"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.

"LOOM"

When I was a kid, my dad "borrowed" and never gave back (i.e. stole) a CD of LucasArts games from his work, a disc for Macintosh computer featuring The Secret of Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, and, if I recall correctly, Pipe Dream. The first of these would go on to be one of my favourite games of all time (bested only by its own sequel). But another game on that disc was LOOM.

These days I think of myself as someone who knows LucasArts adventure games, but the truth is the games I really know are The Monkey Island series, and the other ones I've played and finished are the two Indiana Jones games (Last Crusade and Fate of Atlantis), Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit the Road, and Grim Fandango. I've played a bit of, but never finished, Maniac Mansion and Zac McKracken, I don't think I've ever played The Dig, and the one time I tried to play the full version of Full Throttle its unintuitive (in my view) puzzles annoyed me so much that I stopped. But I always forget about LOOM.

I definitely played LOOM as a kid, albeit without the copy protection information allowing the player to leave the opening island, and saw m'colleague playing the rest of it later in my youth, but I'd never played the full thing until this last week in which I decided to sit down and experience the full adventure of Bobbin Threadbare of the Guild of Weavers. The game has a point-and-click interface in which Bobbin must use his magical distaff to interact with objects in the world by playing various "drafts", i.e. magic spells. There are no dialogue trees and there's no inventory.

The two things people generally say about LOOM is that it's easy and it's short. I'm not entirely sure of the first part — as with all LucasArts adventure games I feel like some puzzle solutions suffered from not clearly indicating that it was even possible to try certain actions, let alone accomplish them. The second part I definitely agree with. The game feels as if it has only just established its world and cast of characters when it rushes to its dénouement. Maybe it was because I was only familiar with the first section, but the opening Loom Island portion of the game, in which you are introduced to the distaff mechanic, I always assumed was a mere prologue to a much larger experience, but it isn't really. After you escape from Loom Island, the game only has one other "open" section, Crystalgard, which really only features a single puzzle, and it then becomes more or less a linear sequence of set pieces until the end.

So LOOM feels a little bit underdone, especially compared to the LucasArts games which came out around it, namely Indy 3 and Monkey 1. We don't get to spend much time with any characters, and the plot moves extremely quickly. The whole thing almost feels more like a proof-of-concept for a larger experience that never came to fruition, and I suppose given that it was designed with the idea of two sequels which were never developed this makes sense, but again the linearity of the second half of the game emphasises a sense of unfulfilled potential, in which there could have been much more room for experimentation.

Like all LucasArts games, one thing LOOM does well is atmosphere. Partly this is due to its Tchaikovsky-derived soundtrack and early-90s LucasArts' ever-pleasant pixel visuals. However, it's also enhanced by the world that it imagines. LOOM's world is truly fantasy, with much magic and no visible modern technology, but it doesn't just present itself as a pseudo-medieval pastiche; there are no kings, knights or bedraggled peasants, just guilds of different artisans who all use magic in their own unique ways: shepherds who render themselves invisible to stealthily guard their flocks, blacksmiths who craft weapons of exceptional quality, clerics who dabble in necromancy, glassmakers who make scrying spheres, and the weavers, who warp the very fabric of reality itself. The guilds have distinctive outfits, unique visual styles and appropriate names. Thus the game presents itself with a fantasy world which truly feels "fantastic", a world of high magic and possibility, not just medieval Europe with wizards. One thing I especially appreciate is that the game does not use invented languages or similar, instead creating names from suitable arrangements of English words.

Of course, in some respects, this refreshing potential only makes LOOM's short and simple nature feel more unsatisfying. However, I'm immediately intrigued by the bits of story we hear about the past; when did the Age of the Great Guilds come into being, and how? What were the First and Second Shadows that seem to have threatened the world previously? Maybe this is revealed in the audio drama which accompanied the game's EGA graphics release (I've listened and it doesn't add much), but it creates a sense of wonder, of a world we can both understand (the professions are relatable, albeit magical), and speculate about regarding its broader story. Perhaps it's a shame that there were never any sequels to LOOM, but equally perhaps there's no harm in it being left to fire a player's imagination thirty years later. That's also something to say in favour of the LucasArts adventures; unlike some games of their era, they're still actually playable without immense frustration. And perhaps with the benefit of hindsight we can interpret LOOM less as a sprawling puzzle game in the vein of Monkey Island or Myst, and more as an early graphics-driven example of a visual novel or interactive storytelling with a puzzle element, which of course has only become more and more common as game development tools have become more accessible.

With that in mind, then, I think LOOM is worth thinking about in two ways: firstly, it's a taste of what was to come in player-driven audio-visual experiences. Secondly, and strikingly, however, it's a good example of what fantasy could be and, in my experience, still rarely is: something truly distinctive and imaginative, while simultaneously having a grounded narrative. Imagine what could be made with today's tools yet with the simple, but powerful, spellbinding of LOOM? And thirty years later it feels like it's still waiting to be the creative inspiration it deserves to be.

