This weekend I played The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow, an atmospheric point & click with nice graphics, music, and good voice acting.
The puzzles aren’t overly interesting for the most part and you can see the ending of the story coming from the beginning, but the way you get there is what it’s all about and that’s mostly fairly well done. Flashbacks interrupt the rhythm of the story rather frequently long after it seems they served their purpose. The game is quite a bit talk to everyone and exhaust all dialog options, and I think the third day was just a series of fetch quests that I could’ve largely done without. The main problem there perhaps is that rather than having several different things to do you’re really working on only one or two things at a time, making it very linear.
So would I recommend it… I’m not quite sure. It’s reasonable as horror and the production value is fantastic, but as game design I find it wanting.
I never actually finished the previous game by the same developer, Sumatra: Fate of Yandi, so it did something better anyway. But I think what I consider the flaws were mostly the same.