[quote][i]Eventually our careful application of pick, trowel and shovel gave way to open space. A stagnant, cadaverous odour was let forth. The seal was broken. I couldn’t believe my eyes.[/i][/quote] The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is a point & click horror/mystery game set in the late 19th/early 20th century, in a small rural village in the north west of England. For those who may not know a ‘barrow’ is a burial mound used by ancient peoples for their important dead. There are many dotted around Britain and much of the rest of the world (with different names). You play as Thomasina, an antiquarian writing a book on the barrows of England, who has come to the village of Bewlay to excavate the barrow and document her findings. As tends to be the way with ancient structures, local folklore imbues it with all sorts of mystery and supernaturality, with stories of goblins causing mischief and trapped demons causing blights in their anger. None of it is true however; Thomasina has no time for any of that hogwash. Needless to say, things don’t go quite as she planned… Now the first thing to say about this game is if you’re familiar with British horror stories it is actually a fairly standard premise. A Londoner goes to a rural village and ends up investigating local folklore. Odd things start happening and the townsfolk are either standoffish or creepily helpful, and nobody wants the main character going anywhere near that one spooky place a few miles away on some moorland - if they even acknowledge its existence in the first place. Everyone has a thick accent and there’s lots of fog and rain. Oh and there’s a creepy cat too, who you can’t pet but you can feed a severed hand to (yeah [b]that’s[/b] not in your typical Hammer horror). Where this game excels though is in the delivery of that premise. The town is creepy as all heck. Weird children playing with awful looking dolls, a missing person and a coincidental fresh grave in the cemetery, boarded up houses and the sense that nobody really wants to talk to you, and you’re never sure if you can trust anyone when they appear to be helping you out; if the whole town might not suddenly turn on you at any moment. Even the vicar is outwardly pleasant but clearly has something else going on behind his eyes. With the slow unraveling of the mystery as well as Thomasina’s backstory always pushing you to wonder about people’s motives and how you can get them to give you items you need, the atmosphere is brimming with tension until you finally plunge your trowel into the ground and fall into hell. The whole game is pixelated which makes for some stunning landscapes and cutscenes, and gameplay is solid no-nonsense item finding/combining/using with only one real instance of moon logic (the kind of solution that only makes sense after you’ve done it) and some light puzzles later on to mix things up. The only real criticism I have is that some items require seemingly arbitrary and unrelated conditions to be met before they appear, so a puzzle reveals itself but the item to solve it doesn’t appear until a few steps later into the story, but it’s neither necessary nor logical for it to appear then rather than previously; things just ‘change’ with the story and now the item appears. If you’re into P&C or horror games you should definitely check it out. The writing is decent and it’s all voiced despite being a much smaller dev team. It deals with some very creepy themes and there are plenty of good twists and unforseen places the story goes. It’s also relatively cheap - at least on the switch eshop.