Review: The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow Hauntingly Blends Folk Horror with Point-and-Click Tradition

Review: The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow Hauntingly Blends Folk Horror with Point-and-Click Tradition

Horror games are not my genre. It’s hard for me to not feel an intense fear because games ask us to participate in them, and my participation usually involves involuntarily throwing my controller across the room at the first jump scare. There was a chance that The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow, a point and click adventure developed by Cloak and Dagger and published by Wadjet Eye Games, would be the same; I’d dabble in the folk horror aesthetics, but one ghoulish face popping onto the screen or one perfectly timed scare chord and I’d be in the market for a new laptop. Thankfully, The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow’s embracing of the folk horror slow burn, its reserved frightening imagery, and its involved but not overly complex puzzles kept me enraptured the whole way through. (more…)