked with keeping an ancient god from waking up and destroying the world by solving mysteries in a small Japanese town. Developed by Pantasz and published by Ysbryd Games, World of Horror is a stylishly chilling little roguelike RPG that filled me with intrigue.

Mechanically, World of Horror is multiple a game of rolling dice and meter management. You have a handful of stats, like something you'd find in a tabletop RPG. You often won't see anything that's not your two health stats, reason and stamina, being applied. But repetition and context clues aid you in conquering anything that may come your way. That, however, doesn't make the gameplay too deep.

You start a campaign and are assigned five mysteries, but you don't really do much solving. It's more like you're reading a novel and every time you head to the marked location, you get to turn the page. The writing is suitably creepy, reading every event for the first time is definitely a highlight.

The art and writing are easily World of Horror's greatest strengths, you'll encounter some mind-bending sights throughout your adventures and the game is well suited to help you soak it in, and the 2bit aesthetic manages to amplify as opposed to detract as it really feels like you're messing around with something cursed.

But while I was enjoying the experience, the whole game felt a bit samey. After you beat a run you unlock new sets of event cards, but I still wound up stumbling across the same events one too many times. I'd try and take a different path to get to a different ending, but at that point I'd returned to the game's mechanics, and without that mystery World of Horror became a survival horror RPG where you make decisions based on numbers.

Honestly, I expected to come into this game with far more praise but as I'm writing about it, I'm finding that I think the game would be better suited to something a bit more linear. The mysteries always play out the same few ways, it's just the random encounters that can be different, and since those are from a deck you can run into the same ones over and over again. It's good for consistency but poor for repeat playthroughs. Right now it feels like there should be some bigger mystery to tie it all together - as anything that's in the game right now just leads to an alternate bonus. Once you've beaten the evil once you've beaten it a thousand times. 

Because World Of Horror is in early access, I do think it can improve across the board - what's there now is compelling, there just needs to be more variance.

Also, this happened and that's real cool.

3.5/5

The second game I've been playing is a recent fad: Phasmophobia.

Phasmophobia is an early access horror game developed by Kinetic Games. It's janky, like really janky. Probably because the game's been built by a single person so I'm not going to be too mean to it.

In Phasmophobia you and up to three others are tasked with investigating haunted locales and determining the kind of specter that occupies them with an arsenal of ghost hunting tools that you probably got from five-below. In each round you scour the place with thermometers and TV remotes searching for the creepy thing, performing test and check with everything you have until you finally have enough to narrow down the list of possible ghoulies to one.

In its best moments, Phasmophobia is an immersive, ghost hunting sim, at it's worst it's just a walking simulator where a static model slides at you and plays croak.mp3 on repeat. In multiplayer it's a hilarious model viewer.

In my six or so hours of gameplay, Phasmophobia has paralyzed me, but that's also not hard to do. I ride skateboards by sitting on them. What the game has usually done is frustrate me with it's four separate interact keys and bore me until I go back to laughing at the janky animations.

The game isn't good, but it sure is great with friends and the developer is working on improvements. Right now that's it's only draw for me - I'm never going to play this by myself and if I were I'd be playing some other horror game. As it stands now, playing alone just means you mash on keys and walk into rooms until you hear one of twelve sound effects.

 2/5 

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Hey guys, DrowZ here!
I'm kinda short on time in general so the patreon thing isn't ready yet, but I'll put it up in a separate post instead.

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Happy Halloween!