🏔️⛰️ The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow PC Review 9/10 "Everything about the game is immediately appealing" 🏔️⛰️ @shaunaitcheson #GameDev #IndieGames

Until recently, if I wanted to hear this many gruff Northerners telling each other to bugger off I’d have to dig out my Ken Loach DVD collection.

Now that I’ve visited Bewlay, and delved deep into Hob’s Barrow (not a euphemism), I have access to another world in which robust vernacular is firmly on the menu. 

In Wadjet Eye’s new point-and-click adventure you play as Thomasina Bateman, a well-educated lady of means who travels Victorian Britain digging up old barrows (burial mounds). The story begins with you being invited to the town of Bewlay to look at a mysterious barrow there…

Everything about the game is immediately appealing. The music is moody, the colour palette suitably grim and the locals are all immediately somewhere between indifferent and actively rude. It feels like the start of An American Werewolf in London, written by Mary Shelley, and I loved it. 

Of course, it won’t appeal to those who want a bright, humorous Monkey Island experience (though there are some jokes), but then this is a different beast. The Excavation of Hob's Barrow is essentially a mystery adventure, with a battle between science and spirits running through its core. As Thomasina investigates and sees things she can’t rationalise, she begins to doubt her scientific values.

I can’t say too much about the story itself without giving things away, which is a shame as there are many good moments it’d be good to go into but rest assured that there is lots for horror and mystery fans to enjoy here. It’s not a spoiler to say that things get distinctly dark and menacing in the final chapters 

And a BIG special mention has to go to the voice acting. The creepiness and unease felt while playing the game is down, in a significant way, to this element. The village denizens are all solid (Arthur Tillet’s local lush particularly), but Thomasina, voiced by Samantha Béart, is the standout performance.

I felt invested in the story and her development from an assured cynic to someone who doubts all that they experience around them. And, as we experience everything through her, we are taken on this journey of doubt and mystery.

Overall, this truly is a great example of both the horror and the point and clicks genres. The game is small in scale and, until the last part of the game, the puzzles aren’t too taxing, so you have more time to enjoy the interactions and machinations of the village folk. There’s also a great fast travel tool, so you don’t have to retrace your steps to the point of tedium.

The visuals are mostly fairly muted and simple, but this shifts for flashbacks and dream sequences, that are genuinely disturbing. And the sound, both the music and effects and the voice acting, are all superb. Even through my laptop speakers. I can only imagine what it would be like with a better setup.