Barrow Hill: a game review
Sep. 27th, 2008 08:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerThis is another point-and-click adventure thingy like The Lost Crown, which I reviewed a while back. There seem to be a gang of three or four people keeping this branch of the industry going in Britain: long may they wave.
This one is written, designed and produced by Matt Clark, who did some effects work on Jonathan Boakes' The Lost Crown, and Boakes has duly helped out on this one. The design is more naturalistic in general; the POV is first person, and it's in colour apart from the opening and closing sequences. Again we have the sly Sapphire and Steel reference, with the first major location is a service station with café not entirely unlike the one they got trapped in in their last adventure. That's as far as it goes, though, and the story is more in the M R James vein again, with added stone circles and pagan rituals.
Visuals are nice and smooth, and suspension of disbelief is quite easy; I found myself getting quite tense as I wandered back and forth. Ambient sound and music are also very good, with few extraneous noises that don't fit. There are some nasty shocks, as for instance when you investigate a particular dustbin behind the café. There is also a very frightening random encounter that you have to watch out for; if you are clicking mechanically through the landscape to get from A to F quickly, and you click once too often, it's back to the last save for you. It's best to treat it as if you really were picking your way along a darkened path through trees with only an oil lamp to show the way ahead.
Wisely, there are no actual face-to-face encounters with people. The closest you get is a few rather tense conversations through a grille with a member of the service station staff (voiced by Boakes, not too badly this time) and some phone calls to and from a local radio DJ (named and played by Emma Harry, whose name is now almost impossible to find on the internet thanks to the proliferation of sites devoted to Watson and Potter). In both cases they do all the talking, saving you the bother of picking from a list of predetermined questions and wondering why there isn't a "none of the above" option. The dialogue is believable and not too overheated, given the genre, and various tape recordings fill out the background of the story and take some of the weight off the chunks of text you need to go through.
The puzzles are ingenious and integral to the plot, particularly the penultimate one which requires a great deal of co-ordination (mental, not physical, thankfully) and either a good memory or comprehensive notes. You're collecting useful information from the word go, and very little is superfluous. There are lots of bits and bobs to play around with, and the clues are clear. The plot is not as complex as The Lost Crown's, which is no bad thing, but there seems to be a lot more scope for being non-linear and doing things in a different order. Once again, it's partly about putting back a stolen artifact, but since you didn't pinch it this time there isn't the why-did-I-bother feel that the other game suffered from, and the climactic scene is well worth the effort.
All in all, I'd recommend this game (for my personal taste) over The Lost Crown by a narrow margin, but they're different enough that I'd find it hard to choose one over the other for a general recommendation. If you aren't put off by New Age stuff and like a good horror story, try Barrow Hill.
This one is written, designed and produced by Matt Clark, who did some effects work on Jonathan Boakes' The Lost Crown, and Boakes has duly helped out on this one. The design is more naturalistic in general; the POV is first person, and it's in colour apart from the opening and closing sequences. Again we have the sly Sapphire and Steel reference, with the first major location is a service station with café not entirely unlike the one they got trapped in in their last adventure. That's as far as it goes, though, and the story is more in the M R James vein again, with added stone circles and pagan rituals.
Visuals are nice and smooth, and suspension of disbelief is quite easy; I found myself getting quite tense as I wandered back and forth. Ambient sound and music are also very good, with few extraneous noises that don't fit. There are some nasty shocks, as for instance when you investigate a particular dustbin behind the café. There is also a very frightening random encounter that you have to watch out for; if you are clicking mechanically through the landscape to get from A to F quickly, and you click once too often, it's back to the last save for you. It's best to treat it as if you really were picking your way along a darkened path through trees with only an oil lamp to show the way ahead.
Wisely, there are no actual face-to-face encounters with people. The closest you get is a few rather tense conversations through a grille with a member of the service station staff (voiced by Boakes, not too badly this time) and some phone calls to and from a local radio DJ (named and played by Emma Harry, whose name is now almost impossible to find on the internet thanks to the proliferation of sites devoted to Watson and Potter). In both cases they do all the talking, saving you the bother of picking from a list of predetermined questions and wondering why there isn't a "none of the above" option. The dialogue is believable and not too overheated, given the genre, and various tape recordings fill out the background of the story and take some of the weight off the chunks of text you need to go through.
The puzzles are ingenious and integral to the plot, particularly the penultimate one which requires a great deal of co-ordination (mental, not physical, thankfully) and either a good memory or comprehensive notes. You're collecting useful information from the word go, and very little is superfluous. There are lots of bits and bobs to play around with, and the clues are clear. The plot is not as complex as The Lost Crown's, which is no bad thing, but there seems to be a lot more scope for being non-linear and doing things in a different order. Once again, it's partly about putting back a stolen artifact, but since you didn't pinch it this time there isn't the why-did-I-bother feel that the other game suffered from, and the climactic scene is well worth the effort.
All in all, I'd recommend this game (for my personal taste) over The Lost Crown by a narrow margin, but they're different enough that I'd find it hard to choose one over the other for a general recommendation. If you aren't put off by New Age stuff and like a good horror story, try Barrow Hill.