I have a sneaking suspicion I won't like Hob's Barrow half as much as reviewers did.
Okay, did the extended prologue, and so far am liking it! The voice acting and sound design is great, writing is solid to good so far, lots of forboding Wicker Man/Royston Vasey energy. Not much has happened except a dream about a slightly weird looking cat, so I hope this isn't an 'elevated horror' game where it's all build up except for the last five minutes!
Only negative so far really is that the art is very basic pixel art. Serviceable but bog-standard. The exception is the creepy close-ups, which have tones of character, but a downside to that is it makes the regular art feel all the more unremarkable. Shame they couldn't have gone a bit more in that direction in general.
Realised that I was possibly mingling this in my mind with Curse Of The Golden Idol, which I think is a lot more of a detective game, and that may have contributed to my pessimism!
Having said that, I've played a bit more now and my opinion has dipped. After the atmospheric opening section, I'm now wandering around feeling a little aimless and doing incongruously silly adventure game stuff like distracting NPCs so I can use a hairpin to pick a lock, or finding a random necklace to use as a deposit to open a tab at the bar. It's all a little boring and is putting a big dent in the atmosphere. I'm now having to check a walkthrough because the latest puzzle is getting some paraffin for my lantern and the blacksmith will trade me for some but when I ask him what he wants. he says "surprise me" and apparently he wouldn't want anything I have! What kind of puzzle is that?
Also, minor criticism is that this is another game that opts for fading to black rather than animate simple stuff like the character sitting down or picking a lock, and even weirder fading characters out of the scene rather than have them open a door and walk through it. It's a small thing but it does spoil the immersion a bit, and it's not the most complicated thing to include.
Okay, looked at a walkthrough and before I got all the way to the solution was reminded that the blacksmith likes fossils. There's one in a rock I've seen, plus I now have a chisel. So I suppose that's actually a reasonable puzzle and one that a bit of wandering around all the screens would probably have got me to after a few minutes - I was just so irritated by that "surprise me" line! Might have been good to get a bit more feedback on trying to give him tools, though, as that seems a fair route to take. But regardless, this all still feels more Monkey Island than Wicker Man. I think I'm about to get to the end of this bit and find Hob's Barrow, though, so hopefully it'll get back on track.
It's a shame because when the atmosphere is uninterrupted, it's really strong. Striding out across the moors, finding a barrow, getting sense memories from the damp peat, then walking back to the village as it gets dark and starts to rain (and the rain effect is great - not the standard AGS rain, it's thick near horizontal British rain) and getting out of the evening mist into the warm firelit tavern. Having a pint of ale and chatting to the locals, enjoying slowly getting to know them even though there's an ever-present underlying worry that as a posh unmarried woman you'll never be truly welcome and may be in some danger. And then you go to sleep and have eerie dreams of walking under purple skies, with creepy close-ups of fair folk. But then you get a little autosave or "acquired: lump of tree resin" message pop-up with an electronic ding, the game fades to black to cover a three second event, the cursor pops in and out, the music behind an interstitial card cuts out abruptly; it all just bumps you out of it a bit. Plus you have a great long conversation at a pub table but there are never any close-ups or anything, and go through all the generic puzzling from earlier, it all serves to remind you you're playing a video game. It's all the kind of little stuff I'd nag Dan about when playtesting and writing up massive lists of notes for him!
Anyway, have done the arrival and Day One now, am onto Day Two (of three, apparently), so I guess I'm almost halfway through...
Ughhhh, more aimless wandering around. I now have to try to convince the farmer to let me excavate the barrow (which I already failed at yesterday and have no reason to think I'll be any more successful today, plus I can't even find him so I'm doing less well than I was before) and 'find out about local folklore' which I suppose just entails walking through every screen and getting through any new dialogue options for every character. Not a propulsive narrative, to say the least.
