World of Horror's Free 1.2 Update Makes Shiokawa 20% More Horrible

Solo Polish developer panstasz, working with publisher Ysbryd Games, released As Below So Above on October 30, pushing World of Horror to version 1.2 with its biggest free content drop since the 1-bit cosmic-horror RPG left early access in 2023. The update is live now on Windows and macOS through Steam, GOG and itch.io, and according to the official patch notes posted to Steam's community announcements, it makes the game roughly 20% bigger across the board.

Two New Old Gods Descend on Shiokawa

The update's headline additions are two never-before-seen Old God manifestations that players can summon to menace the doomed seaside town of Shiokawa. The first is Ikt-Yosis, the First Nightmare, described in the patch notes as a deity that "sleeps beneath the mountains, slowly reshaping the world above with weird weather and wrathful consequences." The second is a scenario called the War for Shiokawa, in which four separate cults summon four eldritch masters at once, forcing players to juggle a "quadrilateral threat" instead of a single apocalypse.

panstasz previewed the scale of the overhaul back in February, when a Steam post framed the 1.2 version number as a deliberate target: not just finishing cut content, but growing the game by about 20% across the board. That post itemized the gains in detail: 60 new events (up 32%), 19 new enemies (up 19%), roughly 20 new injuries, mutations and curses (up 23%), 30 new items (up 19%) and 10 new allies (up 34%), plus 22 new achievements and a new achievement tracker.

Three New Playable Characters, Including a Tarot-Reading Drifter

As Below So Above also adds three new unlockable protagonists. Kiriko is a mysterious tarotist whose cards "could determine the town's fate," and Satoshi is described as a young hiker and avid explorer of the surrounding mountains, which are themselves a new explorable area added in this update. The patch notes add a reworked conversation system that randomly triggers between investigations, meant to flesh out Shiokawa's cast of recurring allies.

The mountains bring their own new system: a Weird Weather mechanic lets players read unpredictable forecasts and plan which mysteries to tackle under more favorable conditions, since the terrain is, in the developer's words, "easy to get injured or lost" in.

Scenario Mode Finally Arrives

The most requested feature in the update is Scenario Mode, which panstasz's team describes as self-contained stories set before the events of the main game. The first of these, Forest of Fear / Tapes of Tragedy, follows Makoto, a member of the school AV club who sets out to film a documentary about an old forest legend. The Steam notes tease a grim payoff for players willing to dig into it: a way to "fix the Forest Tapes and find a Telescope," tied to the scenario's found-footage ending.

It's a structural first for World of Horror, which has until now told its cosmic-horror stories entirely through randomized mystery runs in the main campaign rather than fixed, authored scenarios.

Steam Workshop Gets Real Modding Tools

Alongside the new content, 1.2 ships a reworked modding system that the developer says is backward compatible with content built for the original 1.0 release. Modders can now build original enemies, events and mysteries with custom layouts and chained events, plus custom UI elements and flags for more complex scenario logic. It's a significant expansion of the Steam Workshop support the game already had, aimed at keeping a nearly three-year-old release populated with new runs between official updates.

What's Still to Come

The patch notes list a long tail of smaller additions bundled into the same release: three new challenge modes (up 42%), cloud saving, Steam achievements support and a general pass of balance changes and bug fixes. Console owners will have to wait longer for all of it — Ysbryd Games says the 1.2 update is coming to PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch in 2027, well after the PC and Mac rollout.

For a game built almost entirely by one developer and inspired by the horror manga of Junji Ito and the cosmic dread of H.P. Lovecraft, shipping a free update that grows the game by a fifth more than three years after its full launch is a rare commitment. panstasz has not announced what, if anything, comes after As Below So Above, but the February preview post's framing of 1.2 as a project to finish "unfinished and cut content" suggests more of Shiokawa's mysteries may still be waiting underground.