Perfect timing for Halloween weekend: WORLD OF HORROR, the cult cosmic-horror retro RPG from one-man developer panstasz and publisher Ysbryd Games, just received AS BELOW SO ABOVE — its largest content update ever — live today on PC via Steam, GOG, and itch.io, and completely free.
By the numbers, the update makes the game 20% bigger. That includes new events, enemies, mysteries, characters, items, spells, curses, and injuries, plus a large batch of quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes. For a game built on replaying short, randomized horror campaigns in the doomed seaside town of Shiokawa, 20% more of everything is a serious injection of fresh dread.
Two new manifestations of the Old Gods headline the update. IKT-YOSIS, THE FIRST NIGHTMARE, sleeps in a gargantuan chamber beneath the mountains — and every ritual performed to wake him slowly reshapes the world above and brings strange weather with it. THE WAR FOR SHIOKAWA goes the opposite direction: four cults summoning their eldritch masters simultaneously to plunge the town into pure evil.
Three new playable characters join the roster, including KIRIKO, a mysterious tarotist whose cards can decide Shiokawa’s fate, and SATOSHI, a young hiker who knows the mountains around town better than anyone. There’s also an entirely new way to play: Scenario Mode adds self-contained stories set before the main game, expanding the lore and tying different mysteries together. Its first scenario, FOREST OF FEAR / TAPES OF TRAGEDY, follows MAKOTO, an overachieving school AV club member filming a documentary about the forest’s oldest legend — a setup that has “found footage horror” written all over it.
Modders get love too: Steam Workshop support now lets creators build more enemies, events, and mysteries, with more customization options for all of them.
For more Halloween horror and indie gaming coverage, check out Michael Myers Comes Home for Halloween — Halloween: The Game Drops a FREE Map and Two New Myers Skins Today and Cairn’s First DLC Is FREE and Out NOW — New Climbs, a Playable Marco, and Free Roam Just Hit PS5 and PC.
Console players, take note of the fine print: the game itself is already available on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4/5 for $19.99, but the AS BELOW SO ABOVE update won’t reach consoles until 2027. PC players are the first to descend.
If you’ve never played it, WORLD OF HORROR is a 1-bit, MS Paint-drawn love letter to Junji Ito and H.P. Lovecraft: a turn-based RPG where every run is a race against rising doom, your sanity and stamina drain with every investigation, and the art style makes every new horror feel like it crawled out of a cursed manga panel. It supports English, German, French, Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Korean, and Polish. There has never been a better — or spookier — weekend to start.
Source: Ysbryd Games announcement via GamesPress.
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