YMMV / World of Horror

• Accidental Aesop: Smoking is not only bad, but actively harmful to your health. It's also a money drain, with the need to constantly spend money on it or suffer withdrawal. Adding to this, the only natural smoker is borderline non-functional in combat without a nicotine high. It's been joked that World of Horror isn't a cosmic horror game but an anti-smoking PSA.
• Adorkable: Toshiaki's appearance just screams adorkable, constantly sporting shy puppy-dog eyes that make him look endearingly awkward and cute. His challenge even has him mistake a cookbook for the Necronomicon, which further adds to his dorkiness.
• Awesome Music: The game has quite a few catchy tracks, both fitting the theming of the case where they play, and to overall the Cosmic Horror theming of the game, while also feeling like it could be something you could hear on an old computer.
• Breather Level:
  • "Eerie Episode of Evolving Eels" is a relatively simple mystery with no mandatory combat encounters, with a sidequest completely unrelated to the mystery's endings and thus optional. You'll be accompanied by Kana, who is one of the best followers in the game since they can reduce the damage you take by 1. The best ending, at the cost of 3 reason, allows you to keep Kana as a permanent companion.
  • "Spine-chilling Story of School Scissors" can appear as a mystery in regular playthroughs. As it was made as a tutorial, it plays unlike other mysteries, having a fairly linear progression, mostly easy encounters, a free weapon, and a boss that can be defeated with little difficulty by paying attention to the clues.
  • "Far-Out Fable of Fear Festival" contains locations that allow you to regain your health quickly and buy helpful items for a reduced price. Although not doing any story actions costs you 2 Stamina, this is a paltry price to pay for potentially returning from the brink of death. This has since been changed so that you get an increasing amount of Doom while resting, changing it from a full recovery to merely being a minor one, depending on how much the counter is filled.
  • "Rotten Report of a Rancid Ramen" is a straightforward Mystery with no mandatory combat encounters or end boss fight, and the side quest simply involves discarding two items, which can be done with junk items. "Sorrowful Saga of the Moonlight Sailors" is similar to Ramen, right down to the same sidequest. In timeline B there is a particularly tough boss fight, but if you do the sidequest, you receive a weapon that can be sacrificed to instantly win the encounter.
  • Not a level, per se, but one of the Town Events is "Cut Off From the Outside World", and the only effect it has is that you can't use the TV in your room between mysteries. The one drawback is that certain events can only be triggered by seeing specific TV broadcasts, but getting one to trigger even if you do see the broadcast is a Luck-Based Mission at best, so the overall impact is minimal.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Want to maximize your odds of success in any given playthrough? Pick Ath-Yolazsth as the Old God. Its only effect is that spells increase Doom rather than costing reason, which can easily be mitigated by just not casting spells at all. It does have unique events and enemies that raise Doom, but unless you're trying to investigate everywhere or get really unlucky, Doom buildup is still manageable once you have a handle on the mechanics.
  • Eerie Episode of Evolving Eels is a relatively easy Mystery that doesn't require a sidequest, no skill checks outside of random events, no boss fight at the end, and an easy-to-gain ending that grants you Kana as an ally, all for the cost of 3 Reason. There's nothing preventing you from doing this first.
  • Many players will pick Aiko with her character-exclusive perks, simply because of how fast her combat actions become. She already starts with a faster speed than the average character, and the Fast Swimmer perk only boosts her speed further, letting her string together attacks so quickly she can blaze through runs without ever worrying about dying.
  • The Occult shop isn't affected by the shop closure event and contains the Holy Candle (which can reduce the doom gauge in three separate events), the Ritual Dagger (a great fast weapon that scales off knowledge for characters like Kirie and Yashiro and has a chance of recovering reason), and the Tainted Violin (reduce how much time actions take like Aiko's starting perk), which makes it an easy pick for the second slot in the downtown area.
