UK Release Date: 26-04-2007
Platforms: PC
Publisher: Lighthouse Interactive/Shadow Tor
Price: £14.99

Developer Shadow Tor Studio’s Barrow Hill is endearingly retro. As an adventure game, it is a welcome respite for anyone with a yours-is-bigger-than-mine complex amid the current production-line of hardware-devouring, gaming monsterpieces. You could practically run this one on an old Commodore 64. There is no dizzying 3D, 360° processor-blasting bling here; the point-and-click 2D slide-show world the design team creates is as ancient in essence as the standing stones to be found at the centre of the game’s namesake. But Barrow Hill succeeds in doing what every good game should do: it draws you in and keeps you playing.

On the eve of the autumnal equinox, driving through the Cornish countryside with only the voice of Emma Harry, the local radio DJ, for company (pleasing wisps of Carpenter’s The Fog here) your car stalls, leaving you stranded amid an evocative soundtrack of spooky woodland stirrings and squawks. An impenetrable warp wall lies in one direction; in the other, a motel and petrol station, deserted but for the babbling, terrified attendant, Ben, who has locked himself in the motel office. Archæologist Conrad Morse and his colleagues have gone missing during their investigation of the mysterious Barrow Hill standing stones. Nothing remains of the hapless Time Team but their belongings, found strewn throughout the motel. In figuring out the puzzles and following the clues to solve the mystery of the archæologists’ disappearance, you will unearth a deeper and darker mystery buried beneath the history of the stones themselves.

Without any crash-bang-wallop technological wizardry, the game creates a compellingly atmospheric environment of sight, sound and narrative intrigue: an evocative slice of moonlight across shadow to illuminate lichen-encrusted old stone here, a disturbing rustle of something definitely not nice lurking in the undergrowth there; and an absorbing blend of historical fact and imaginative fiction in the storyline. The voice-acting is fine enough, too. I would be happy to spend an evening in with Emma the DJ; although Ben’s repeated rants proved irksome and a degree of schadenfreude crept in as I imagined Norman Bates locked in that motel office with him.

Eventually, your inventory will bulge with everything from a blue crayon to a GPS device to aid you. No pointless click-and-drop red herrings – all the items prove useful. The puzzles blend well with the dictates of the storyline, driving each other and you along; they never feel incongruous or random as so many adventure game puzzles can.

The game is essentially non-linear and there is more than one way to find your way forward through 15-hours-plus of Celt-adorned, pagan nightmare. Watch out for that stone sentry. And while the musical and audio environment are integral to the immersive effect of playing the game and highly effective with it, Shadow Tor also know the value of stark silence at certain points.

Barrow Hill veers off the noisy highway of mega-buck gaming releases, but it is no dead end. If you go down to these woods today you are in for a nasty, but also a very pleasant adventure gaming surprise.