World of Horror Gets a Free Update That Makes the Game 20 Per Cent Bigger

World of Horror has just had the biggest update of its life, and it is already live, so if you fancy something small, scratchy and quietly disturbing for tonight instead of a full film, I have found exactly the thing.

What is World of Horror, if you have never played it?

World of Horror is a black and white, hand drawn horror RPG set in Shiokawa, a Japanese seaside town where the stars have gone wrong and something very old is starting to wake up underneath everything. You play an investigator picking apart a handful of overlapping mysteries, from vanishing schoolgirls to cults meeting out in the woods, while a doom clock and your own sanity both tick down at the same time. Fights are settled with dice rolls rather than reflexes, which suits me fine, because my reflexes are currently needed for not tipping coffee onto the sofa. The game has been around in one form or another for a few years now, built up a properly devoted following of people who like their horror slow, strange and almost entirely monochrome, and it is exactly the sort of thing I reach for on a night when a two hour film feels like too much of a commitment.

What the As Below So Above update actually adds

According to Bloody Disgusting, the new As Below So Above update is out now, and it is not a token patch. The site reports that it makes the base game roughly 20 per cent bigger, which for a game that already runs on branching random events and overlapping mysteries is a genuinely large amount of new material to drop in one go. The update adds new events, new enemies, new mysteries, new items, spells, curses and injuries, alongside a long list of quality of life fixes that longtime players have apparently been asking for.

Two of the new playable characters are named directly. There is Kiriko, a tarot reader whose cards have an unpleasant habit of deciding what happens to the town around her, and Satoshi, a hiker who knows the mountains surrounding Shiokawa better than is probably good for him. A third new face is also included, though the report does not go into detail on who they are. Sitting above all of them is a brand new Old God, Ikt-Yosis, the First Nightmare, described as sleeping in an enormous chamber beneath the mountains until something is foolish enough to disturb it.

The other major addition is Scenario Mode, which gives players self contained stories set before the events of the main campaign, rather than another full run through the same long game. One of those scenarios follows a school audiovisual club member making a documentary about an old local legend, which is precisely the sort of set up that tells you how well that is going to go for them, and I mean that as a genuine compliment to whoever wrote it. The update also expands Steam Workshop support, so modders now have more tools to build their own enemies, events and mysteries on top of everything already in the game.

Where to get it, and who still has to wait

The update is free, and it is live right now on Steam, GOG and itch.io, so if you already own World of Horror on PC there is nothing to buy and nothing to unlock, just a download to grab before you start your evening. Bloody Disgusting notes that PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch owners will have to wait a fair bit longer, with those versions not arriving until 2027. That is a long time to sit with a new Old God you cannot yet fight, and I do feel for console players on this one, but for now PC is unambiguously the place to be.

If you have never touched World of Horror before, this is a genuinely good point to start, since you get the full 20 per cent expansion from the moment you install it rather than bolted on months later. If you already have hours sunk into Shiokawa, I would go straight for Scenario Mode first, purely because a self contained story is a far kinder way back into a game that has a habit of quietly eating your whole evening.

I know exactly how I am spending tonight, and it involves Kiriko, her tarot cards and probably one too many cups of coffee instead of a film. If anyone reaches Ikt-Yosis before I do, I want to know what woke it, because I can already tell you it was somebody's fault.