This review contains spoilers
Oh great, now I have to be haunted by this game for the rest of my life. To be cursed by a disquieting tale of folklore, superstition, archaeology and cats that falls somewhere between Lovecraft and The Wicker Man without truly being quite like either.
I often struggle with what I specifically want to talk about when reviewing a game, but here it’s only more so. I’m a southern person whose family come from a small bit of Wales, and who spent over half a decade living in the north, and those differing perspectives and tones and communities all inform how I’m perceiving Thomasina, how I’m perceiving this village, and the northern sorts within. The alienation, the closeness, wariness of others, distance from anyone but the village you live in, there’s stuff to connect to that makes you understand the less sinister characters more, but does nothing to lessen the unease when dealing with peculiarities, eccentrics and absentees, none more than the local lord, who upon your meeting (well, re-meeting, his identity is unknown earlier on) shows you his DEFINITELY NOT SUSPICIOUS ancient church he’s having rebuilt to bring back the worship of something… old. Forgotten. Dangerous.
You have regular nightmares, visions of the barrow you’ve come to excavate, communicating with a sort of goblin creature (the mythology is brilliantly explained, but I’ll keep it simple here), trying to convince you that your ultimate goal is to free him. Thomasina talks to the player via a letter to her Mother, some time after the game’s story has finished. We know that whatever he’s promising isn’t going to be what we really want. But the deception, the corruption of him, infested with the increasingly powerful, sanity-breaking, unseen Abraxas, is still a gut punch, as you see that no matter the intent, this evil is beyond anything anyone could have prepared for. And Thomasina’s fate is a capstone on that.
There’s a lot about Thomasina’s Father. He’s the root of the story, after all, bedridden, incommunicative and non-functioning as he is. We all have Daddy issues, but the way this played out was unanticipated. To not truly know your parent, to then learn they were something the opposite of what you expected, and had done something terrible along the way… it’s effective.
The whole game is effective. The hens are gone. The church is risen. Abraxas walks.
I often struggle with what I specifically want to talk about when reviewing a game, but here it’s only more so. I’m a southern person whose family come from a small bit of Wales, and who spent over half a decade living in the north, and those differing perspectives and tones and communities all inform how I’m perceiving Thomasina, how I’m perceiving this village, and the northern sorts within. The alienation, the closeness, wariness of others, distance from anyone but the village you live in, there’s stuff to connect to that makes you understand the less sinister characters more, but does nothing to lessen the unease when dealing with peculiarities, eccentrics and absentees, none more than the local lord, who upon your meeting (well, re-meeting, his identity is unknown earlier on) shows you his DEFINITELY NOT SUSPICIOUS ancient church he’s having rebuilt to bring back the worship of something… old. Forgotten. Dangerous.
You have regular nightmares, visions of the barrow you’ve come to excavate, communicating with a sort of goblin creature (the mythology is brilliantly explained, but I’ll keep it simple here), trying to convince you that your ultimate goal is to free him. Thomasina talks to the player via a letter to her Mother, some time after the game’s story has finished. We know that whatever he’s promising isn’t going to be what we really want. But the deception, the corruption of him, infested with the increasingly powerful, sanity-breaking, unseen Abraxas, is still a gut punch, as you see that no matter the intent, this evil is beyond anything anyone could have prepared for. And Thomasina’s fate is a capstone on that.
There’s a lot about Thomasina’s Father. He’s the root of the story, after all, bedridden, incommunicative and non-functioning as he is. We all have Daddy issues, but the way this played out was unanticipated. To not truly know your parent, to then learn they were something the opposite of what you expected, and had done something terrible along the way… it’s effective.
The whole game is effective. The hens are gone. The church is risen. Abraxas walks.