Nightmare Fuel / World of Horror

aM I bEaUtIfUl?

World of Horror is essentially what happens when you put the works of H. P. Lovecraft and Junji Ito in a blender. You can see where we are going with this.

Unmarked spoilers below!

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• All of the Old Gods. It's made clear at the outset that they are unstoppable, and the best you can do is buy time. In order...
  • Cthac-Atorasu is an extremely giant spider that rises every 300 years to feed on mankind. Should you fail to stop it from hatching, it webs up the entire world, forcing everyone to wait for their turn (days, months, even years) before they are finally devoured.
  • Ithotu appears to be the most "normal" of the Old Gods; a mass of flames locked away within a Greek statue. But should you be unsuccessful in keeping it sealed, it burns the entire city of Shiokawa to the ground, killing you and everyone in it.
  • Ath-Yolazsth is a Giant Eye of Doom heavily inspired by Remina itself. If it awakens, it's outright stated that it will consume the Earth within 10 years and there's nothing you can do about it.
  • Goizo takes the cake though. A tentacle monster that primarily attacks through mirrors. And if it manages to break free? Enjoy a close-up of some Eye Scream. And the death message carries the implication that it also eats people.
  • Ygothaeg, a massive axolotl-like creature that was awakened by Pacific nuclear tests, has arguably the most dangerous ability of all, forbidding the player from visiting certain locations while investigating, lest they anger it and raise the Doom meter. And when the Doom meter reaches 100% with it? Its gaze becomes so complete and impossible to resist that it forces the entirety of the populace of Shiokawa to drown themselves, with the rest of the world likely suffering similar fates as well.
  • While the Herald of the Shattered Court lacks horrifying imagery (the most you see of the Old God is something resembling deformed brass instruments), it still manages to be terrifying. For one, the flavor text states that it's "inviting" everyone in Shiokawa to a ball held by the Shattered Court, and that they will attend whether they want to or not. Certain events even imply it's taking control of people to do so. And should you reach 100% Doom with it summoned, the party begins, the Nobles of the Shattered Court walk the streets of Shiokawa to feast on its people, and the survivors, your character included, are kidnapped by the Shattered Court, never to be seen again.
  • Ktu-Rufu, the Dreaming. AKA: Cthulhu by another name, with a healthy blend of Azathoth, since all of Shiokawa, and maybe the rest of the universe, is the result of him dreaming, his stirrings slowly crumbling reality apart like sand. And what happens when he wakes up? Exactly that: He wakes up, the dream of Shiokawa ends, and you and everyone you know vanish along with it.
• Quite a few of the mysteries are pretty horrifying; even the happy endings some have frequently carry disturbing implications.
  • "Spine-Chilling Story of School Scissors", which serves as the game's tutorial, is a good tone-setter for what you're in for: it has you exploring the school, looking for a way to stop a monster called the Scissor Woman from terrorizing the school and killing your friend. While performing the ritual correctly weakens her enough to be properly defeated and saves your friend's life, doing it wrong has her attack you at full strength; even if you win the fight, your friend's fate goes unmentioned and the Scissor Woman is implied to possess your character through the scissors they pick up after beating her.
    • The Scissor Woman herself is pretty terrifying, being a woman with a creepy multi-faced head and a Glasgow Grin running between its mouths (and that's in Timeline A: if you pick Timeline B, she's instead the giant Tomie-style column of heads seen in the page image). She gets worse is you fail to exorcise her properly, and worse still if encountered after the school gets burnt down in one of the other mysteries. If you're not careful during your fight against her, you'll end up with a Glasgow Grin of your own.
  • "Bizarre Bruit of the Blood-Curdling Botanist" has you tracking down Shiro-san, a gardener who went missing after ordering a massive supply of a new fertilizer. You end up having to rescue him from a swarm of hostile plant monsters, but that's no the creepy part. If you complete the side quest, you learn about a mutated strain of Cordyceps fungus that's managed to infect rats, and completing it unlocks the combat option "W-WHAT'S THAT?" Choose it, and you take a closer look at Shiro-san... and the top of his head flies off, revealing his brain has been taken over by a gruesome Puppeteer Parasite, which you then have to fight. For added Fridge Horror, if you rescue Shiro-san without discovering his infection, you get the C Ending where you manage to escape, but he goes missing... presumably so the fungus can spread its spores.
