We're certainly at no loss for modern throwbacks, those games that expertly summon the aesthetics of pixel-built classics from the 1980s and 1990s. We have retro-styled platformers, retro-styled RPGs, retro-styled spaceship shooters, retro-styled dungeon crawls, retro-styled Link's Awakening tributes with flail-wielding mice, and so on.

But what about a retro-styled adventure game with deliberately primitive black-and-white graphics and a nightmarish panoply of tributes to Junji Ito, H.P. Lovecraft, and countless other horror staples? That's a little harder to come by.

World of Horror draws the eye with its monochrome palette and rough pixel edges, bringing to mind 1980s Macintosh and Japanese PC games where the developer's most elaborate visual ambitions had to use technology that rarely reached 2 bits. Even the game's alternate colors are limited, muted, and just as effective in painting a stretch of Japan that has attracted every possible form of Fortean weirdness and ancient, unspeakable evil.

Within the rampantly unfortunate town of Shiokawa, a few selectable young protagonists stumble through mysteries personal, incidental, and cosmic in ramifications. A demonic summoning might be captured on videotapes now missing. A scissors-wielding specter might terrorize the school. A relative might have a funeral where a missing corpse is the least strange occurrence. And that's to say nothing of the random lunatics, zombies, specters, and fanged, bulbous horrors that might randomly accost you.

World of Horror owes a constantly obvious debt to Junji Ito. Even when it's not directly referencing the pages of Gyo, Uzumaki, Hellstar Remina, and his other manga, the game revels in a world gradually sliding toward chaos while ordinary humans can only mentally unravel and perspire. And since actual Junji Ito games (like the Uzumaki titles for the WonderSwan) remain obscure, World of Horror has little competition.

It's also awash in Lovecraft loans, with slowly stirring elder gods and visions of squamous non-Euclidean terrors beyond human comprehension (minus Lovecraft's underlying racist paranoia, of course). World of Horror has some fun with it all. When your town is being slowly devoured by hellspawn, it's important to check the news to see if ancient rumbling horrors have messed with the phone lines, water supply, or general sanity.

The cases within World of Horror play out through adventure-game commands as you pick locations and diversions from menus, choosing which dangers to inadvisably tackle. The RPG element is always close at hand, and battles play out with Roguelike text narration and an expanding menu of options. Early on, you can get away with the tried, true, and repetitive strategy of finding a decent baseball bat and wailing on the ghouls, psychopaths, and nether-beasts that plague you, but you'll gradually discover how to gain allies, cast charms, and otherwise inoculate yourself against threats both immediate and psychological.

And in this sort of story, it's essential to raise your levels and watch your stats. The two most important ones are "Stamina" and "Reason," with the latter being understandably tenuous, and the game's numerous encounters deplete your fortitude or introduce nasty little status effects. Instead of the typical debilitating RPG poisoning, a spider bite will grow and fester into an open wound, while a sudden burst of comprehension will drive you just a little more insane.

World of Horror skillfully leaves a lot to chance. Sidetracking scenes and monster encounters pop up randomly, while even the main story branches leave it vague where your decisions might lead. The game excels in inviting you to punish your character and satisfy your curiosity simultaneously. Touching that rune-covered stalagmite that just burst up through the forest floor might not be a good idea, but you'll do it anyway.

The best retro-styled games require no actual nostalgia to enjoy, and World of Horror doesn't lean too heavily on memories of old adventure titles. It's adept at drawing even the unfamiliar player into that mindset of being alone in the computer room downstairs late at night, cautiously clicking through some danger-filled adventure game without instructions, box art, or other hints about what lies ahead. World of Horror is every possible fear from that night.

And that's the real strength of it: building up fascination in the midst of bleakness and despair. The seemingly simple graphics hide all sorts of details while creeping, low-toned music backs each scene. By limiting its visuals, the game sharpens players, forcing the eye to examine everything a little closer than it might in a full-color game. And that makes the surprises all the more unnerving. Even playing with a controller instead of a mouse adds to the effect, as your decisions have more suspense and weight when the cursor moves a little slower.

Economical in its writing, World of Horror keeps the gruesome flow of the mysteries from anything that might bog it down—even character development. There's not much to endear the cast beyond how well you can put yourself in their shoes, and each of them gets only a few unique encounters with friends, acquaintances, or ominously unpunished antagonists. Yet it's easy to sympathize with them as they witness tentacled deities ripping open the sky or as they peek at shadowy figures watching their apartment. It leaves the small victories satisfying when the characters gain a rescued dog as a sidekick or head home for a hot bath…as long as some Cthulhuloid spawn hasn't contaminated the town's aquifer.

World of Horror might disappoint some with its brevity. The central game is a few hours, but a lot lies under the surface. Each chapter has multiple endings that are rarely predictable in their routes, and there's a wide roster of additional playable characters, random encounters, and other extras. The save system is rigid, similar to a dungeon hack, and it pushes you toward playing each chapter in a single go, just as scary stories are best consumed in one sitting.

World of Horror sometimes comes off as too much a tribute, bolting together countless sights and plot twists familiar to genre fans. Yet it all blends so well that the game rises far above a pastiche. It's everything that it wants to be: relentlessly eerie, darkly funny, rewardingly bizarre, and able to scare you even after the system's turned off. That's because part of you is still there in a dank, dimly colored hallway where something just blinked in the darkness.