• Creepy Awesome:
  • The Old Gods, due to being nightmarish beings with unique designs and powers that run the gamut from simple and destructive to otherworldly and bizarre. Their cultists are also quite disturbing and interesting.
  • The Apartment Stalker, a masked man who creeps through your peephole with a horrific clown mask and ambushes you when you explore the apartments. He is never explained, making him creepier and cooler.
  • The protagonists grow increasingly disturbing and badass at the same time, going from simple high schoolers to warriors with fragile sanity. They can double down on this on certain paths, which can lead to them being cannibalistic ruthless monster slayers.
  • "Your Friend" from "Worrying Write-Up of a Wordless Ward." Despite initially seeming innocuous, they slowly become more dread-inducing as time goes on, and punctuate it all by being eerily smart. Whatever the player does, they get what they want. If the player kills them, it's discovered they essentially founded a cult of personality centered around mimicking them, revealing that every patient in their ward has taken up the face of the Player Character. If the player doesn't kill them, they pull off the biggest win in the game by implicitly stealing the player's body. Their uniqueness as a threat and utterly deranged behavior only amplifies how impressive their planning skills are and how disturbing their encounter is.
• Disappointing Last Level: The Lighthouse. By the time you've reached it, you've survived encounters with eldritch gods, taken several hits in Doom penalties, braved many investigations, and have steeled yourself for some great final encounter. Unfortunately, that encounter never comes. At the start, you're granted an easy method to heal 2 Stamina per a reasonable Doom price, making it easy to tank the 5 stat checks that await you. Each will cut a steady supply of health, but assuming you fail every last one, the healing available before this point is hardly a concern. There is only one enemy that can appear, and while he does Doom damage, his Stamina is pitiful at this point in your run, he only does two points of Doom, and you can attack him fast. After that, there is nothing stopping you from entering the final room, disabling the artifact, and stopping your chosen god from appearing. No Final Boss, no last test of skill, not even a suitably descriptive ending. Unless you enter the Lighthouse with more than 90 Doom to start with, odds are good you've already won.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Mimi is among the most popular playable characters, with the disturbing parts of her character often being Played for Laughs by the fanbase portraying her as a silly and quirky girl rather than dangerously disturbed.
  • Many gamers like the Shiba Inu dog and hate it if his store is closed down forever in a game run due to the supernatural presence.
  • There's a growing fanbase for Kana, due to their incredibly useful ability, being guaranteed to join if you get ending A on Eerie Episode of Evolving Eels, and their cheerful personality. This even led to them becoming a secret playable character in the 1.0 update.
  • The school nurse is quite beloved by many players, thanks to her kind personality in complete contrast to her creepy appearance, and having one of the most useful effects in a run by treating all minor injuries for free.
• Evil Is Cool: The awakening Old Gods, of course. That tends to be the reaction when you're heavily inspired by some of the most popular evil beings in all of fiction.
• Fanon: Despite being an Eldritch Abomination most likely with no concept of gender, Something Truly Evil is often referred to by the fanbase with feminine pronouns.
• Gameplay Derailment: Toshiaki's perks are all based around spending a lot of Doom in order to cast powerful spells. However, many players tend to ignore these spells, as his starting page removes 10% Doom per mystery, which compensates for his extremely low stats by allowing you to visit sub-locations or rest.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Japanese gamers who've tried the demo/seen the graphics and art appreciate it and even have made fanart of the characters/setting.
• Good Bad Bugs: Kana's "Always There" perk caps their STA and REA to 8. This applies even when any other effect changes the caps for these stats, which is likely intentional. What probably isn't intentional, however, is that this applies even with spells that only cost max STA/REA, making it possible for you to cast them indefinitely at zero cost. The Scars backstory also becomes a no-brainer to take, as it's sole downside is negated by the perk.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The boss of "Bloody Brief of a Beckoning Bulletin" can be convinced to back down under the promise that technology in the future will let it expand its suicidal cult more easily than the more primitive tech of the 80s will allow. Considering the existence of online forums dedicated to the act of taking one's own life (which will not be listed here for the sake of reader safety), that claim is chillingly correct.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Yashiro's Timeline B is just Kana's shirt, since he doesn't celebrate Halloween. With version 1.0 making Kana playable, and Yashiro being their neighbor in that case, his outfit choice isn't so outlandish now.
