Adventure Gamers - Forums

well I beat the game in 8 hrs and I got to say they def saved the best for last. The final chapter was finally spooky and creepy, there were real puzzles that actually slowed me down just a bit and I actually enjoyed the ending, even though I had guessed about 90 percent of what was going to happen. Im glad they didnt leave the ending open ended, no meta ending here. Final day easily 9/10

But as a whole game I will give it an 8 to 8.5 outta 10 bc of the negatives I posted before. Def a great game to get you in the Halloween mood. Im super glad I played it. This could work as a CPT if the time frame to complete days was speed up considerably. Hope yall enjoyed my thoughts.

Karlok - 26 October 2022 07:07 AM

I did enjoy your thoughts. Looks like an interesting game, so I bought it.

Great I would be thrilled to hear what you think, it was a roller coaster of emotion me, from this is okay to wow this was pretty good, but in the game’s defense I don’t ever think it was bad. It’s a quality made game throughout, and depending on your view of how puzzle should be implemented and how everything should be animated and no dark screens, to cut time and cost. it could be great to you

Baron_Blubba - 26 October 2022 11:32 AM

I think we’re mostly on the same page, if not in the same paragraph, Jdawg.
The fade-to-blacks didn’t really bother me. I noticed them, but didn’t care.
My *least* favorite puzzles were actually the ones that everyone here seems to enjoy most, those being the ones in the final chapter. I think the reason is that the ones involving the villagers at least rewarded me with some narrative progression—I’d learn more about the story, the setting, and the people, with each puzzle solved. Most of them also involved small anecdotes relating the the fetch-quest-givers background, which I enjoyed. Like I said in my mini-review, the depth of character and place were significant highlights in this game. Meanwhile, the puzzles in the final chapter don’t include any such narrative rewards; they are there to impede your progress. This is fine, because it makes sense that they would be there. The problem is, none of them were particularly difficult. With possibly one exception, I never felt clever for solving them; to the contrary, I felt like I was doing 2nd grade level reading-comprehension and logic progress-test busy work.
It’s really a problem that I think the adventure games ‘industry’, such as it is, has to deal with (or at least, *I* would like it to deal with). Too many games are a dissonant combination of mature themes and childish gameplay.
Maybe that’s what the mass market wants? Pure interactive fiction, like a US/Euro version of the visual novel, which has been so popular in Asia for ages? Apparently—hopefully!—these games are selling well, but I’m really missing the challenge that games used to have.
I actually feel like the immersion, and consequently the narratives, suffer by making games to easy. Rather than living in the worlds for a meaningful period of time, we are only briefly visiting them, before moving on to the next game world.
I’m not calling for a return to the old Sierra way of having you play the game over and over again in order to solve it, but there is a balance that can be, and has been, struck by several great games of recent years.
Shardlight. Primordia. Fran Bow. Whispers of a Machine. Nelly Cootalot. The just released Lucy Dreaming. There Is No Game. VirtuaVerse.
Going back a little further, I think Curse of Monkey Island, Full Throttle, the Dig, Syberia, and Toonstruck are a few examples of great games that challenged players and made them feel smart without making them feel stupid.

I dunno. I buy a lot of these games knowing what I’m in for and enjoy them for what they are—adventure game comfort food—, but I avoid just as many because I know they’ll just make me feel like a mouse in a maze or a child, going through simple easy motions until I reach the end.

This sounds overwhelmingly negative when applied to a game like Hob’s Barrow, but I *still* think Hob’s Barrow is top-notch, which I guess just goes to show how effective everything in the game *but* the game is at delivering the goods. And this is why I’ll keep buying Wadjeteye games in the first week that they are released.

