#574: The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow
A modern-day Shadow of the Comet but not as annoying
Initial release: September 28, 2022
Platform: PC, Switch
Developer: Cloak & Dagger Games
Adventure games, despite what you may have heard, aren’t dead yet, having survived in one form or another. Telltale Games, The Adventure Company, Frogwares, Wadjet Eye, and so on — all have played a role in keeping one of the oldest video game genres alive for almost fifty years. There’s something about being able to sit at your computer with a cup of coffee on a rainy day and click your way through a story (one often as good as any you’d find in a movie or TV show) without having to worry about reflexes or KDR. Wadjet Eye, especially, have been a consistent presence in the adventure sphere, with its flagship the popular Blackwell series as well as publishing a number of other titles such as Gemini Rue. Which leads us to The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow.
Developed by Cloak and Dagger Games, a small team working out of London, The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow at its heart is folk horror dressed in the trappings of a Lovecraftian tale. Young antiquarian Thomasina Bateman — likely named after the real-life Thomas Bateman — travels from London to Bewlay, a shitty little town out on the moors, at the invitation of one Leonard Shoulder, who is nowhere to be found. The purpose of her visit is to excavate a little-known Bronze Age burial site, known locally as Hob’s Barrow due to what the folklore says is the presence of a hobgoblin. The locals’ response to her presence ranges from friendly, to wary, to outright hostile. Most of them don’t know about the barrow; those that do want her to stay away from it. The more she looks into the history of the barrow and the strange goings-on around the town the more she discovers the barrow’s link to her invalid father, who had taught her everything she knows and instilled in her an almost pathological skepticism.
In general, the overall aesthetic and the folk-cum-Lovecraftian horror storyline remind me quite a bit of Infogrames’ Shadow of the Comet, a traditional point and click adventure game from 1993 that featured a rather thinly-veiled pastiche of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction. Both feature similar isolated small towns with dark histories with a blend of folk horror and something more sinister (hobgoblins and fairies in Excavation, Haley’s Comet in Comet) and a plucky main character who is wholly unprepared for the madness that lurks beyond the surface.
Where Excavation differs from Shadow of the Comet, however, is that it’s significantly less of a chore to play. Shadow of the Comet was developed before point and click became standard, and the CD-ROM version’s inclusion of it was just sort of bodged in there; it also had many of the same infuriating design tropes common to adventure games of the era: absurd puzzle solutions, frequent death traps, and dead-ends from making the wrong decision. While The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow does away with most of the worst cliches of the adventure game genre, it’s still nowhere as streamlined as, say, a Telltale Games title is. You’re still going to be wandering around a lot, picking up random trash off the ground because it’ll be useful later, and trying to get NPCs to help you.
That being said, it’s a beautiful little game; the backgrounds are well done, the character sprites have a lot of expression for being so chunky, and it’s got a great soundtrack, if sometimes a bit poorly mixed. The game also features full voice acting, some nice ambient sounds, and an easy to use interface. The characters are all well-realized, and the story in general is well-written, aside from a lingering question about the game’s timeline.
(Spoilers ahead)
Thomasina is given what turns out to be her father’s journal from when he visited the barrow 25 years prior. The journal mentions visiting the local wise woman for a remedy for pregnancy nausea, suggesting that he had visited the barrow while his wife was pregnant with Thomasina. But it’s later revealed that he had emerged from the barrow unable to move or speak, an incident that happened when Thomasina was very young. So which is it? This is never explained, though ultimately it’s inconsequential.
(Okay you can look now.)
The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow was a fun time. If you like adventure games, especially the old-school kind that aren’t as streamlined as, say, Telltale’s The Walking Dead, you should absolutely play Excavation.
june❤
The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is available on Steam and gog.com.
