Barrow Hill

Oh wow, this really feels like stumbling round the Cornish countryside in the dark whle fumbling through every building you find looking for clues in everyday detritus. I mean that a little in a good way, but a lot in a bad way. On the good side, you sift through a lotta info and take notes to piece together the story and mystery. On the bad side: some key objects are near-invisible in the dark; the way the world's modelled is sometimes counter-intuitively maze-y (in terms of the paths you're allowed to take); the game keeps re-locking code-locked doors so you have to keep re-entering the codes; quite a few puzzles and screen transitions are so obtuse I can't imagine anyone finishing the game without a guide… As for the story and style, it starts as a fun if not that gripping blend of lo-fi eerieness and kitsch horror before the game's annoyances override its atmosphere, and it really could've done without the late-game CCTV footage of the “monster”—a standing stone jerkily hovering around burning people to ash like some manic druidic anti-roomba. Okay, to round out the compliment sandwich, I do kinda like the semi-coherent low-res monochrome FMV of urban infrastructure that constitutes the game's bad end where the ancient Green Man-type entity psychically suffers/runs amok in modern British cities.