The Haunted Hoard: The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow (Switch)
Dotted across the English countryside are burial mounds known as barrows. Easy to mistake for hills as the grass covered dirt placed over them help the tombs blend in with the environment, they might not be extravagant like pyramids or as rich with historical finds as catacombs, but Thomasina Bateman still finds excavating them a rewarding and fascinating task. It’s not much of a surprise that the people of the small rural town of Bewlay are uneasy about someone showing up and asking to excavate the nearby burial mound, but in the point and click horror game The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow, Thomasina gradually finds there are more unnerving reasons why she should maybe leave this particular unassuming burial mound alone.
The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow very much takes its time getting to its more overt horror elements at first, instead leaning on a perhaps more relatable sense of unease that can come from showing up in a place where you’re not really wanted. Bewlay is an isolated little town only really connected to the rest of England proper recently thanks to newly installed railroad tracks. Few people in town are welcoming to outsiders, but many are also too polite to make it overt, save when they’re a few drinks deep. Rather than outright hostility, Thomasina starts off butting against that clear discomfort the people she needs to talk to to set up her excavation feel, and the game prods at this even more with its use of detailed pixel art. Normally, the pixel art can create vivid environments, even if they’re often the muddy moors or a dreary little town rather than something lovely, while the people are a bit simplified, still recognizable from each other but with harder to read expressions. Close-ups though will show you someone in far more detail than you’d often like. A regular drunken man doesn’t exactly look horrifying, but an unflattering close focus can conjure up that social feeling you’d get if a drunkard you don’t know was getting a little too close. Animation can be used during these scenes to make them even more eerie, a scrappy local cat animated with unnerving fluidity and making you wonder if there is truly something wrong with it.
Thomasina keeps a level head rather well, but as the player, there are many times where you’re tasked with picking reactions for her. These mostly seem to color the interactions you have with certain townsfolk rather than diverting the course of the story’s events in major ways, but the game stopping to ask you essentially how you feel about someone also leads to that lingering sense of discomfort that the town of Bewlay gives of. You’re often asked whether you trust someone enough to be open with them or whether you will respond to their behavior with kindness or a sharp rebuke, and as you start getting reactions to your early choices, you might start to realize that the people you meet aren’t so one-dimensional that you can write them off due to a bad impression. Someone being outwardly friendly or gruff might just be the way they react to strangers in their little shifting world, and your strongest ally or enemy can be someone who you could very much get a bad read on if you respond to them differently when those dialogue choices come up.
The voice acting in The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow does a good deal for fleshing out the citizenry of Bewlay and helps make fuller characters out of the people you encounter. You can pick up hints of irritation or earnestness buried beneath awkwardness in the performances, although it’s not like you’re trying to suss out if everyone in town is suspicious. There are kids you’ll speak to that are written believably, characters on the periphery who are a bit more memorable due to their accent or their line delivery, and conversations are divided up neatly so while simply talking to people does make up a good bulk of the first half of the game, you don’t feel like you’re spending too long listening to any single conversation. Bewlay itself is a place with a good bit of character, the local graveyard has last names you can connect to the people you meet, you pick up on how different folks get along with someone with power like the local lord or someone who might sit in an odd place socially like the lady making remedies out in the forest. You’re mostly working towards getting the permission and help to excavate Hob’s Barrow, but by the time that actually begins, you’ve gotten a fairly thorough portrait of the place you find yourself and go in knowing there is a far greater weight to what you’re doing than simply disturbing a grave.
Thomasina has a personal story pop up many times across the adventure as she reflects on the past. Her father, long ago, returned from his own excavations unable to speak or move, but Thomasina grew up to continue his work and is reminded of her connection to her afflicted father many times as she nears the excavation. While the Thomasina of present is a confident skeptic who handles herself too well for such history to spill out as a natural piece of conversation, the flashbacks start establishing gradually relevant elements of her life that intertwine with her time in Bewlay, especially as the seemingly supernatural starts gradually dipping its toes in the narrative. The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow does eventually shift more explicitly into horror, but the hints of it alongside the natural uncanny elements keep some tension present before the greater truths are revealed. Once horror does take the spotlight and the truths of Hob’s Barrow are starting to come into focus though, The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow also starts to shift how it plays some, focusing in more on puzzle solving than before.
