If there really was a magazine called Freaky Times, I’d buy it – especially if it only cost £1.50, which is the price tag on the one pictured above. Actually this is a screenshot from a recent video game called Barrow Hill: The Dark Path , which I bought after seeing a full-page advertisement for it in last month’s Fortean Times (a magazine that bears an uncanny stylistic resemblance to Freaky Times – or perhaps it’s the other way around).
The original Barrow Hill game came out ten years ago, and I found it enjoyable to play but nothing really special. That’s essentially my verdict on this belated sequel, too. It’s probably slightly more fun than the original, with more immersive graphics and more interesting characters. The style is reminiscent of Jonathan Boakes’s Dark Fall series, or Daniel Peach’s Corrosion: Cold Winter Waiting which I wrote about last year . But those games have fascinatingly original storylines and vast, intriguing settings to explore, while the Barrow Hill games are shorter, with more mundane locations and a plot not too different from a hundred other games you can find on Steam. But if you like first-person adventure games (as I do) and wacky New Age weirdness (as I do) then you’ll enjoy playing Barrow Hill: The Dark Path anyway.
The main developer behind the Barrow Hill games is Matt Clark of Shadow Tor studios, but Jonathan Boakes’s name also crops up several times in the end credits. In fact he seems to have been the one behind the Freaky Times mock-up pictured above (and there’s another shot of it below). After a bit of Googling I found this post on his blog, which describes the design as “a little nod to the Fortean Times”. And right at the bottom of the cover he’s slipped in a reference to the “Dowerton ghosts”, from his own Dark Fall games!
