Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories. Developer: Cloak and Dagger Year: 20122 The Excavation of Hob's Barrow isn't the scariest horror game I've ever played, but it might be the most disarming. The most powerful tool in its arsenal is its close-ups—moments where the classic retro point-and-click adventure look is set aside for detailed and disturbing pixel art scenes.
The game is pure folk horror in a way you don't often see in this medium. The quiet rural village that Victorian academic Thomasina arrives in sits comfortably alongside the likes of The Wicker Man's Summerisle—a seemingly simple and unassuming community that hides a deep undercurrent of darkness behind an idyllic veneer. At times, the setting is almost cosy, lulling you into a false sense of security, before another grisly discovery makes it all the clearer that something is amiss.
That feeling of the sinister hiding in pastoral plain sight is core to the genre, but Hob's Barrow takes it a step further. The structure of the game itself pulls the same trick. On the one hand, it's a throwback to a peaceful style of play.
The old-fashioned graphics are unassuming and cosy, and progressing through the story is more often than not down to solving little item-based puzzles. Like an isolated rural community being visited by a hapless city-slicker, it seems to hark back to a simpler and more innocent time. But when developer Cloak and Dagger wants to cut thr.
