Full spoilers for The Excavation of Hob's Barrow within.
For some reason it's taken me a while to warm up to the idea of playing
adventure games made in Adventure Game Studio (AGS). I don't really have a good
justification for that beyond perhaps having played Yahtzee Croshaw's Chzo
Mythos games too many times as a kid and not being terribly interested in the urban
fantasy or cyberpunk genres, which seem to be a recurrent setting for a lot of
commercially released AGS games such as those developed and/or published by
Wadjet Eye Games. Regardless, the itch to play some more point and click
adventures struck me this year and on recommendation I initially played Clifftop
Games' Kathy Rain, followed by Wadjet Eye's Shardlight and, most
recently, Cloak and Dagger Games'
The Excavation of Hob's Barrow (published by Wadjet Eye), and while none
of these games are quite the sprawling puzzle-driven experience of, say, a
classic LucasArts title, they've all shared strong atmosphere and decent if not
always massively original approaches to story and characters.
I was actually reminded of the approach of
The Excavation of Hob's Barrow when some promotional material for it was
shared by Airdorf Games, developer of FAITH, on Twitter, and given that
Return to Monkey Island had put me in the point-and-click mood it was
more or less an instant purchase. I like stories set in Victorian England and I
also enjoy weird fiction and folk horror, so everything I saw made me think that
Hob's Barrow would probably appeal to my sensibilities.
And indeed I spent a good part of a recent long weekend playing
Hob's Barrow and I found myself coming back to it each day wanting more,
which I think is about the strongest recommendation I can give. It's far from
perfect, but given that it was apparently developed in the developer's spare
time I think it's an admirable achievement. It took me about eight hours to play
through, and that was with a fair bit of wandering around following the game's
various objectives, but I wouldn't be surprised if it took less time for an
experienced player. Regardless, I think it was worth the twenty-ish bucks
Australian that I paid for it.
In Hob's Barrow you play as Thomasina Bateman, a "barrow digger" or, to
put it in more contemporary parlance, a Victorian-era
paleontologist-archaeologist who has come to the small town of Bewlay in northern
England at the invitation of one of the locals to excavate an ancient grave
site. As usual with this kind of folk mystery experience she faces a good deal
of obfuscation, superstition and reservation from the locals while getting to
know the town and countryside. Over the course of the game her own backstory is
revealed, and the mystery of the titular barrow, and her own involvement with
it, is uncovered.
The strongest element of Hob's Barrow is the atmosphere. The game is set
in a small rural town in the north of England, amid sweeping moorland and
beneath overcast skies. Rain and foggy evenings add to the feeling of both
quietude and sublimity of such a landscape. The music contributes to this
significantly as well, with a strong ambience pervading many of the scenes. The
game is also rendered in the kind of engaging pixel art that I personally really
love and which has become a convention of these kinds of games. It's only let
down on a few occasions when elements are scaled at different resolutions, which
creates a visual clash; old LucasArts games would compress sprites when they
were intended to appear at a more distant perspective, which looked crunchy, but
at least they still fit within the image because a pixel was still a pixel. When
you have low-resolution pixel art blown up to a higher scale to fit modern
screens, it doesn't work so well when some sprites in the "distance" seem to be
at a higher level of detail than the rest of their environment. Nonetheless, the
game has a decent amount of sprite animation, and isn't too reliant on the
fade-in fade-out technique that a lot of lower-budget adventure games use to
avoid having to animate complex actions.
My biggest critique of Hob's Barrow would largely come down to the story
and characters. There's a curious recurrence in all the AGS games I've mentioned in
this review of having the protagonist be a young woman with an absent father or
father-figure, and for her relationship with her father to in some respect drive
her motivation or characterisation, and I find it also noteworthy that all three
of these games were written, as far as I'm aware, by men. Thomasina's father
William was a barrow-digger before her, but has been a silent invalid for
decades as a result of an unexplained accident during her childhood. Thus her
motivation begins with trying to carry on her father's legacy; it ultimately
ends with her trying to cure her father of his ailment. Perhaps it's just me,
but I find this parent-driven characterisation, while realistic, a little tired
as a character device.
