This review contains spoilers
The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow definitely oozes quality from the jump. The art and music are great and really lend to the folk horror vibe the game has going on as you explore an isolated British village out in the moors. The game manages to capture the desolate expanse of the moors so well with relatively little scope. The writing is also quite good for the most part; the protagonist, Thomasina, is well fleshed out and a good chunk of the supporting cast have some nice depth to them too. The voice-acting is also top notch, as expected of adventures games published (as well as developed by) WadjetEye. The puzzles are also pretty solid, there’s one puzzle that I felt was a bit too obtuse in finding the item you needed, but it wasn’t too bad. The puzzles are mainly interacting with the characters and inventory puzzles. The endgame goes more into logic puzzle territory but I thought those were fine. The game does has some nice quality of life stuff too like fast travel and a hotspot button.
What prevents the game for achieving true greatness and what soured the experience for me though is its complete wet fart of an ending. It’s a horror story, I’m not expecting happy endings here where the protagonist gets away unscathed, but Hob’s Barrow’s ending is a forced, contrived downer. This is mainly due to how out of character Thomasina acts to go along with it to make happen and it’s even more egregious because how the game strongly establishes how sensible and practical a person she is and especially after a person she trusts outright tells her she’s being set up. The ending doesn’t feel like a failure borne out of Thomasina’s flaws or being something out of her control, instead it genuinely feels like the kind of the bad ending you get if you, the player, messed up along the way for not paying attention and were punished for it instead of a natural progression of the narrative and the actions of the characters. Also it feels like it just was shoehorning in all the Lovecraftian horror story ending clichés it could without any respect to the narrative that came before it.
Regardless of its full pratfall right before the finish line, Hob’s Barrow is still quite good and worth playing, especially for the Halloween season. Do kind of hope it gets a remaster/patch down the road to fix the ending like Kathy Rain did though.
What prevents the game for achieving true greatness and what soured the experience for me though is its complete wet fart of an ending. It’s a horror story, I’m not expecting happy endings here where the protagonist gets away unscathed, but Hob’s Barrow’s ending is a forced, contrived downer. This is mainly due to how out of character Thomasina acts to go along with it to make happen and it’s even more egregious because how the game strongly establishes how sensible and practical a person she is and especially after a person she trusts outright tells her she’s being set up. The ending doesn’t feel like a failure borne out of Thomasina’s flaws or being something out of her control, instead it genuinely feels like the kind of the bad ending you get if you, the player, messed up along the way for not paying attention and were punished for it instead of a natural progression of the narrative and the actions of the characters. Also it feels like it just was shoehorning in all the Lovecraftian horror story ending clichés it could without any respect to the narrative that came before it.
Regardless of its full pratfall right before the finish line, Hob’s Barrow is still quite good and worth playing, especially for the Halloween season. Do kind of hope it gets a remaster/patch down the road to fix the ending like Kathy Rain did though.