  • "Vicious Verses of A Violent Vigil" has you called to a mansion for a vigil for your supposed grand-uncle, surrounded by strangers and asked to perform unusual tasks. Then everyone disappears. Then reality starts to break apart. Worse still, failing to perform the tasks asked of you sees the other guests turned into hideous monsters and ends with everyone dead but you and your "grand-uncle", who reveals he caused all the chaos in order to return to life. Even one of the endings where he's defeated still has you as potentially the only survivor.
  • "Eerie Episode of Evolving Eels" has you and your neighbor Kana investigating another one of your neighbors after Kana sees him bringing strange eels into his apartment. Nothing too disturbing at first... but then Kana goes missing. Following them into the neighbor's apartment reveals that the eels laid eggs in your neighbor's eye, which killed him when they hatched. Kana now has them in their own eye, too, and the only way to save them is to pierce their eye with a needle. And you, the player, have to control the needle to stab Kana's eye out, causing the tiny eels to crawl all over their face.
  • "Macabre Memoir of Morbid Mermaids" is one of the more "mundane" mysteries, but no less horrifying; it involves a number of disappeared students, suspected to be kidnapped by a school janitor obsessed with mermaids. Eventually, you discover where he's taken them and what he's done to them; he cuts the students in half and sews fish tails onto the lower halves of their bodies. You ultimately fail to save his latest victim, and he corners you, intending to make you his next victim.
    • While some of the mystery's endings are fairly standard, Ending B stands out; you open a manhole to escape only for a real "mermaid" to come through the sewer and devour the janitor, musing how he got it wrong and "the fish half should be on top". Accompanied by an image of the horrifically deformed Deep One.
  • Ending E is also pretty creepy, if only for the implications: instead of fighting the janitor, you can offer up one of your allies to him. The Janitor then proceeds to devour them and let you go, with it being heavily implied that he continues his murder spree completely unscathed while your character is left haunted by what they've done. This ending effectively renders everything you've done throughout the mystery one big case of Shoot the Shaggy Dog, all because you chickened out at the last minute. Hope you're happy with yourself.
  • "Horrible History of Household Hell" has you investigating the mysterious deaths of a family who killed each other in a secluded mansion. After a prolonged sequence of exploring the mansion, you eventually stumble upon some caves that lead out into the sea. In the worst ending (which is also the easiest to get), this is as far as you go; you never find out exactly what happened. In the "good" endings, however you discover what drove the family insane; an immense Eldritch Abomination called Oetaru, which your character has now awakened. At this point, your only options are to run and let it rampage, or sacrifice one of your allies to appease it; not only is it utterly invincible to most attacks, but staying in the fight for too long automatically kills you, complete with a unique death scene ripe with Eye Scream and Body Horror.
  • "Far-Out Fable of Fear Festival" has the player character travel to a village in the woods that is holding a festival. It already starts out creepy with the player character noticing one of the villagers have strangely claw-like hands. Various mysterious things happen culminating in the player character finding the village abandoned and covered with blood. Then the player needs to travel through the forest on a Timed Mission to see if there are any survivors. If they succeed in time they are captured by the local cult and brought towards one who reveals they are player character's aunt who invited them, and they need one last sacrifice. You then get a scene where a weird misshapen giant humanoid slowly rises out of a hole. Thankfully it is stopped by a mysterious undercover person shooting the high priestess. However in the other ending if the player takes too long they find that the scene is being scoured by mysterious men in gas masks with no evidence of the cult or survivors. This brings up the implication that either these gas masked people came in and exterminated them all, survivors included, or they failed and that weird being from the other ending is now released into the world.
  • While it lacks any outright horrifying imagery, the "Bloody Brief of a Beckoning Bulletin" mystery is quite scary as it involves an increasing cased of suicides tied to people using an internet bulletin board. What makes this scary is that as you investigate it becomes apparent that whatever is causing the suicides makes those afflicted want to willingly do it. At the climax of the mystery you hook up to the bulletin board and even the player character quickly falls victim to the Compelling Voice and almost kills themselves for it. Worse yet there are a couple endings where the player can fail to stop it, causing suicides to continue to skyrocket and spread all over Japan. Even the "best" ending has you convince it to leave humanity alone until the Internet becomes more widespread, where it will gladly come back to complete its Assimilation Plot.
  • Similarly, your character slowly slipping into empty listlessness in "Restless Rumors of a Residential Recluse" as the apartment grows more malevolent can be extremely unnerving, particularly when the narration drops out entirely. It's particularly disturbing for anyone who's experienced severe depression or come close to the Hikikomori situation that the title alludes to — unlike most of the events in the game, aside from the supernatural element the events of this mystery could actually happen.