The Endings of 'SKYHILL'

Lately I've been hooked on SKYHILL, the point and click survival indie game from Mandragora and published by Daedalic Entertainment. It's a simple but atmospheric game in which you play as a lone man, possibly named "Perry Jason", who is trying, apparently, to escape from the aftermath of a biological weapon attack which has transformed humanity into monsters. The twist is that you start the game in the VIP suite on the one hundredth floor of a hotel, and must fight your way down. As such, you reactivate lifts and, when injured or needing to improve your equipment, you must retreat upwards, returning to your place of sanctuary on the top floor. It plays with typical imagery of progress, in which upward motion is associated with achievement, success and escape. Here it's the opposite; you want to go down, and going up is going backward.

The gameplay is fairly simple. Everything bar a couple of "puzzles" is done with the mouse. You click on rooms that you want the character to walk into (one on either side of the central stairwell in two dimensions), fight monsters in turn-based battles by clicking on them, either generally or by selecting weak spots which have a reduced chance to hit, collect food, health items and gear, and craft with the material you collect. You can use this material to upgrade your VIP suite in various ways, primarily to cook better food in which the combined value is greater than the sum of the parts, and to build superior weapons. These range from the notionally conventional, like a blade strapped to a wooden mop to form an improvised spear, to the outright outlandish, like circular-saw-bladed axes, Japanese naginata and, at the top of the pile, an electric "chainsword" presumably influenced by Warhammer 40,000.

I highly prize simplicity in games, and SKYHILL engrossed me. I've played it for 16 hours - over ten times as long as I've played Dark Souls, which I bought recently out of an itching for RPG fantasy but struggled to find interesting. There's something about simple games that I find appealing, especially when they're laden with atmosphere. In this case SKYHILL seems to owe a fair bit to 2012's Lone Survivor as they both feature apartment-based 2D post-apocalyptic gameplay, although SKYHILL is a good deal more simple and has less immediate narrative.

It's the narrative I wanted to talk about primarily, its ambiguity being another connection to Lone Survivor, which featured multiple endings and which generally suggested that the post-apocalyptic scenario was a hallucination, dream or delusion. In SKYHILL, apart from an opening comic-book-style cinematic which shows the player character checking into his hotel and being protected by a "biological defence system" when the city is attacked, the narrative is presented through a series of collectibles and interactive experiences: a series of journal entries, a set of voice recordings, some mysterious electronic and written messages, and a torn photograph. The confusing thing is, these elements don't all correlate. 

The journal entries describe the state of the world in the near future, which seems to suggest both a plague and a severe nuclear weapons moratorium after Middle Eastern terrorists gain access to nuclear weapons. These two events are seemingly followed by the development instead of vicious biological weapons, and a failing political relationship between the West and an Asian super-state named the "Eastern Confederation". On the verge of losing a war against the United Nations, this Confederation has apparently launched last-ditch biological attacks against the West. This apparently explains the situation. It doesn't explain, however, any of the other components.

The recordings are presumably the musings of the player character, and feature his melancholy thoughts about living in the post-apocalyptic world, as well as increasing thoughts that his life is a dream, and confusion about his identity; he describes himself as an inhabitant of the post-apocalyptic world scavenging in the hotel, but he's come from outside after the disaster. He's very clearly not having the same experience as the player character in gameplay. References to a "fever" suggest that he is a deluded and possibly infected inhabitant of the ruined world who is simply dreaming that he lives in the VIP suite at the top of the hotel, and is actually following hallucinatory "whisperings" attributed to a dead relative, "Nikki", beckoning him upstairs. This person was killed in an explosion which toppled a billboard, leaving the player character as the only survivor. It's unclear as to whether this relates to the explosion presented in the opening cutscene. In this case the truth is the reverse of what the player experiences.

The interactive components, by contrast, including graffiti behind a hanged man and a computer message discerned by using a password taken from a website which can only be accessed using a web browser outside the game, a kind of modern equivalent of old games that asked players to use the phone, state that the world is unreal, and that the player character is in fact part of a virtual reality experiment testing the effects of a mutagenic virus and the possibilities of human survival through a computer simulation.

The photographs, finally, assemble a news article and statement describing the existence of a vicious serial killer dubbed 'The Mechanic' who uses improvised weaponry and who apparently believes that the world is inhabited by monsters who have infiltrated human society. They don't exactly fit together. Each one leads towards a different ending. Thus there are essentially four storylines:

1. The storyline on the surface: a man is trapped on the top floor of a one-hundred-storey hotel after "the end of the world" and is trying to fight his way out.

2. The "recording" storyline: the man is actually an inhabitant of the ruined world suffering from delusions which lead him to believe that he's in the first scenario; in actual fact he "lives" in the lobby and is climbing to the top of the hotel following a hallucinatory voice beckoning him upwards.

3. The "computer" storyline: the man is actually plugged into a virtual reality machine, being used as a human guinea pig to simulate and test human behaviour after a society has been destroyed by a mutagenic virus. Nothing in the game is real.

