HomeFeaturesThe Excavation Of Hob’s Barrow
Dave Gilbert on branching out to gothic horror, and why voice-acting is his “favourite thing in the world"The Excavation Of Hob’s Barrow is coming later this year
The Excavation Of Hob’s Barrow is coming later this year
Originally announced as Incantamentum (Gilbert jokes that one of the reasons behind the name change is because he could never pronounce “Incantamentum” correctly), Wadjet Eye got involved after Gilbert played the Steam demo last year and emailed the developer. “I said, ‘Hey, I played the demo. I really liked it. Please tell me you’re going to be adding voice acting to this because it’s screaming for it’,” Gilbert tells me. “And he said, ‘Well, we will if we can find a publisher who’ll do it for us.'” So now Wadjet Eye are publishing, and Gilbert is overseeing the voice recording.
The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow - Teaser Trailer!Watch on YouTube
The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow - Teaser Trailer!
“What’s funny is that often the side characters don’t realise it’s supposed to be a creepy game, because the creepiness isn’t happening to them,” says Gilbert, who met up with some of the voice actors at Develop in Brighton earlier this month and showed them the unreleased trailer for Hob’s Barrow. “And they were surprised like, ‘Oh, it’s like a horror game!’ Because, like, the bartender talks about a cat just in passing, and [the actor] thought, ‘Oh, it’s just a cat in the pub, but in the trailer, you see the cat. And it’s this friggincreepything.”
Welcome to normal town, population: hell!
It really is (you can see up there in the header), and The Excavation Of Hob’s Barrow goes all in on its Turn Of The Screw-esque vibe of uncertainty: is everything actually normal and I’m imagining it? Or is it actually properly supernatural? On one level, for example, the cat is a cat, but in my preview build the cat pads into Thomasina’s room at night, through a door that should have been bolted shut, and sits on her bed for the camera to give it a loving, awful close-up.
I got a couple of close-ups like that in the preview, and they’re a fascinating and gruesome application of The Excavation Of Hob’s Barrow’s pixel art style. They’re mobile and powerfully weird. The cat looked somehow like an old man as its features settled, and in another, where the town priest seemed to grow nauseous at the sight of Thomasina, I almost wanted to look away. “The game is full of them,” says Gilbert, speaking of the “amazing” close ups. “And it kind of elevates it, because pixel art adventure games like that are kind of a dime a dozen now, and those close-ups really just double down on that style. That’s another reason why I was drawn to it.”
I say that I love seeing point and click adventures that arehorror games, or at least dark and/or scary, because I feel the genre still has a kind of wacky hangover in people’s minds. Gilbert says yeah, alittlebit, but he doesn’t like the funnier stuff as much anyway.
“Whenever we do a more comedy-skewed game, it tends not to sell well. I think that’s just because I’m not quite sure how to sell those games. If you have a creepy mood, you can compress that, it’s pretty easy to present. You’re like, ‘Hey, this is a creepy game’, you know? And then you have all this creepy imagery: here you go,” he explains. “And humour is harder to do that way. Because you have to see it in action. And you can’t just show us a funny screenshot. Because humour becomes less funny, the more you are exposed to it. And so if [the game] doesn’t have anything else going on, then it’s a little bit harder.”
This is why Gilbert is usually more drawn to moody, atmospheric games and urban noir. Not that The Excavation Of Hob’s Barrow could even remotely be described as urban. The two most intact buildings in Bewlay are a large church and the pub; if you get a parcel on the day the postmaster is away, you have to pick the lock with a hatpin you extracted from a ragdoll buried in a fairy circle. It’s folk horror through-and-through, and familiarity with that helps. I solved that latter puzzle quickly in part because I knew exactly what to look for to find fairies, but your mileage may vary on this. I think The Excavation Of Hob’s Barrow is effective partly because it’s so specific and regional, but this did pose a challenge to Gilbert, an American, especially while directing the voice acting. He had to rely on the developers, or the actor themselves, as the voice cast is all British.
“There was some just stuff that I just wasn’t sure if it was a typo, or if it was a colloquialism,” he says. “‘Any road up’. That was one thing. ‘Any road up’. I’m like, ‘is that a thing?'” He was assured it was a thing. He also had to rely on the devs to sense check when someone was doing a good British accent, too: “You get a lot of people who think they can do a British accent, but they really can’t,” he says. “But my brain isn’t set up to really tell the difference.”
When casting he looks for actors who make those interesting choices, rather than those who nail what he already has in his head. “Not so much, ‘Oh, that’s it, that’s perfect,’ but, ‘Oh, that was an interesting choice they did there’. That also means that they will make interesting choices during the actual recording, and I will have to do less work myself,” he says, laughing. But he says he’s not having to work so hard directing The Excavation Of Hob’s Barrow’s voice actors (regardless if they aware they’re creepy or not). “When the characters are this well-written and very strongly defined… There’s not a lot I have to do to bring that out.”
