The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow brings traditional horror conventions to gaming

As we go through Spooky Season and a bunch of horror video games, The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow was an instant favorite for how it played with tropes that were common to literature, especially gothic horror conventions.

Set in Victorian England (check), it stars Thomasina Bateman, a lone female (check) researcher, who is set on exploring a specific barrow site (check) near a small town on the isolated moors (check) after a riddle or prophecy (check) related via her father’s old archaeology journal. Things begin to go wrong for Thomasina almost immediately after she arrives, and she meets many archetypical townsfolk along the way as well — the priest, the innkeeper, the dashing aristocrat, the town drunk, the annoying children. In between hugging chickens and speaking to townsfolk to even figure out where this mysterious barrow is, the story begins to unfold — or unravel. The whole voice cast is amazing, but in particular Samantha Béart (Karlach from Baldur’s Gate 3) truly sells the story.

The real genius for me lies in the intersection of storytelling and art style. My favorite Victorian horror convention is the one where the author has to describe The Creature, and instead of making something up, they dramatically bite their fist within the narration to tell the reader that they could not possibly describe it, as the mere doing so would likely cause the reader to go mad, and anyway, the creature kept shifting around so it was hard to focus on it anyway. This convention pops up in literature almost as frequently as The Shining Carpet in modern video games, and it’s easy to understand why — the reader filling in the blanks makes it tailored to their own fears, and also the author doesn’t actually have to make up something scary. It’s a win/win. In Hob’s Barrow, the art style is pixelated, and shifts as the action happens, so that kind of disconcerting unnaturalness is a constant in addition to allowing the sketchiness of it fill in the blanks. Was that a bone and blood, or something completely normal between those pixels? I blinked and it shifted. Is Thomasina losing it? Am I? What’s the deal with this weird blue cat? Is it supposed to be blue and weird, or is it black and normal, but pixel shaded?

It’s a relatively short game, and as a point-and-click it does have a few moments which had me rolling my eyes as I combined three random objects to solve specific puzzles. Yes, of course I should combine a flower with a worm with some pine sap to make a glue. Sure. Whatever. But even that seems to lend to the idea of both lampshading and embracing the genre. Besides, for Halloween, what’s spookier than having to look up a guide for how to avoid the nosy church lady, lest she gift you a slightly sketchy pie that’s been in the sun all day? Ah yes, a silver key and an apple, makes perfect sense.

The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is available on Steam and GOG for PC, macOS, and Linux, and Nintendo Switch.