The Excavation of Hob's Barrow

My first hour in Hob's Barrow had me questioning whether I'd picked the right game for a Saturday night. Thomasina Bateman arrives in the fictional Victorian village of Bewlay to excavate an ancient burial mound, and the game spends a generous stretch of its runtime making her, and you, feel profoundly unwelcome. Suspicious villagers dodge questions, the man who invited her is missing, and the puzzles are lightweight enough that you start to wonder if the whole thing is just a slow walking tour with good music. Stick with it. The payoff is real. Mechanically, this is a traditional point-and-click built on a clean, modern interface. Left-click picks things up, right-click examines them, a map handles fast travel, and a journal logs your active goals so you're never totally adrift. Inventory-based puzzles ask you to combine items and use them on the environment, and the solutions are, for the most part, logical rather than moon-logic obtuse. The middle section does lean on fetch-quest busywork as Thomasina assembles her excavation crew, and several reviewers have noted that the game over-narrates during this stretch, spelling out things a genre-literate player would clock immediately. It's a fair criticism. The pacing here is deliberate to the point of sluggish. What carries you through is the atmosphere, and it is exceptional. The pixel art is doing serious work: character sprites range from expressive to genuinely unsettling, with villager designs that sit in an intentional uncanny valley, distorted, slightly wrong, like a photograph left too long in developing fluid. Close-up cutaway shots of eyes, weathered faces, and ritual objects punctuate quieter scenes with a jolt of dread that a higher-resolution art style might actually defuse. The soundtrack by The Machine. The Demon. pulses with droning synth that keeps your shoulders tense even in daylight scenes. And then there is Samantha Beart's voice performance as Thomasina, which earned a BAFTA Breakthrough award and a longlist BAFTA nomination for Leading Role, the writing and performance together make her feel like a full person, not a genre placeholder. When the game finally descends into the barrow itself, things shift hard. The mechanical puzzles get more complex, the horror imagery stops being subtle, and the story's foreshadowing snaps into place. This final act is where the game earns its reputation and where most of the valid criticism also lands: the ending wraps Thomasina's arc with real force but leaves several supporting threads dangling in ways that feel unresolved rather than deliberately ambiguous. Folk horror as a genre does thrive on unanswered questions, but a few of these read more like cut content than intentional unease. For players who find the Wicker Man-meets-point-and-click pitch immediately appealing, this is a comfortable recommendation. The roughly eight-to-ten hour runtime never outstays its welcome once the barrow opens up, and the combination of strong writing, award-recognized voice work, and a visual style purpose-built for dread adds up to something that lingers after the credits. If you need brisk pacing and snappy puzzles from minute one, the slow-burn opening may test your patience before the game earns your trust.

Alex · Scout Team

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