When I first saw the trailer for World of Horror, I knew, without a doubt, it was a game for me. I am an unapologetic Junji Ito fanboy who pre-orders every book, and I gravitate towards retro-inspired games. It took a while to finally get around to playing World of Horror given my unruly backlog of games, but when I did, the world building and art left a lasting impression I’ve yet to shake.
Its distinct 1-bit artwork is stark and unsettling, and it fits well for telling stories of existential dread and unknowable cosmic terror. The enemy designs are incredibly unique, and I never know what to expect going into each new combat encounter. The diversity of enemies, ranging from the surprisingly mundane to the completely abstract, keeps me eager to see what strange new threat each encounter will bring.
This may sound like an odd thing to praise, but I love the obtuse and overwhelming UI. It is cryptic in the way that I’d expect a dusty ancient tome to be. One whose purpose is lost to modern man, but which once summoned cosmic deities from eons long forgotten, and whose pages are bound in human flesh and words inked in blood. Did I mention I am an H.P. Lovecraft fan, as well?
World of Horror was created by a Polish man by the name of Paweł Koźmiński, who is a dentist by day and a game designer by night. He led the creation of World of Horror, which is one of the most unique games I’ve ever played. It’s not just the graphics (which, by the way, were created using MS-friggen-paint) or gameplay that makes the experience so memorable – it is the music. It is composed of driving melodic electronic tones that sound as if they slithered out a haunted PC-98 machine ready to kick ass. Don’t believe me? Take a listen here.
I fell in love with the soundtrack immediately. It helped me push through initially frustrating and obtuse gameplay mechanics until the whole experience finally clicked. It manages to be simultaneously stylish and scary, spiraling the player further into madness as they solve mystery after mystery around the town of Shiokawa. The music was so impactful to me that I needed to learn more about who created it. So I kicked off an investigation of my own…to track down and interview the composer of World of Horror.
Turns out it wasn’t a single composer, but two different artists separated by both geography and time: Garoslaw and Qwesta.
Meet the Composers: Garoslaw & Qwesta
Both Garoslaw, who goes by Garo for short, and Qwesta, were incredibly generous and gracious when I reached out to them. I want to extend a heartfelt thank you to both artists for taking the time to speak with me and sharing their experiences for this article.
Garo first got his start composing music like many young digital artists of his time. “During junior high, I downloaded a cracked copy of FruityLoops Studio and started playing around with it,” he told me. “It just started as a hobby.”
While a common origin story for many budding digital musicians, some of us (i.e me) could spend countless hours futzing in FL Studio only to walk away with nothing more than a series of discordant tones with no redeeming musical qualities. Mastering this software takes dedication, passion, and raw talent.
World of Horror could easily have fallen into horror genre trappings of that “dark ominous score,” but it didn’t. Instead, it is something wholly unique and stylish thanks to its composers. Genre expectations took a back seat to tone and emotion, which Garo elaborated on. “More often than not, I start with a melody or bassline and build from there. I think the emotion of the track matters more than the genre label.”
That freedom to focus on tone over trope was baked into the process from the start. “I wasn’t really thinking in terms of horror music,” Garo told me. “I was just told to make something that felt fitting for a certain place. Just do whatever.” And the tools he used mirrored that ethos. Rather than relying on expensive software or high-end plugins, Garo created the bulk of the soundtrack using PXTone, a lightweight, free program made by the creator of Cave Story. “PXTone kind of forces you to be efficient,” he explained. “It’s not lush, it’s harsh and raw, and that helped a lot.”
Though Garo works a full-time job outside music, his passion hasn’t faded. When I asked how he first got involved in World of Horror, he recalled, “Paweł reached out to me through a Discord community. We both posted on 4chan’s game dev threads back then.” That was back in 2015, and at the time, Garo was working on a game called Star of Providence. “Which I still am, believe it or not,” Garo mused.
If you visit Star of Providence’s Steam page, it is sitting at an Overwhelming Positive review score and has a loyal fanbase. “It’s a top-down roguelike shooter. Kinda like Nuclear Throne. The soundtrack started out very chiptune, but I moved more into this fake-bit, retro-inspired thing over time… That’s the music Paweł heard. I think he liked the atmosphere of it, even though it wasn’t horror, it had this sort of moody energy.” Star of Providence and World of Horror are the only two commercial releases Garo has worked on, surprisingly.