  • "Worrying Write-up of a Wordless Ward" features you meeting up with a friend who was undergoing surgery at the local hospital. You're confined to the hospital for the whole five days the mystery takes place over, and each day ends with you visiting your friend as they say more and more cryptic things, like talking about "how beautiful you are" and "how they can't wait for you to see the results of the surgery". Never mind the fact that one of the days ends with your friend jumpscaring you and telling you not to leave yet, the ending of the mystery may well be one of the most horrifying of them all: the surgery your friend underwent was the first phase of a plan to steal your identity, and you end up in a boss fight against your friend, with their appearance being based on whatever character you chose. If you run away from the fight, you abruptly wake up in a hospital bed, ready to dismiss the whole thing as All Just a Dream... but it's all but stated that your friend somehow pulled a Grand Theft Me and left you in their altered body. If you win, you get so pissed at the betrayal, you bash your slain friend's head into a bloody pulp completely unrecognizable as a human head... then the commotion rouses the other patients of the ward from their rooms, revealing that your friend had convinced them to copy your face too.
  • "Perilous Parable of the Peculiar Painting" has you exploring a mansion after an artist you admire invites you in. It starts off harmless enough, with you even meeting a fellow patron of the arts along the way and exploring the mansion with them. However, near the end, you meet the artist in question, and he asks you to leave him alone with your new friend for a bit. If you refuse, the painting he was in the process of creating comes to life and attacks you. If you agree and leave the room, when you come back you find your new friend is gone. Why? Because the artist murdered her, and now she's stuck in the painting he was creating. The painting now depicts the same eldritch horror from the first ending, but with your friend in its grasp and a wide-open mouth. And to really make matters worse, the artist then forces you to take the painting home.
• Some of the enemies one can encounter while exploring are quite disturbing.
  • The Aspiring Model, a masked woman who attacks you with a knife, intending to cut your face off to use as a new mask. Striking her causes the mask she's already wearing to fall off, not only revealing she has no facial skin of her own, but also pissing her off badly enough to sharply boost her attack power and potentially making her just as scary as an opponent as she is in concept.
    "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE! MY FACE... IT'S RUINED!!"
  • Jane Doe, a brutally mutilated corpse who rises to attack you during an event while exploring the hospital's morgue.
  • The Class of 1971, a twisted monstrosity assembled from the corpses of a class of high school students who fell into the sea.
  • The Hole-Ridden Thing, a formerly-human monster so horrifically mutated that it has the Beast label instead of the Human one. Worse, being attacked by it causes you to start developing the same holes on your body.
  • The Forgotten Specimen, a bizarre creature encountered in the school that psychically drives you to self-harm and had already killed a teacher before you arrived.
  • Twisted Corpse, the ghost of a man who died on the stairs in your apartment building, with a grotesquely broken neck and a twisted smile. Like all ghosts, it's impervious to normal attacks, making it very dangerous unless you know the proper rituals or have the right weapons.
  • Burning Man, a man surrounded by flames that has burnt his skin black, which can appear and attack you during an event of the beach.
  • Vengeful Athlete, a student who was murdered and seemingly buried on the school grounds, whose face has been brutally disfigured.
• The backstories also deserve some mention, as while they only serve as a setpiece for the gameplay as a whole and don't really have any scary imagery, the implications behind them are enough sometimes.
  • Hunted By The Cult: Apparently, at some point you pissed off a cult serving the Old God, and now they're trying to hunt you down and kill you. Choosing this backstory also makes it so every time you check your mailbox, you find it stuffed full of animal guts.
    THEY KNOW
  • The Seventh Curse: Your family made a Deal with the Devil at some point in your past, and now everyone around you is fated to die. This comes up in gameplay as being unable to recruit human allies (you can still recruit the dog), because every time you do, they immediately meet some grisly end. Imagine trying to befriend someone who you know has never had friends, only to quickly find out why they were always so alone. Not even plot-relevant allies like Kana and Eimi are safe: they die as soon as you start a new mystery, and while this is obviously done to avoid making the game Unintentionally Unwinnable, it's easy to interpret it as whatever/whoever's behind the curse deciding to mess with you by giving you a chance at companionship only to rip it away once you start getting attached.