Wow that’s very insightful and I think we are on the same paragraph but are attacking the puzzle problem from two different angles. I will agree the puzzles in the final chapter in the Tomb were not all that hard, although I did take a while to solve the serpent puzzle but that’s because I missed a piece that I could interact with. So you are right very simple puzzles but at least there were puzzles. For the record I didn’t mind some of the fetch Quest puzzles in Chapter 2 like getting ingredients for the Medicine Woman at least made sense and gave her character some background, I agree, but some of the other puzzles were just stupid. 90% of the inventory you use over and over again aka the tools, should not have to be picked up to begin with, because she has the crate in the alleyway full of her tools after the end of day one. she should have everything she needs for any of the questing to be done. I think the reason some like day 3 puzzles is not because the puzzles became all that difficult, but at least they were real puzzles, that involved more than one step busy work.not pick up shovel one screen away to use it on soil. That is not a puzzle that is busy work.

The Narrative does carry the game but I’m not one that is ever going to want just visual novels, they don’t do anything for me as a whole anymore. There is too much good television to watch if I dont want interactive storytelling that day.

The reasons the black screens bother me is because I feel like the game’s incomplete. It can work in small doses, like I remember one of the first big battles in Game of Thrones, a character is knocked out and misses the battle so the viewer does too, you can get away with that once but not over and over again. That would be like in star Wars two people pull out lightsabers and then the screen Fades to Black and all you hear is the sounds, people would lose their minds for good reason

I checked steam Spy and it said this game has sold between 20,000 and 50,000 copies. I don’t know how accurate that is, but even if they sold something like 10,000, that’s still a lot of copies for a brand new IP. Plus I know Dave tweeted out a week ago that this is one of the fastest selling new IPS they’ve had at wadjet eye games

Baron_Blubba - 26 October 2022 01:28 PM

Regarding fade to black scenes:

To be fair, the light saber battles in Star Wars are a main attraction. The fade to blacks in Hob’s Barrow, as far as I can remember, are usually just busy work. Makes the game seem slightly rushed? Maybe. It’s something I noticed, but it didn’t strike me as potentially irksome until others mentioned it.
Also, as major of a release as HB is for an indie adventure game, it’s still a budget-constrained adventure game. The only fade-to-black scene that I’ve seen singled out as egregious, is frankly one that I’m happy not having to watch. It would have been egregiously gratuitous.

By the way, a solution to the too-easy puzzle syndrome would be to go back to a parser interface. Imagine having to actually deduce the appropriate conversational topics and questions on your own, instead of selecting them from a menu.
Example: The Colonel’s Bequest had very few real puzzles, but having to type every conversational topic forced the player to pay attention and figure out/remember what was noteworthy.

well considering the game fades to black when she’s describingwhat the devil looks like, in all its horror I would say that’s a pretty big attraction

you could do that with puzzles design. I just think it’s how it’s implemented going back to one of the games you listed Full Throttle, which is in my top five adventure games of all time. It has plenty of fetch Quest puzzles but they’re just better implemented into the game world. I mean in the first real area of the game world after you wreck your bike, it’s all fetch Quest. Moe literally gives you a list of things to collect, like blowtorch, forks, and gas. But how you go about it is really implemented well especially since this is the first game that I can remember that the hand icon and the foot icon are not just used for picking up and walking but for kicking and punching. The whole puzzle design is centered around Todd’s trailer and all the puzzles are solved from that trailer in interesting different ways.

Going back to Hobbs barrow one thing that I found interesting is I was reading the forums over at Steam and one guy said he had no idea he could combine items because he hasn’t played an adventure game since Eco Quest. And I was thinking the game does make you combine an item right at the start but then I don’t think you actually do that again until you put the worm in the Apple much later. He said he forgot all about combining items and if you are new to adventure games I can see why that would not be second nature to you. with the game showing it to you only once in the beginning. That is the smart thing about Full Throttle going back to that game. they use punch and kick four or five times in the first 2 hours of the game to remind you that it’s not just a pickup and walk button.