Qwesta joined the project later, around 2019. “I’ve been a musician since I was about seven,” Qwesta told me. “I learned piano and violin. And about when I was 17, I took a music technology course at school, and I realized that I really liked it… It [music software] was a much more interesting avenue for me to write music in than the sort of stuffy classical method of writing everything down on sheet music… From there, my brother was working as an artist on a game called Devil Engine. They needed a musician, and he suggested maybe I give it a go… and it all sort of ballooned out from there, I suppose.”
Eventually Paweł would hear Qwesta’s music through his mutual dev circles. “I was brought on to work alongside Garoslaw,” he said. “He gave me a bunch of samples and instruments he’d already been using. That was a pretty good base to go off of.” Though the two composers rarely communicated directly during the project, the end result feels surprisingly cohesive. “We just got our own tracks and did them,” Qwesta said. “But they worked out together.” Qwesta is based in the UK and Garoslaw is in Poland.
It genuinely surprised me that Garo and Qwesta worked almost entirely independently. The soundtrack feels so cohesive, thanks in part to the instruments and sound palette defined by Garo early on in development.
Garo selected a small set of instruments, and those became the foundation for everything that followed. As Qwesta put it, “It saved me a trick. It wasn’t something that limited me, it gave me a jumping-off point.” Garo added, “The first track I wrote, ‘Into the Dark,’ (titled “Intro” on soundtrack) ended up defining the motif for the whole soundtrack… think it’s still my favorite.”
Dread by Design
If you go into World of Horror expecting the music to lean on horror clichés like dissonant strings, sharp stingers, or heartbeat drums, you’re in for a surprise. The soundtrack is unsettling, sure, but it’s also energetic and melodic.
Garo and Qwesta delivered a sound that feels inseparable from the game’s identity, and I am certain this game would have not resonated with me as deeply without their contributions.
“It was my first horror game,” Qwesta said. “Most of my music is really dense and full-sounding, but I had to rein that in. This wasn’t a game where you want to beat someone in the face with music all the time.”
Instead, he leaned into tone and subtlety, especially the feeling of existential dread. “That’s the kind of horror that really inspired me,” he said. “Themes like desperation and isolation.” One of his favorite contributions, “Bulletin Combat,” was inspired by the mechanical grind of old hard drives. “I based the central bass riff on a seek test from this YouTuber, DanoOct1. It just had this great mechanical vibe I wanted to recreate.”
Fake-Bit Fear
Both composers referenced retro hardware as an inspiration.
Garo was inspired by the Japanese PC-98 and Sharp X68000.
“I like fake-bit music,” he said, referring to a style of retro-sounding tunes that aren’t limited by real hardware restrictions. It is retro inspired, but it’s not completely constrained by technology limitations of the era. “I picked a small selection of instruments that would be used across all the tracks to create consistency.”
Qwesta typically works in later-era retro palettes (think Sega Saturn), but World of Horror required a more stripped-down aesthetic. “I had to write long-form pieces that could loop endlessly,” he said. “And I never really knew exactly where they’d show up in the game, so they had to be flexible.”
Despite different backgrounds, their creative styles merged perfectly. Garo established the tone early on, and I think both the artists’ lack of attachment to the horror genre allowed creativity to flourish. They didn’t end up stuck in old tropes and styles we’ve heard a million times and come to expect in horror games; they did something unexpected, which worked in its favor.
“There’s a temptation in horror to just go ‘spooky house’ with the sound,” Qwesta noted. “But that can get silly fast, especially with chiptune. We wanted to avoid that.” Instead, he focused on emotional contrast. “You can mirror the threat with sound, or you can contrast it, and sometimes that’s even more effective. Music doesn’t always need to scare you directly. It just needs to make you feel like something’s wrong.”
Horror and Sonic Textures
World of Horror’s soundscape is so effective because it doesn’t feel heavy handed in trying to scare you.
“There’s power in absence,” Garo said. “Sometimes, no music at all is more disturbing than the scariest track.” He believes sound should support what you see, not just mimic it. “I wasn’t trying to make it sound scary. I was trying to make it feel like something is wrong.”
Qwesta agreed, and pushed the idea further. “Blurring the line between the soundtrack and in-universe sound is really effective. If you can’t tell where the music ends and the world begins, that’s scary.” In one case, he designed a track around the sound of lapping waves. Not because the game played that sound in-engine, but because he knew players would subconsciously expect it. The track isn’t heavy handed, but listening with this in mind, the overall composition makes a ton of sense.