• LGBT Fanbase: The game has built a substantial following among queer players, particularly in the Trans community, as evident by the makeup of the official Discord.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Before the addition of his Hard Knock ability, Haru was seen as the worst character in the game because of his cigarette addiction, which requires him to always have cigarettes in his inventory in exchange for a fairly small buff to his attack speed. While attack speed buffs are always a positive, most ways of getting them are permanent or easily maintained, while Haru needs to constantly spend money to maintain his and gets a speed penalty if he runs out of cigarettes. This mechanic isn't unique to him, either; other characters can choose whether or not to take advantage of this at any time, while Haru is forced to do so right from the start. Aside from that, only one of his perks (Core Strength, which gives +1 damage) is particularly good; the others range from niche to useless. This meant Haru was reliant on constantly spending money and getting lucky with a single perk just to compete with other characters. Fortunately for the yakuza, he later received Hard Knock, which provides a +1 to damage while he has cigarettes and even stacks with Core Strength. While Haru is still reliant on specific perks and money-draining resource management, this damage buff puts him on much more even footing with the others, and even allows him to be reasonably effective without any weapons, a strategy most other characters struggle with.
• Magnificent Bastard: "Together" is an amalgamation of minds and souls that seeks to kill all of humanity to bring all of its victims into it, where they can find peace. To this end, it uses an online bulletin to force its victims to take their own lives. When investigated, Together proves an altogether personable if alien adversary, almost always devising a way out when discovered. Should the investigator deny its requests, it will simply ban them from the bulletin and continue its spree with no conflict; should the investigator reason with it, however, Together will develop an understanding of humanity's impending doom, and will politely step aside to let the investigator deal with them, promising to return when technology has advanced and it can achieve its goals more efficiently.
• Memetic Loser: Kouji has become the fandom's whipping boy, with jokes commonly being made about his face and him having brain damage, as well as being described by Discord users as "already the chew toy of the people", a "Silly Camera Mortal" and "the fandom's punching bag".
• Memetic Molester: The entire History Club, particularly its president, due to their Nonstandard Game Over in which the president strips you naked and then stabs you to death while wearing nothing but a bra and skirt. Needless to say, the game's Discord have commonly joked about them being a "horny club", and refer to getting said Nonstandard Game Over as a "Sex%" speedrun.
• Moe:
  • Kirie is a cute Black Magician Girl who can end up having to cry her eyes out at what she's gone through throughout the game.
  • Toshiaki is quite the adorable boy who sports constant puppy-dog eyes and a dorky smile in his portrait.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • Several enemy designs can easily qualify as this, thanks to embodying varying degrees of Body Horror and/or Facial Horror.
  • "Rotten Report of Rancid Ramen" proves to be this for the protagonist in-universe. In Ending B, the narration says they can no longer eat noodles without feeling ill; in Ending A, where the full truth about the titular ramen is revealed, the protagonist throws up in the street.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Out of all the backstories the player can choose from, Medical History is widely considered to be the hardest to work around - it has a chance to inflict a random Major Injury on the player if they get attacked in combat, and these injuries almost always serve to either lower a stat or cause Damage Over Time. That would be annoying enough on its own, but what really pushes it into scrappy territory are two factors: Major Injuries can only be healed one at a time and need to be paid for unless you have a Medical Kit (as opposed to Minor Injuries, which can be healed all at once for free by the school nurse if you have her location enabled), and there's pretty much no character or build for whom getting a major injury isn't a massive disadvantage, unlike other similar back stories like Scars, Ill-fated or Curious Birthmark. You also don't really get anything in exchange for taking on such a major handicap (you start with a Medical Kit, but that's likely going to be burnt through quickly because of the backstory). It's almost universally seen as a Necessary Drawback to unlocking anything else, since it's also the first one.
