The Excavation of Hob's Barrow

I'd heard good things, but the actual experience was underwhelming. The good: - The voice acting is solid. - There's a key to highlight everything on the screen you can interact with. - You can fast travel to areas you've been before. - You can skip the awkward fireside musical interlude. The bad: - Most of the genuinely creepy bits don't actually go anywhere. [spoiler]For example, the goblin's daughter exists to give you a fiddle for one of the final puzzles, I guess. There's really nothing more to that entire mystery.[/spoiler] - Until almost the end of the game, the puzzles are tedious fetch quests without any actual [i]puzzle[/i] logic to work out. - The closeups. They're (deliberately, I think) ugly, stay on screen for a predetermined amount of time vs allowing you to skip ahead, and don't really add anything to the game. It's not spooky or ominous, just kind of gross. Faces in general are awful here. That's not an issue with pixel art, since it [i]can[/i] do detail without bein...

The quality of this game totally caught me off guard. First, I wasn’t expecting the pixelated artwork to be beautiful, as it frequently was. I also didn’t expect the voice acting to be so evocative. And the narrative? LAYERS. Such an amazing discovery.

One more thing... ... This is not a dream.

Excellent cosmic-horror

I grew up on Point and Click games and this is a lovely newer entry in a genre we haven't seen that much of in recent years. It's a proper folk horror with excellent acting and music. And I'll always appreciate a developer who makes their games available on Mac as well as Windows.

This one was a bit of a surprise. The graphics had that early games charm to it, and had a very interesting story. While somewhat linear, the game play was interesting enough to keep me invested, while being diverse enough through the various tasks to avoid tedium. The game was relatively short in comparison to most currently, but at approximately $8 on sale, was worth every penny and the several hours I'd invested.

I have to admit, I was enthralled with the theme, style, atmosphere and voice acting in this game. It all came together perfectly and I will always appreciate it for those aspects. I could tell the game was fairly linear at first but it did give you choices that felt significant here and there when interacting with people (lie, tell the truth, choose to spend time with people etc.). As the game progressed and it became apparent where things were headed I was really looking forward to having some kind of choice in how everything wrapped up. It turns out the moments of agency were a bit deceptive. Unfortunately the final act [spoiler] goes full auto pilot and you have no choice but to guide the main character as she makes decisions that really don't make a lot of sense based on what she has learned up to that point. For example: Why would she complete the blood sacrifice? First of all, through the whole game she was calling all supernatural stuff "hogwash". She eventu...

I.. am at a loss for words due to the last part of this game. An incredibly haunting experience!

A truly haunting experience everyone should try if likes old-fashioned adventure games. The visuals reminded me to all the great early point-n-click legends but there is no moon logic here as every single puzzle and objective can be solved by simply thinking about what would you really do in that situation. The only thing I have to mention is its easy to forget that this is a horror game - don't get fooled!

One of the best point and click adventure of the past decade in my opinion. Feels like an A24 Movie made in pixel art. Fantastic setting, engaging story, do not miss out on it