That psychological focus permeates the soundtrack. “It’s not always about big stingers,” Qwesta told me. “Sometimes, just letting something repeat long enough becomes uncomfortable.” That method, repetition as a source of discomfort, appears often in Japanese horror cinema. Ju-On: The Grudge, for instance, uses the croaking sound of Kayako to unnerve the audience. It’s not a jump scare, just a low, unnatural rhythm that repeats and worms its way into your brain. World of Horror taps into that same sensibility.
Pixel Perfect Terror
As much as I love the soundtrack, it wouldn’t hit nearly as hard without Paweł’s artwork. His hand-drawn, Junji Ito-inspired illustrations are grotesque, beautiful, and constantly surprising.
It’s the combination of sound and art that makes the game so sticky in my brain. I still remember my first glimpse of the scissor woman in combination with the driving otherworldly electronic tunes, her attacks draining my character’s sanity to dangerous levels.
Or climbing the lighthouse to the final encounter, watching my doom meter tick higher and higher, knowing once it reaches 100%, it is game over. The pulsing music is a constant and tense reminder that there’s never enough time and little hope I’ll make it out of this alive.
Qwesta described this sensation perfectly. “From a narrative standpoint, I got this sort of constant feeling of dread that I felt I needed to portray somehow in the sound. The entire game is racing against a clock, in effect, and I needed to represent that.”
When I asked the composers about their favorite horror games or soundtracks, their answers reflected their distinct personalities. Garo admitted he doesn’t play many horror games as they’re just too intense. “You’ll never catch me alive playing Alien: Isolation. I think I’d die,” he laughed. Still, he’s drawn to horror films and moody soundscapes. “I’ve listened to more horror game music than actually played them.”
“Siren is number one,” Qwesta said. “It has this sort of buzzing, humming, weird cultic thing… it really nails that feeling of danger even when there isn’t any.” He also praised Resident Evil: Dead Aim for its sparse, effective sound design, being “just pure sound design, and it’s perfect,” and Anatomy, a minimalist indie game reminiscent of Skinamarink, which he called the scariest he’s ever played.
Shiokawa’s Final Mystery
Unfortunately, the man who created World of Horror, Paweł Koźmiński, has vanished.
Paweł was planning more updates after World of Horror’s 1.0 release, but communications suddenly cut off. You can visit the Discord and see Paweł’s last message from years ago, which reads like someone who had every intention to return and add more features, and yet never did. Fans are still left discussing why Paweł’s communications came to an abrupt end, with many different unconfirmed theories swirling about. There is a fanbase hungry for more World of Horror content.
This wouldn’t be the first time Paweł pulled a disappearing act, which alleviates some concern around his well being. He’s gone dark like this multiple times during the early access days. Garo added, “I think he just gets busy with personal life. I believe he works full-time as a dentist. That probably helps with the horror side of things.”
Qwesta added with a chuckle, “He keeps to himself a lot.”
I tried contacting Paweł through every channel I could find (probably to his annoyance). I tried multiple emails, Discord, and his publisher. I really wanted to include Paweł’s voice in this article. Sadly, I was unable to reach him. In a way, though, that absence feels oddly fitting. What could be more World of Horror than the creator mysteriously vanishing before the final chapter?
I do hope he returns one day to continue to build upon what he started with World of Horror. While it did enter 1.0, there are obviously incomplete features within the game. While this doesn’t distract from my enjoyment of the game whatsoever, it does make me wonder what more this game could have been if development continued to this day.
In the end, the sound in World of Horror is a triumph of horror game soundtracks. Garo and Qwesta managed to build a soundtrack that doesn’t just accompany the game, it defines it.
That said, World of Horror is not without its flaws. There is a lot I could criticize from a gameplay perspective, but, to me, that isn’t why I love this game. It is the aesthetic, the overall experience. From the unsettling visuals to the driving melodic soundtrack, it creates a world I know I’ll be returning to for many years to come.
Like the dark spiral clouds that hang over the town of Shiokawa, the game finds a way to pull me back in, again and again. Its soundtrack encourages me to linger on each individual screen, letting the music loop over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and overr, anddd overrrrr, adnnndd overrrwerr, and overawernwerr……
