The Excavation of Hob's Barrow

The moors of the Northern English countryside are small hills and austere plains with no tall vegetation, spread out beneath the almost always grey and mysterious skies of the north. It is precisely this mystery that invades the protagonist of The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, Thomasina Bateman, and takes her to the sinister town of Bewlay.

Thomasina does not consider herself a grave robber, but rather a scholar of ancient burial mounds, and is currently preparing a book about them. On this occasion, she has been invited by letter to travel to a remote village in the English countryside, to unearth the secrets of the aforementioned Hob's Barrow.

Continuing in the footsteps of the classics, like LucasArts and Sierra Games, The Excavation of Hob's Barrow follows a style completely made in pixel art, we move around a scene by clicking with the mouse on the interactable objects and people, right click to look, left click for action and a space for the inventory, but also with mechanics of new games of the genre, features as a "to do list” and fast travel.

Despite its inspiration with the classics, it has some animated scenes that are very expressive, and disturbing, conveying an air of unreality that sets the game in a great way. It is this uneasiness and constant feeling of strangeness that the developers wanted to capture during the game.

Bewlay works so well as a setting for all this madness and anomalous events, its characters are adapted to their reality, and are so foreign to Thomasina's world that conversations sometimes become unsettling simply because they are people with such different backgrounds and ways of living. Since we are faced with a graphic adventure and we have to talk to everyone and squeeze information out of them, through the protagonist's interactions with them and with their environment, everything becomes more familiar, which makes the plot twists more satisfying to experience as the story progresses.

The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is a game that should be enjoyed it at a slow pace, without unexpected surprises, in which just a walk in the rain through the moors towards a half-ruined house is enough to make us shudder. Being an adventure focused on narrative, it does not seek to complicate things or give us an excessively long experience, but rather a good story led by characters that sound and feel very real and human.