The puzzle design in this game is truly terrible. I've reached the point where I'm checking a walkthrough every few minutes and I can't be bothered any more. Remember that episode of the Simpsons where the kids are stranded on a desert island and by the end of the episode they've resolved their Lord of the Flies style conflicts but they're still stuck there so a narrator starts speaking and finishes with "and they were rescued by, oh, let's say Moe"? This game is like that: "you need some workers but you can't hire any until, oh, let's say you get some milk for the maid ... the lord won't help you until you get him, oh, let's say some cakes from the church patron." Just laughably perfunctory. And the solutions to the puzzles tick off a bunch of bad adventure design boxes too, like having to walk around interacting with everything until you trigger a change, having to do the same action three times to get a result without any suggestion that will happen, cause and effect you couldn't possibly guess at. Like, you've been trying to get the farmer to let you excavate the barrow and he's resolutely refusing. The solution? Show him an old stone from the previous dig. Turns out his brother, who was on that dig, also had a stone like that and for some reason this convinces him to give in. I still don't understand that one. Or when you need a particular kind of flower, which you've been told grows on the moors. The solution is to go into the church where there is now suddenly someone inside despite it being consistently empty up to this very moment, ask them about the vicar and randomly be told he had a roof garden at the top of the church and he has a key which he keeps in an unknown location maybe the graveyard, and realise this means that actually he's hidden the key behind one of the plaques that aren't in the graveyard and which now your character mentions have crumbly plaster around them despite never having said that before and that it must be the plaque with the names Romeo and Juliet mentioned because the vicar quoted Shakespeare at you a few times. There are more of these, it's painful.
Again, a real shame, this would have been better off as an If On A Winter's Night... style interactive story. Even the flashbacks were starting to run out of steam though, to be honest, no new information or mystery to them, it was all starting to feel a bit perfunctory. too. So I'm going to watch a walkthrough because I do want to see all the supernatural stuff (assuming it turns out to be real) but I can't be bothered struggling through any more of it. Especially as I have a journal with a bunch of quoted passages with IMPORTANT highlighted WORDS in them and a bunch of drawings with stars in different positions and shit, and I definitely can't be bothered to go through a load of Fate Of Atlantis style dial-turning nonsense.
Watching the last third of the game on a playthrough video, and my god the puzzles got worse just after I quit. The lord will only let you use his workers if you get him that one villager's homemade cakes, so you go ask her, she says she just gave the last of them to the vicar and even though he's left town and the cakes will go off you can't have them, and she's too upset over the recent death of her husband to bake more (which doesn't make sense seeing as he's been buried since you got here, at which point she was going on at you about her latest batch), so you have to go look at his grave, then go back to her and mention it to her at which point she tells you she wants to put a certain kind of flower on it (the third 'get me some flowers' puzzle of the game, in fact) and will bake you some cakes if you get her some, but you can't get them because a grumpy housekeeper is guarding them, but the maid will distract her if you find her missing boyfriend so you go ask some bloke in the town square who tells you which road he comes in from and you go there, find he's been tied up, cut his ropes and take him back to the maid. It's the kind of stupid "Man I love spanners" puzzle chain that Dan and I would put in a game to take the piss, I can't believe the devs thought it was a good match for this game. And unless I missed some contrived detail while scanning through, it doesn't make sense that the lord would even demand this of you, because his secret scheme depends wholly on you excavating the barrow! Why would he refuse to facilitate you doing that unless you got him some cakes?!
The worst thing is, the egregious puzzle design means I stop giving the benefit of the doubt on other stuff: odd choices like a little text pop-up that says something like "acquired: lump of tree resin" whenever you pick something up, like you're a terminator. Or directing the goblin VO to sound completely human (and I know, goblins aren't real, there's no reason they couldn't just sound like some twenty-five year old bloke down the pub, but it just feels wrong). Or stopping the story to listen to a travelling musician (cool idea, nice bit of atmosphere) but writing and mixing it to sound like a 90s Radiohead B-side rather than some late 19th century folk music being played on an acoustic guitar in the corner of a tavern. Things that, when I read reviewers gushing about how they had to keep reminding themselves that this terrifying ordeal was just a game or that they spent hours after playing thinking about the deep socio-philosophical themes, make me want to shout "did you just not notice all the terrible bits, have you not played a game since the 80s?!"
Finished watching the video, and wow the last section is a purple Atlantis full of riddles and turning statue heads to face the right way, and sneering cartoon villains doing evil laughs together like it's an Austin Powers movie. All that opening atmosphere gone. It's like if the last twenty minutes of Wicker Man were Sergeant Howie finding the Wicker Man's secret underground lair and solving riddles to get past booby traps. I can see why one reviewer reported being initially disappointed after finishing the game but then spending hours talking themselves into liking it and thinking it was really clever actually. Maybe if you have to work that hard on maintaining cognitive dissonance, the game was actually just disappointing and you'll have to bring yourself to give a bad review to an adventure game despite it being one of those 'important serious ones with themes'.
This really does remind me so much of Fate of Atlantis in how frustrated I am at the devs for squandering so much promise with so much bullshit.
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