Sections
The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is an effective point-and-click adventure game that excels in creating an ominous atmosphere that carries most of the cosmic horror narrative. With a focus on characters and setting, the game only falters in the abruptness of its ending, whose anticlimax avoids some important confrontations.
We play as Thomasina Bateman, a young archeologist who receives a letter from one Leonard Shoulder telling her of a historical site in the rural town of Bewlay, named Hob’s Barrow. However, when she arrives in the isolated village, her contact is nowhere to be found, people avoid talking about the barrow, and some residents even urge her to leave at [...]
Norco is a point-and-click adventure that moves in a frantic place, structured like a fever dream, depicting a land immersed in chaos, where the people are confused, lost, and dangerous. It’s a game that is not afraid to double down on the bizarre, providing a strange and memorable experience.
It opens with a series of descriptions that set the pace and tone of the story, leaving you bewildered as they move quickly from one subject to the next. The first ones show an industrialized society where pollution is a part of life – it harkens back to the shot in Blade Runner that introduces the setting with refineries and plumes of fire. You click and the scene changes, you are now [...]
Here’s the thing about repetition: it’s an ambivalent element. On the one hand, it’s the ultimate learning tool, commonly used by tiny humans, called children, to mimic big humans, called adults, to discover how to act and behave in life. It’s how humans of all sizes learn how to speak a language, how to write, how to build objects and structures, how to cook, how to live in society – actually, some never learn this last part. Repetition can be relaxing, especially when it creates a routine: the familiarity of some elements and events can make us feel safe, in control of things. But on the other hand, repetition is also intrinsically tedious, since it’s anathema to change: we feel we [...]
Backbone is a strange point-and-click adventure. Its story moves from one extreme to the other too fast, going from complete cliché to “holy hell, what’s going on” after a single twist. However, it never commits to both approaches, abandoning important elements for the twist, but not giving it time to breathe.
The protagonist is a raccoon that wears a trenchcoat and works as a private investigator. Howard Lotor is your typical noir detective: he’s reckless and cynical, talks tough and claims to be used to the dark, filthy places of his town: “Granville. Smells like wet concrete, overpriced fast food and puke. My kind of battleground.” One day, when he’s investigating the [...]
The Medium tries to blend the point-and-click genre with survival horror, failing to live up to both. With a problematic story that quickly derails after a promising start and a main gimmick that is ultimately wasted by poor puzzle design, The Medium eventually falls short of its ambitions.
The game starts with Marianne, a young Polish woman, looking for a tie clip in her father’s house to adorn his body. After putting the finishing touches on the corpse – she used to help him in his Funeral House – the lights go out and Marianne sees herself in the “other side”: she’s a medium that sometimes, against her will, is pulled to this other plane of existence [...]
Call of the Sea is a first-person point-and-click adventure that tries to put a new spin on the Cthulhu mythos. With a colorful and vibrant art style, the game is unfortunately dragged down by clunky writing and questionable puzzle design.
It’s the 1930s and the protagonist is a white woman called Nora Everhart, who travels to a remote island in the Pacific in search of her husband, Harry. Harry was frustrated with his wife’s strange skin disease – which gives her some black spots – and decides to go search for a cure. One day, Nora receives a package detailing where Harry went to, an island southwest of Tahiti, and she decides to travel there and discover what happened to [...]