"The Excavation of Hob's Barrow"

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.