Initially, much of your time in Bewlay involves conversations, telling the right people the right things or finding items they want to get more information. Inventory puzzles are common but somewhat simple, like using a digging trowel for its intended purpose or sometimes as a way to gain a little leverage when opening something. When you’re in an area, you can hold a button to view available interactive objects or even just use the directional buttons to snap your cursor through the spots of interest, meaning you won’t ever really miss something for too long if you utilize these options. Some screens do have a lot more extraneous elements there to establish things about town so you’re not only able to highlight puzzle-solving objects, and as you get a bit deeper into the plot, there will be puzzles around Bewlay that might have a more complicated solution than they first appear. You’ll get times where a new item immediately triggers a memory of where you can potentially use it or others where you’re walking about town wandering how maybe combining things you’ve found might trigger the situation you need to progress, but it’s only when you’re actually in Hob’s Barrow do puzzle solutions start to feel complex. Some you’ll need to feel out, noticing how altering one thing impacts another, while others might involve consulting notes and interpreting their hidden meaning. The difficulty doesn’t take a huge jump though, and even if you are stumped, once you do get the answer it’s usually fairly easy to see how you should have realized it sooner. It could have been nice if the frequent social interactions had a stronger payoff towards the conclusion rather than leaning more on true logic puzzles and figuring out strange devices, the mysteries of the plot the richer part of the experience than the actions taken to see it to its single possible ending.
THE VERDICT: The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is first built on the subtle unease of heading to a small town with dark secrets, it often unclear who is just a bit of an awkward or stodgy local or someone who truly has something to hide. Slowly, more unexplainable and dark elements weave into the plot alongside moments pixel art is used against you to add to the uncomfortable feeling Thomasina would have trying to push through local superstition to try and unearth history that is meaningful to her. When things start to truly dive into horror though, you’ll have come to know the people of Bewlay rather well and start engaging in some effective puzzle solving, the time spent becoming familiar with the small town more conceptually interesting to make up for its early simpler puzzles before everything culminates at Hob’s Barrow. It may not pay off all of its place-setting perfectly, but it still provides a compelling point and click plot that you’re eager to see the conclusion to.
And so, I give The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow for Nintendo Switch…
A GOOD rating. The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is a subtler sort of horror for a good bit of its run time and never exactly delves into the in-your-face terrors that tend to immediately earn a game its place in the horror genre. It starts off creepy in a realistic way, where people aren’t treating you normally, or get dodgy when you ask about Hob’s Barrow or the man who invited you to town, Leonard Shoulder. Some of these things are deeper than they seem, and others are mundane, a suspicion about a lady from out of town asking about a burial mound not the weirdest thing to make someone clam up and not want to help. The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow doesn’t string you along on just uneasiness though, throwing in more true uncanny moments that start to hint at the darker truths so you aren’t left with just breadcrumbs before the big excavation. It does end up almost a shame that you do spend a good bit of the end disconnected from Bewlay after coming to know it so well though, the increased puzzle solving focus keeping you busy and the new discoveries keeping your mind active, but it feels like your growing social understanding might have been able to pay off with perhaps an alternate ending or even just a moment where you’re allowed to lay out what you uncovered about the citizens with ill intent before the game makes the reveals itself. It does provide an effective bit of small town folk horror, and comparisons to the 1973 film The Wicker Man feel very appropriate in terms of tone and structure. It cannot be understated how well the voice acting and pixel art bring the setting to life, from its mundane drudgery to bits of life and beauty, you get both sides of the rural life alongside the social issues that can arise from it as well. The puzzle solving being more straightforward or only occasionally creative before the final act isn’t too much of a knock on the experience, the mysteries holding your attention enough that poking around for items to grab and use elsewhere isn’t too vital to holding your fascination.
It’s easy to unnerve with the unnatural, but The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow almost makes you uneasy when things are a bit too natural. Real life can be a bit ugly, and focusing in on that at points feels like it roots some of the game’s early uncomfortable moments and helps build that small town strangeness up before it can start doing more than make you suspicious of the citizenry. There isn’t some anxiousness that everyone is against you, but that uncertainty of how things tie to the barrow and what the intentions of the people you speak with are keep The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow engaging even when you’re essentially delivering information around town to get closer to the more overt horror of the game’s back end. It’s often the performances, the little realistic touches, and the patience in progressing things that make this an enticing story rather than the puzzles solved to progress to the next discovery.