What is so special about Thomasina Bateman? Does she perhaps wear a certain protective talisman? Was an alien embryo shot into her brain? She has no recurring nightmares, at least not at the start of the game. Maybe she’s a v… no, let’s not go there, although she’s certainly not a police officer either. Whatever it is, it has brought her to a village in northern England that, at first glance, seems normal, and whose residents go about their business without more than a gleeful ‘cheerful’.
Must know
What is it? Peculiar British folk horror point ‘n’ click
Expect to pay: £20 / $20 (guess, check before publishing)
Developer: Cloak and dagger games
Publisher: Wadjet eye
Judged by: Threadripper 2950x, 64GB RAM, RTX 3080
Multiplayer? no
Clutch: Steam (opens in new tab)
Of course there is more to it, otherwise Thomasina wouldn’t be here. She is an outspoken modern Victorian woman making a living as an antiques dealer, called to the village of Bewlay by an elusive man who is the driving force behind an excavation of a particular burial mound. And what secrets does she discover?
Wonderful things – although recognizing them requires looking beyond the art style. The low-res, blocky sprites may have worked for Maniac Mansion, but that game was mostly indoors. In Hob’s Barrow’s, majestic forests complete with recognizable songbirds and ravaged moors stretching as far as the eye can see are rendered as a mass of individual pixels struggling to blend together as a whole.
In the underground sections of the second half of the game, the look comes together, with stone blocks and curious pink lighting. When it’s not muddy, the hand-drawn look certainly has a lot of charm.
And atmosphere too. This is the game’s strong point, its folk-horror roots figuratively and literally digging into the earth around Bewlay to pull out a monstrous story that pulled me all the way to its deadly conclusion. There’s very little real horror here in terms of jump scares or gore, unless you count the actions of a particular stray cat. It’s a subtle kind of horror that makes you think about the implications of what the beautifully voiced villagers have brought upon themselves.
Thomasina’s character contributes greatly to that. She is utterly stoic: her favorite phrases are ‘curses!’ and ‘nonsense!’, and she won’t take any advice to stop her proposed archaeological analysis of what appears to be a perfectly normal small burial mound. She doesn’t flinch when faced with the obvious supernatural or — content warning — discussion of suicide. She’s not afraid to bang on people’s doors to demand that they help her. She might even be the kind to answer the phone, if they were invented at all. You would almost think that Thomasina really has something that ties her to events in this place where she has never been.
Store the twist
We are with her as she explores the village, getting supplies for villagers so they can provide information or give up an item she needs, battling walls of silence and misinformation along the way. Towards the end of the game, she expresses a single moment of self-doubt: Is everything she sees just all in her head? It wouldn’t be such a fun game if she gave up and returned to London, and we’d be robbed of the chance to solve a myriad of adventure game puzzles. I had to translate text from Latin, consult magazines in my research, juggle apples, and really pay attention to what the villagers have to say to Thomasina.
The ending feels a bit rushed, but still manages to make an effective turn – an event takes place at the end of the game that left me staring at the monitor with open mouth, not sure if it would have more impact if my mouse pointer had been direct that caused the events I was looking at.
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But the moment could have been even better: During the eight or nine hours it took me to complete Hob’s Barrow, the game happily switched from the low-resolution action to show a more detailed view of a particularly weird one. gruesome or important sight, from an old man sitting on a bench to the crude blobs of an alleged artist. It doesn’t use this trick at the crucial moment when it should being at the height of its narrative power.
The game also leaves questions behind. The lives of the characters, apart from a select few, remain without conclusion, even though the entire game is driven by the need to know what happens next. The amount of foreshadowing that is in the first third drives you with the need to know how these clearly significant but obscure events could possibly be related, so to snatch this away at the end seems unfair.
There is also a goat that just disappears. An epilogue would have been nice.
But in terms of what? is there, Hob’s Barrow (opens in new tab) is a great experience with a good pace, an excellent voice and no more than welcome. It’s a haunting tale of a woman’s determination to succeed and a conspiracy to… well, not really stop her, but twist her work in the most infernal way. There is something special about Thomasina Bateman, and it has led to a rather special game.
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