• Signature Scene: Kana getting their eye stabbed out with a needle. It's so iconic the scene appears on the Twitch icon for the game.
• Spiritual Adaptation: This is just about the closest we'll ever get when it comes to a video game adaptation of Junji Ito's style of horror.
  • The gameplay feels like a straight-up adaptation of Arkham Horror.
  • The game comes very close to emulating the style of horror Tabletop RPGs such as Call of Cthulhu.
• Tear Jerker: Some of the character-specific events really reinforce the fact that the player characters are just a single person standing up against the literal end of the world. Kirie's Taking Its Toll gives you the choice to either cry or push through a horrible thought train, Aiko's Distance results in either her looking crazy if you fail the Charisma check or being forced to lie about the horrors she has been facing, and Haru's Midnight Driver has him reflect on the death of his comrades.
• That One Boss:
  • The painting in "Perilous Parable of the Peculiar Painting". It's a Damage-Sponge Boss, which is nothing new for this game, but its attack is what truly stands out - on normal difficulty, it deals 4 Reason a turn. Most characters have at best four turns to kill this thing before they go insane... and again, it has a lot of health.
  • Shiro-san, the Garden in "Bizarre Bruit of the Bloodcurdling Botanist" is a brutal fight. It starts the fight by immediately damaging you for -3 Stamina and Reason, putting you at a disadvantage right from the start, and it continues to deal the same amount of damage throughout its attacks. It also gains an additional 12 HP to make it tougher to kill. Even worse, if you're going for Ending A, you have to spend at least two turns chopping down the blockage and running to the minivan for the flamethrower, all while this thing continues to heavily damage you. If you started the fight with low Stamina and Reason to begin with... say goodbye.
• That One Disadvantage:
  • Picking the Medical History backstory is essentially asking for ending your run quickly. The injuries sustained in combat will rack up quickly, even if you run from combat (due to forced combat in at least one mystery you'll get) and chew through your funds when you try to treat them. To make matters worse, you will need to do this if you want any other backstories, as it's the first one unlocked and is required for obtaining other ones.
  • The Ill-Fated background is arguably even worse. It causes you to automatically fail all event skill checks, meaning you're likely to lose Stamina or Reason almost every time you have to investigate somewhere. It also unlocks Card Pack C, so you'd be forgoing plenty of content if you don't complete a run with it. Even with the free 133 experience (basically equating to an instant level up) upon starting, Medical History is still easier. Its only saving grace is that Miku can get a perk that gives her +1 Reason after failing a skill check and and gets substantially stronger as Doom rises — which, given all those failed skill checks, will happen a lot.
  • The Knight-Errant backstory deserves a mention here as well. Here's the positive part about this backstory: you start the game with a book that, once used, increases all damage dealt in combat by 2 for the duration of the current mystery. Handy for, say, ending boss encounters pretty quickly. Now here's the negative part: every single time you get an ending for a mystery that isn't the Golden Ending, the DOOM counter advances by 7. It's got a good chance of getting worse if you're in Timeline B: in that timeline, three of the mysteries possible will never get that golden ending. Furthermore, some golden endings require multiple mysteries to be done in the right order. For example: if you get the Botanist mystery but don't get the Mermaid mystery, you better prepare for that DOOM increase, because the former's golden ending requires obtaining the Fire Axe, which only comes from the latter's golden ending. This can be somewhat mitigated now that you can reroll mysteries at the start of the game.
  • From the randomly-chosen influences of the Old Gods hoisted upon you after finishing a mystery, getting Contaminated Water or Fetid Fumes are perhaps the worst - the former denies you the free healing of using the bath in your house while the latter makes your Rest action less effective. This means you'll either spend more time Resting and racking up Doom or spending Funds on healing items. Getting both at the same time is bound to give you problems unless you are close to finishing the run.
