A brief list of accrued maladies: holes (covering my body, interminably expanding), tiny cuts, hunger, frostbite, a torn muscle (right arm), a broken bone (left arm), a concussion, three incurable curses. Murders solved: two. Murders unsolved: two. Current level of existential dread: 75%.
Alas, at least the bath water is running.
This is the state of my save in World of Horror. In World of Horror, eldritch forces threaten to devour your hometown of Shiokawa, Japan. These old gods manifest as disembodied limbs floating around public transportation, masses of possessed high-school students, and conspiratorial online message boards. In Our World, they manifest as ceaseless forest fires, an international pandemic, and conspiratorial online message boards.
“World of horror” also happens to be an apt descriptor for the current state of the nation.
In both the game and in reality, my mind turns around the word “world.” A world of horror―not a closet of horror, nor a bedroom or sink. “World” conveys an incomprehensible largeness, a too- big context that fails to describe the small, everyday experience of living inside it. To any random individual, a horrific world and a utopian world may appear identical―if one was to dig a ditch and live in it, they would know nothing but the weeds and the top-soil.
You can’t comment on the state of the sky from ten feet under. Blissful ignorance is everywhere, even in a world of horror. Even so, horror has a tendency to infiltrate. You are only as safe beneath the soil as the farmer is merciful in not digging you up.
In my mulch pile of reality, mornings go like this: I wake up with an aching pain in my back. My mattress is old, nearly six years; the coils are like porridge, I dip in like a spoon. During the day I stare at a laptop screen and squirm in an office chair. This incessant sitting molds my hip flexors into tightly-coiled balls, my spine into a bent squash. Getting up is a constant revelation, a reminder that my limbs have ulterior functions. Press X to shimmy. Press Y to do jumping jacks while you wait for the microwave ding.
In the late afternoon, the Tiktok algorithm offers me a fifty-second seminar on alleviating joint pain―Lift your right leg. Kneel on the left. Contort yourself into a ball. Hold your breath for fifteen seconds. Roll your eyes backwards. Leave your physical form behind―Exhale. I stretch on the floor of my bedroom and my muscles feel like bloated bags of rice. I contemplate if reality should have a status page. What would my save reveal? What if my wrists had tooltips? Carpal tunnel: 45% achieved. Don’t worry, you’re halfway there!
I’ve yet to win World of Horror, but I have lost it rather spectacularly exactly three times. First, by impalement: shivved by a three-faced lady and her too-long scissors. Snip-snip. Next, by madness: my Reason depleted to zero, so I went insane in a psych hospital―although insane seems relative here―and finally, third, my demise came via an overabundance of Doom.
What is Doom, exactly? The game declines to define it, but it is not hard to guess: it is existential dread. Eternal pessimism. It is the farmer finally ripping up the top-soil. Most critically, Doom is the overarching metric that decides your playthrough in World of Horror.
Every time you encounter something unsettling, your Doom meter increases. Your neighbor gets murdered? +5 Doom. Your mail is full of eyeballs? +5 Doom. A sentient bowl of ramen noodles tries to chew your leg off? +5 Doom.
As the metronome ticks through 2020, this mechanic feels uncannily familiar to me. Life has become a balancing act of ignorance versus awareness, risk versus reward. Do I leave my house today? Do I dare go to the grocery store? Will doing either of these things endanger the lives of my aging parents? Life has become one long quicktime event, my finger hovering over the trigger. Except I am not Thor wielding Mjolnir, hovering in suspended animation, waiting for input; I’m eating cup ramen and weighing the impact of my social life on the likelihood of my family’s demise.
+50 Doom.
World of Horror is chock full of such no-win decisions. It is a game predominantly concerned with trade-offs, quid-pro-quos with demons: here’s a lemon wedge of my remaining sanity, now can I go about my business? Every choice is, in some way, a poisoned chalice. A delaying of the inevitable. In most instances, the game forces you to iterate through these traumatic events incessantly, like a Lovecraftian episode of Scooby Doo. Yet, in more ways than one, World of Horror mimics life: despite its seemingly endless chaos, it is very occasionally merciful.
Near the tail end of uncovering a mystery, World of Horror interrupted my investigation with a pop-up event. It was labeled EXHAUSTED. It informed me that, in light of recent events, I was a bit tired. A small understatement. My character was swimming with parasites, sported third- degree burns, and just recently lost a friendly acquaintance to a fatal fight with a substitute teacher. Still, the game urged me to take a nap. So I did.
Just as any good nap should, the break rewarded me with health and mental stamina. My wounds were healing, my thoughts less muddied. As quarantine slouches on towards infinity, I have found needed solace in these periods of rest. For me, it’s not only naps, but showers. I dial the heat up to near-molten and let the water steamroll my pores. The heat is so loud that my thoughts muffle; they flee from my head, circle the drain, wade around in the watery abyss like patient little devils. The laze is bliss, but it is also only momentary―they’ll crawl back in once they find the chance.
In the same way, Doom in World of Horror never leaves. It merely lies dormant. Waiting, waiting. The truth is that this seemingly innocuous pop-up was no exception at all. Naps are a no-win choice, too, a +2 to my ever-increasing Doom. In World of Horror, Doom is not only a function of unpleasant experiences―dead friends, eyeball mail―but of existence itself. The message is clear: self-care will not save you. There is no normalcy here. You are not allowed to look away. You can nap, but only with the knowledge that the world inches towards an apocalyptic end-state. Tick. Tick. Tick.
Eventually there is no more room for delay. Eventually the climate change clock ticks 0. Eventually there is more billionaire wealth than there is habitable land. At 100 Doom, it’s game over. That’s roughly 33 naps. Or 72 baths. It’s 24 times you watched television instead of acknowledging the violent chaos just outside your doorstep. In World of Horror, you can quite literally count the number of inactions you performed that lead to the world’s demise. I wonder if that feature is coming in iOS 14? (Editor’s note: it didn’t, but now I can watch Netflix in picture-in-picture mode on my iPhone.)
Before this year, I had never played a horror game. At least not firsthand, always once removed. I’ve dabbled instead in twitch streams, happy to let the streamers’ pupils dilate and their throats go hoarse instead of my own. Yet as my own reality grows more sinister, as good choices dwindle and inaction becomes complicit violence, horror has begun, too, to transform. It has lost its menacing edge: monsters look less like monsters and more like passersby, unmasked figures in the grocery store, villains on the news. In place of fear, horror conjures a new emotion―comfort, relatability.
For as long as I can remember, games have been my favorite escape. I’ve loved their ability to transport and transform, to let you embody. They offer nameless heroes I could pin things to―motivations, hopes, traumas, dreams. Their worlds, too, have been a central part of this fantasy: a place where anything is possible, where lowly traveler could become daring thief, nation-traitor to queen. But as reality shifts, so does the world I need escaping from. Sometimes that means donning a helmet and jaunting around Skyrim. Right now? It means a game that lets me be scared; a game where the worst case scenario is already the baseline.
Thank you to Celia Lewis for contributing this piece on World of Horror! She’s our third (PAID!) contributor, and her contribution was made possible by you, our lovely readers!
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