  • Eldritch Parasite: Something is growing inside of you, and while it helps out by giving you dramatically increased Stamina and Reason, you can't heal at all, giving the implication that this thing is preventing you from stopping whatever it's doing to your body. To make matters worse, any time you do anything, you have a chance to see a message that simply states "The parasite stirs." suddenly appear in the chat log.
• The Something Truly Evil series of events. What starts as a seemingly innocuous event (such as looking at a painting, checking your mail or talking to a neighbor) eventually leads to you being stalked by an unknown, malevolent entity. As it draws closer, more and more parts of the interface are replaced with pictures of it, up to and including your own character. Once it finally chooses to attack, you're locked into an unwinnable battle with it; all you can do is repeatedly sacrifice Stamina and Reason to it (while it continues attacking as normal), hoping it's eventually satisfied and goes away. It's also possible to be stalked by the creature more than once in a single playthrough.
  • The fight against Something Truly Evil is worth mentioning in more detail. As soon as you attract the attention of the creature, random investigations will draw it closer, with messages saying things like it "has you in its grasp" and it "has your scent now". Once it's close enough, any investigation runs the risk of it attacking you. Once it decides to strike, the date in the corner of the screen is replaced with "FOUND YOU", and the description for the encounter reads as such.
    In the distance, the bell tolls and everything gets dark...
    [YOUR
    DEMISE
    IS HERE]
  • The entire fight drives in how truly outmatched you are by this eldritch creature, and how it's just toying with you the entire way. Underneath its name in the fight is a black bar that read "I'VE FINALLY FOUND YOU". All your spells are replaced with "FOUND YOU". Your only options in combat are "SUFFER FOR ME", "CRY FOR ME", "BLEED FOR ME", "GIVE UP FOR ME", and "DIE FOR ME", all of which sacrifice Stamina and Reason to Something Truly Evil. The combat log reads "SOMETHING TRULY EVIL REQUIRES MORE" whenever you make an action that sacrifices something to the creature, and "SOMETHING TRULY EVIL WILL END YOU!" when it attacks. Even if you manage to give Something Truly Evil enough Stamina and Reason to make it leave you alone, the action to finally run away reads "Something Truly Evil is sated... For now.", giving the very obvious impression that this thing will come back for you some day now that it knows you exist.
  • Worse still, resting at any point while you've attracted the attention of this creature will raise its event meter by 1 with every rest, complete with a lovely image of Something Truly Evil on the computer screen of your home and a message reading "SOMETHING TRULY EVIL KNOWS WHERE YOU LIVE".
  • Almost every other enemy has a reason or motive behind their attacks. The Aspiring Model needs to replace her face; the Vengeful Athlete thinks you're the one who murdered her; even the Horrible Old Man is trying to complete his Deal with the Devil to stay alive. Something Truly Evil has no reason to come after you. All you did was see a picture of it. Something Truly Evil is the only pointlessly malevolent being in the game. It's literally just pure evil.
  • And depending on the choices you make, you can attract the attention of Something Truly Evil, only for it to never attack you. Throughout the rest of the run, you're just left waiting for it to throw down the gauntlet and strike...and it never does.
• The Shiba Inu shopkeeper is normally a Precious Puppy. So why is it here? Let's just say that it isn't a wise idea to ask it to restock at 100% Doom... and if you do so anyway? You are minced and cooked into dog treats.
• If you visit the History Club one time too many, their President strips down and murders the player character in cold blood, presumably sacrificing them. This is required to unlock Toshiaki.
• The Official Launch Trailer features animated scenes of terror that the player characters face, such as Haru fending off the Apartment Stalker with only a broken bottle, Aiko riding a train stained in blood (which was full of masked people just a few seconds ago), Kouji getting slashed by the Scissor Woman, and Kirie falling victim to "SOMETHING TRULY EVIL", all before culminating in a shot of the Old Gods looming over Shiokawa.
• Go ahead, Alt+Tab out of the game to look up a guide. Going back in greets you with a split second shot of a man with a creepy bloody grin. You have to do this once to unlock an achievement. Thankfully, once you do get the achievement, you can simply choose not to have him appear.
• The Seamstress event is freaky. Succeed the skill check, and you get a brief Jump Scare of the Seamstress's Nightmare Face and a random spell/a sewing kit. Fail the skill check, and you just get a creepy Jump Scare.
  The Seamstress: iVe fOuNd yOu aT lAsT...
• The game's soundtrack contains a track called [FOUND YOU], which is just one second of nonsensical noise. That is, until you put it through a spectrogram, revealing THIS.