Got this game during the summer sale of 2024 after playing the demo that takes you through the first day pretty much. It's another horror point and click game like the Last Door. And since I finally finished the Lovecraft collection I have some more references to take from... that and I watched John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness for the first time just before playing the game. Maybe it pulled me to get it as well. Kinda funny that the fiction town of Hobb's End from the movie takes it name from the archaic english word Hobb that apparently means devil or something like that. So with that I knew there was something bad in the end of the barrow.
Story is that you play as Thomasina Bateman who have been invited to Bewley by a man named Leonard Shoulder to help in the excavation of Hob's Barrow. As she arrives Leonard is nowhere to be found so she has to walk around the village and get the clues to find the barrow and entering it, all while some townspeople gives her a hard time. Turns out that Thomasina's father was involved in the excavation of the barrow 25 years ago, but that attempt ended in tragedy as her father ended in a coma which her mother explained away as a horsing accident. Another of the excavator hang himself after losing his hand. And her father seemed to be investigating the barrow in order to trap an ancient spirit that apparently caused famine in the countryside.
You have nightmares, creepy music and I believe rotoscoped animation of people and animals that always give a creepy vibe. Not to hard, the only time I checked up on a puzzle was when I was in the barrow and couldn't get a door open even though I knew the answer and tried to enter a code, but I must have put in the wrong input since it didn't get through until I had the picture just in front of me on the computer (and I took a picture on my phone from the game and that didn't work). There was one puzzle that began feeling silly as I played when I needed workers for the excavation and the only one that had them was the local lord so I needed milk for the maid of the manor, but since I couldn't get it directly from a goat, I needed to heal an old man and the only way was finding two ingredients and both had their own distinct quest to get them before getting the damn milk. A bit convoluted I might say. Lucky the fast-travel system worked really well when I got where everything was.
Overall a great atmospheric story worth a playthrough. I though it was gonna be more violent than it was, especially when they slap an 18+ rating on it and the trailer really shines the spotlight on an incident that really don't amount to much. But great voice acting, although the in between narration from Thomasina is noticeable much higher in sound than the rest of the game and it puts me out of it at times. Great to play during Halloween.