4. The "photograph" storyline: the man is actually a hallucinating lunatic termed 'The Mechanic' who sees the innocent people around him as dangerous monsters and is murdering them; he's not really escaping from the hotel but rather rampaging down from the VIP room slaying the other inhabitants; the premise is essentially an elaborate, violent fantasy.

SKYHILL has three endings, and I'll describe them in the order they appear in the game's cutscene menu.

ENDING 1:

Named the  "Secret Ending" in the game's achievements, in this one a point-of-view character wakes up in some kind of scientific facility being observed by two people. One of them is pleased with the "data" they have collected and tells the other to "dispose" of the person from whose point of view the player experiences the scene. That's it. It follows on from the "computer" storyline.

ENDING 2:

This is the default ending, and it follows from the "recording" storyline, but is achieved regardless. The player character bursts out not from the front doors of the hotel on the ground, but rather the door on the roof of the hotel, high above the city, calling out for "Nikki" and finding out that she is not there. He climbs onto the edge of the roof and looks down, presumably preparing to jump, a reference to one of the recordings in which he considers whether his life is a dream and muses that death supposedly ends dreams.

ENDING 3:

Dubbed the "Alternate Ending" in the achievements, in this one the player character wearily emerges from the hotel's lobby, a bloody axe in hand and a dead mutant behind him, only to discover a brightly-lit, functioning city, and the hotel surrounded by armed police telling him to put down his weapon. As he warns them of further monsters, they shoot him, and he dies in confusion, unaware of his hallucination, the final shot showing that the dead "mutant" behind him is in fact the murdered body of the hotel's receptionist.

Thus the odd thing about SKYHILL is that it has three different storylines, none of which wholly relate to the others, and the only one that apparently isn't true is what I've termed the "storyline on the surface" above. The only thing that the player knows for sure is that what they are observing is, in one way or another, not the truth, at least not wholly. The mutants might not be real, or the progression of the game might not be real, or the entire thing may not be real.

On the one hand it's an interesting narrative exercise if nothing else. To what extent do we trust what we are presented with in a text? In what way can a video game have an "unreliable narrator"? This also leads to the question of whether one of the multiple narratives is "more true" than the others. The default ending resolves one of the narrative strands to the same extent as the others, but requires none of the luck required for the "alternate ending" (as the photograph fragments do not necessarily appear on a particular playthrough, at least not in accessible places) and does not require the arguable puzzle-solving ability of the "secret ending", which relies on the player, unless like I did they discover it through the internet, realising that the mysterious password file on one of the interactive computers in the game is the address of a real website which can provide them with the password used at the end of the game to access the "secret ending". Does this mean that Ending 2 is the "least true"? Ending 3 relies on luck, while Ending 1 uses both luck (the computer with the password file does not always appear) and puzzle-solving ability. Does that make Ending 1 the "most true" ending as it arguably involves the most challenge? In the end, however, the character is deluded any way you slice it, and perhaps the point of SKYHILL ultimately is to question the idea of "multiple endings" and whether they really mean anything.

Multiple endings are typically presented as a "reward" for conscientious players. They typically give different levels of closure, with the most difficult to attain being the most satisfying, as in Lone Survivor. SKYHILL reverses this situation by turning it on its end: none of the endings offer any real closure. If Ending 1 is true, what's the meaning of all the material about 'The Mechanic'? Was that part of the simulation? If Ending 3 is true, what is the meaning of all the information about the war, or the computer in the lobby? If Ending 2 is true, who was "Nikki" and why was the player character so confused about what he was doing? You might be able to fold some of it together; Ending 1 lists the test subject as an unknown agent who might conceivably be 'The Mechanic', but it's hardly clear.

In this way SKYHILL also interrogates typical gameplay experiences. Ending 1 presents the game as a data-collecting exercise which gives no benefit to the player whatsoever, a possible commentary on game experiences in general. Ending 2 questions the reality of what a player is presented with in-game, arguing that graphical representations are nothing more than that - up might really be down and a penthouse might really be a lobby, and we're none the wiser. Ending 3 to an extent goes down a familiar route of criticising the routine violence of video games, presenting it as deranged, but it also mocks the current obsession with "crafting" in the indie game survival scene, portraying the questionable combinations used to produce new items in such games as the imaginings of a deluded mind.

On the other hand, SKYHILL might be seen as a cop-out, a game that foists upon its players three vague storylines, fed in an arbitrary fashion, to avoid composing a single robust narrative. The "simulation" ending in particular is hardly original, and there are certainly precedents for the "Mechanic" ending as well. As a result, ultimately, my favourite was actually the default ending: the idea that all this progress has been no progress at all, that the inversion of typical goals was itself being inverted, and that there is nothing, really, to discover. Perhaps that's the point, and the "harder to attain" endings are formulaic deliberately to subvert our expectations. In that case, almost as an exercise in futility, SKYHILL succeeds.

All that remains is to consider this archetype of the "man alone", alienated in a world in which there is no meaning, and how the game's various narratives engage with this. I'd argue that the game essentially presents them as interchangeable and focused on a single concept: our utterly limited comprehension of what constitutes reality, and how modernity and its artificiality has brought this, so long avoided, to our notice.