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I was always going to play The Excavation Of Hob’s Barrow. Since it was called Incantamentum back in 2020, when I first covered its demo, it struck me as perfect Buried Treasure fodder. Except, then it only went and got loads of mainstream press attention. Which is a very excellent reason for not needing to cover a game on here.
With reviews on RPS, Eurogamer, PCG, and even EDGE, as well as a bunch of other sites, it’s very much not a buried treasure, and I’m delighted about that. I imagine being published by Wadjet Eye and PRd by the indomitable Emily Morganti likely helped a lot with that. So hooray!
But I still wanted to review it, so I did, and that’s up on Kotaku now. It starts like this:
“Every nation has its own traditions for folklore and fairytale. In England, those tales tend to gravitate toward a thinness between our world and that of fae folk or magic, and a notion that bucolic rural villages hide dark secrets of ancient pagan sects. From The Wicker Man to The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, local legends with dark hearts are a core part of English tradition, and it’s within these realms that The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow so neatly fits.”
You can read the rest over there. And I still sort of found a way to sneak it onto this site!