Similarly, the plot is perhaps too conventional for its own good. Thomasina is
invited to excavate the barrow by one of the locals, and it's ultimately
revealed that not only had her father excavated the same site previously, but it
was the cause of his accident. While the discovery is naturally disturbing
in-game for the character, it's a little neater than I like in this kind of
strange story. Further, it's ultimately revealed that certain locals have
brought Thomasina there for the very purpose of uncovering a powerful force that
was previously sealed away by her father, in the hope of releasing it so that it
will grant them power and plenty. If you've ever seen the original
The Wicker Man from 1973, elements of this conspiracy plot aren't too
surprising. Further still, while the game spends a good deal of time introducing the
town of Bewlay and its inhabitants, the dénouement with the actual barrow
excavation and the uncovering of its secrets is rather hastily done and doesn't
give itself too much time to build up a sense of dread and inevitability. When
friendly local Arthur Tillett reveals to Thomasina that he overheard her two
apparent allies discussing the plot to lure her to the town, it gives away a bit
too much too unambiguously (and too soon). Similarly, the game builds up and up to the actual excavation, only for the entire process to occur in a narrated cutaway, when having the excavation take several days and have its own complications would probably have heightened the tension. Further, once she enters the barrow itself and comes across
strange ruins and eerie purple lights, unfortunately I found it all rather too
much in keeping with a typical pastiche of a story by H.P. Lovecraft or one of
his imitators. The game's commentary mentions the ghost stories of M.R. James as
an inspiration, but I don't quite see it. A clearer inspiration is the point and
click horror adventure game series The Last Door.
I also wanted to add that the use of the period setting feels a little
inconsistent. At times the characters speak and interact much as I imagine
Victorian-era people would, especially with an outsider. However, I can't help
but suspect that in reality an unaccompanied young woman arriving in town,
asking lots of questions, frequenting the local pub and getting about in
breeches would probably have caused a massive stir at the time. I appreciate
that this is partly the point of Thomasina's character but sometimes it makes it
difficult to take the setting entirely seriously. One thing I noted in
particular is that some of the characters are implausibly familiar with
Thomasina and vice-versa, using first names and nicknames; it's also not very
realistic, I don't think, that Thomasina, as an upper-class or at least
upper-middle-class woman of the time, would need (or even think to use) a maid
to introduce her to the local aristocracy. These are just nitpicks of course but
they stand out when at times the characters do seem to speak mostly in an
appropriate idiom and behave as people of the era would.
As far as gameplay is concerned, Hob's Barrow isn't a particularly
difficult puzzle game. The puzzles generally require more exploration than
lateral thinking, taking the opportunity to re-explore the environment after
certain conditions have changed. The town of Bewlay feels large enough and each
day there is a list of goals, which helps with keeping track. A seasoned
adventure game player won't be slowed down by any of this but it does given the
opportunity to let the environments feel well-used, which, given that the game's
atmosphere is its strongest feature, makes them complimentary of the broader
picture. I should also add that apart from some children's voices which are
clearly just adult women adopting squeaky tones the voice acting is strong
overall, as is the use of appropriate regional accents and slang.
Overall, despite my view that it's lacking a certain degree of originality in
terms of its story and characters, and has some issues with pacing, I enjoyed playing
The Excavation of Hob's Barrow. Folk horror is an interesting concept,
preferably when it isn't too needlessly Lovecraftian, and this game certainly
kept me invested. Further, as I've said above, I have to give the developers
credit for making this game as a side project. The main takeaway, I think, with
all of these points is that atmosphere can be a huge factor in the success of an
adventure game, and creating a world that players want to stick around in goes a
long way, even if other elements are very familiar.