I also finished this game recently and I really liked it. I enjoyed reading your thoughts and reviews and I agree with most of the points raised, namely the great pixel art graphics, the sense of place and atmosphere, the characters and voice acting. I really enjoyed the story, it was the perfect classic spooky tale for the season without getting too much on the nose with the horror.

Regarding the puzzles I think is an interesting discussion. I liked them overall and I didn’t mind that they were easy and mostly fetch questy. I felt like it helped with the pacing and like you guys mentioned, sometimes they also helped to flesh the characters. I also had a problem with the last part of the game though. Like someone mentioned early, I didn’t like that the whole thing in the Barrow was magically reset, it didn’t made sense since everything was supposed to be solved already by the previous expedition. And also because of the lack of of difficulty. At first with the numerous rooms and things to interact with it gave me the impression that it was more complex than it really was, I didn’t like that the answers were pretty much spelled out for you in some way or other.

About the fade to black I actually didn’t mind them at all. I thought the way they used the letter to convey the story in moments like this was clever and I was ok with most of them, it just felt like somebody telling a spooky story where I had to fill in the blanks here and there. And speaking of which maybe this was only me but I really liked the fade to black when describing the god/devil at the end. It reminded me of some stories I have read, maybe Lovecraft or other where the “final horror” is revealed and the protagonist either dies or flees in horror and the thing is barely described, it’s just mostly left to the reader’s imagination.

danigar - 26 October 2022 10:48 PM

I also finished this game recently and I really liked it. I enjoyed reading your thoughts and reviews and I agree with most of the points raised, namely the great pixel art graphics, the sense of place and atmosphere, the characters and voice acting. I really enjoyed the story, it was the perfect classic spooky tale for the season without getting too much on the nose with the horror.

Regarding the puzzles I think is an interesting discussion. I liked them overall and I didn’t mind that they were easy and mostly fetch questy. I felt like it helped with the pacing and like you guys mentioned, sometimes they also helped to flesh the characters. I also had a problem with the last part of the game though. Like someone mentioned early, I didn’t like that the whole thing in the Barrow was magically reset, it didn’t made sense since everything was supposed to be solved already by the previous expedition. And also because of the lack of of difficulty. At first with the numerous rooms and things to interact with it gave me the impression that it was more complex than it really was, I didn’t like that the answers were pretty much spelled out for you in some way or other.

About the fade to black I actually didn’t mind them at all. I thought the way they used the letter to convey the story in moments like this was clever and I was ok with most of them, it just felt like somebody telling a spooky story where I had to fill in the blanks here and there. And speaking of which maybe this was only me but I really liked the fade to black when describing the god/devil at the end. It reminded me of some stories I have read, maybe Lovecraft or other where the “final horror” is revealed and the protagonist either dies or flees in horror and the thing is barely described, it’s just mostly left to the reader’s imagination.

They did try to spice up the fade to black with the letter, but i found it a cheap trick to avoid time consuming animations. As far as the puzzles being reset, i took it as the expedition doing it to make sure the tomb stayed sealed. But yeah the journal was not just a hint guide but a step by step guide. Especially the last door puzzles.

Doom - 27 October 2022 09:26 AM

Interesting discussion! I like how different people with different tastes have A LOT to say about the game. From what I figured, it would be a good idea to play some puzzle-heavy games first, such as The Neverhood and The Case Of The Golden Idol (which I was planning anyway), exhaust myself and then enjoy the dark lightness of Hob’s Barrow.

I think about 90% of us would agree that this is a really good game that’s held back from being great because of design choice and I would say design flaws. But in my opinion the game is still really good overall.

Jdawg445 - 26 October 2022 01:31 PM

well considering the game fades to black when she’s describingwhat the devil looks like, in all its horror I would say that’s a pretty big attraction

But that was almost certainly a creative decision, as opposed to a result of workload restrictions.  I really admired that we never see the demon.  Our imagination is far more powerful than anything the developers could have come up with.  By the by, it’s not the Devil.  It’s the Pagan demon Abraxus .