The Excavation of Hob's Barrow Reviews

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!

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

Lovely art, perfect voice acting and interesting story! 10/10

Not difficult but the story is captivating, would recommend for a short interesting experience.

One of the best point and click adventures I have ever played. The atmosphere and tone are second to none. I really felt like an old fashioned lady archaeologist caught up in a folk horror plot. The writing, performances, and puzzles are all excellent.

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.

Great story and really fun and intuitive puzzles. Never felt lost but never felt like my hand was being held. Maybe severed.

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 being ugly, but every relatively high-res face in here is HIDEOUS. Sure, the closeups of the town creeps' ugly, leering faces are as off-putting and unpleasant as their personalities, but what does that actually add? They're already creepy and unpleasant. I don't need an unskippable still to prove that. The meh: - The map is pretty large, but that means the obligatory backtracking and searching get tedious fast, even with the fast travel and highlight systems. - You know how disappointing escape rooms that rely on a clue book are? The journal is that clue book. [spoiler]You don't really need to think about any of the puzzles in the barrow, just follow whatever's in red text in the journal and call it done. They're not hints so much as a walkthrough.[/spoiler] - Most of the game isn't particularly creepy or ominous, just kind of boring. You wander around town exhausting all dialogue options so time can advance, then fetch something. Yay? - [spoiler]The final reveal is just disappointing. There's some neat folklore buildup, but it's tossed aside for the big reveal that it's just a demon. Meh.[/spoiler]

8.3/10 Pros- * The Writing and Storytelling * The Art and Atmosphere * The Sound Design Cons- * Puzzle Pacing (some puzzles are unintuitive and slows the story down) I didn’t expect this game to get under my skin the way it did. Even though its pixel art, it all feels so alive; the villagers, the unease, the houses, and ofcourse, the moors which feel like they could truly swallow you whole. It is the kind of horror that doesn’t rely on jump scares or gore, but something far more insidious: the horror of inevitability, of ancient truths that care little for human ambition. Days after playing, I still think about the final scenes. About Thomasina. About the barrow. About what we disturb when we dig too deep.

Puzzles, dialogue, and world felt under-baked. Difficult for me to get into after nearly 4 hours