The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow
The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is a point-and-click adventure game developed by Cloak and Dagger Games and published by Wadjet Eye Games. It was released on September 28th of 2022. The game stars Thomasina Bateman as she travels to the small village of Bewlay. She’s traveling around England writing a book on the barrows of England. Bewlay was her latest stop as she was summoned there by a mysterious Leonard Shoulder. Thomasina is an Antiquarian or *cough* *cough* a Tomb Raider. Hmm a Tomb Raider from England, why does that sound familiar? However, I digress. Thomasina arrives by train to Bewlay where she meets a variety of characters that she has to interact with and speak to in order to get to the bottom of first who is Leonard Shoulder and what’s the secret to Hob’s Barrow.
There are elements of fantasy and horror in this game which is what originally drew me to want to review this game for the website. This game, to me at least is very reminiscent of the late ’80s to mid-90s DOS and maybe early Windows point-in-click adventure games, where you get a task from person A or find item A and have to go to B only to accomplish C in order to get back to completing the task of A. This game reminds me specifically of one of my favorite DOS games The Colonel’s Bequest and possibly its sequel The Dagger of Amon Ra which was made by Sierra.
While I haven’t been able to complete the game as I have been hindered by Hurricane Ian at the end of September and had to get caught up. I will say that the story is intriguing as Thomasina interacts with the peculiar characters of Bewlay and work towards her goal of excavating Hob’s Barrow.
There are some supernatural and fantasy aspects in this game as there is also a slight horror theme as well, as Thomasina tries to solve the mystery that is Hob’s Barrow and how it connects to her injured father.
The only negative I have found in this game so far is I feel like a lot of time is spent trying to figure out where to go, with visiting and revisiting people to make sure you talk to everyone and click on everything to make sure it isn’t something important. So, it did slow a little bit for me in that aspect, but I do like games with puzzles that involve critical thinking, due to my love of the Resident Evil series and the trying to solve the puzzle aspect and find out the secrets that are hidden in Hob’s Barrow keeps me coming back for more.
The game is currently available for purchase in the Steam store for $14.99 and has available DLC in the soundtrack and Art Book which isn’t necessary to complete the game.
The system requirements are not intense as this game isn’t very CPU-heavy or GPU-heavy. The bare minimum to run this game is a Windows XP system with a Pentium processor or higher with 1GB of RAM and DirectX version 5.2, with the recommended settings being at least Windows 7, with a 2.7 Dual Core processor and above, 2GB of RAM.
My thoughts on the game are, I do feel this game is worth the purchase especially if you are into point-and-click games, puzzles, and or mystery games. The price isn’t too high and has an engaging story to keep you interested. I look forward to hopefully reviewing more games in the future as this was my first review. For any games, you would like me to talk about reach out to us on our social media platforms.