  • When Eh-Żhal is the chosen Old God, the various Doom penalties that may be imposed by the Misery Parasite can range from cumbersome to irrelevant depending on your character and/or playstyle, but "+Doom for every 10 experience points" is almost guaranteed to cause issues for any run. Even if you go out of your way to keep your experience as low as you can, the experience rewards for completing mysteries alone will accelerate the Doom clock by around 5%. In the more likely event that you cannot manipulate your experience points, you may end up having to deal with a Doom penalty of 10% or more after each mystery, and that's before factoring in any other penalties that are in play.
• That One Level:
  • Any mystery that locks you out of the town and forces you to explore locations until you find the randomly-determined one that ends the story. Not only will this rack up Doom quickly, it can easily end your run through the random events with no way to recuperate between them unless you had items/spells stocked.
  • Among these, "Freaky Feature of Found Footage" is especially notable, as it requires you to keep checking squares in a 3-by-4 tile forest until you find the random correct one, each one triggering an event and costing 1% Doom, and the optional objective simply eliminates a few squares, which may not be enough to save you from bad luck. On top of that, it has one of the most Guide Dang It! Ending As in the game, requiring a specific item (the can of acid) without displaying the usual "needs [item]" hint.
  • You'd be hard-pressed to find a player who doesn't dread the mystery Chilling Chronicle of a Crimson Cape. Not only do you have to face a difficult battle against Aka Manto, but no matter what color toilet paper you ask him for, he'll still take a good hit of your Stamina before the fight even begins, potentially leaving you at an early disadvantage. It is possible to gather gossip on him, which allows you to refuse toilet paper altogether and avoid taking damage, but this is entirely luck-based, and you might not run into any students who tell you this without waiting around a few times, raising your Doom accordingly. If you do so, while he doesn't damage you at the outset, this just makes Aka Manto stronger and prevents him from dropping the Crestfallen Mask, which grants a substantial reduction in Doom and can save a run.
  • "Bizarre Bruit of the Blood-Curdling Botanist" is a massive pain. Like "Freaky Feature of Found Footage", you're reduced to tile-clicking at its finale, but unlike that mystery, you have no way to speed things up. The boss of the mystery is an Escort Mission (always good news) where the escortee is ridiculously fragile; you can cancel the escorting part if you took the optional steps, but that turns your escortee into a brutally powerful replacement boss. Want Ending A? Better hope you rolled "Macabre Memoir of Morbid Mermaids" and got Ending A in it, because you can't get it without the Fire Axe!
  • Mysteries that focus on the Seaside can also be slogs, since the seaside tends to contain a lot of Demonic Spiders and events that can mess the player character up. It's especially bad if the "Freaky Flood" town status is in effect, as it gives a chance to suffer the Drenched status effect (which lowers your combat speed for the rest of the investigation) from exploring the Seaside. The only saving grace of the Seaside is one particular event at the city docks that allows you to get some guaranteed funds, reason recovery, or try to recruit a unique follower.
• That One Sidequest: Some of the achievements can be a severe case of Guide Dang It! and/or Luck-Based Mission. The achievement for safely drinking eldritch blood, for example: a rare event will warp the player to an Eldritch Location where they have the opportunity to gather blood in a bottle and drink it to suffer a Nonstandard Game Over. How does one drink the blood without dying? There's an item called the Goblet that can only be obtained by getting the Tiny Key from Alarming Account of Abnormal Arms and using it to open the trophy case that's randomly encountered while investigating the school. The eldritch blood is safe to drink from the Goblet, and the only hint is that the Goblet is unnaturally cold to the touch while the blood is burning hot. Even if the player knows what they need to do, it's still a very specific set of steps that requires investigating specific locations until the right events happen.
• Values Dissonance: Interestingly so. The creator found that all Japanese players at TGS chose to help the creepy substitute teacher whereas almost everyone at PAX East refused. In Japan, teachers are to be treated with the utmost respect.

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