Picture this: it's the middle of the night, you're driving through the countryside by yourself, your only company is the voice of the local radio station's DJ talking at you via your stereo system. You notice you're getting low on gas, so you make a diversion to a service station for a fill-up, and that's when it happens. Everything just stops working.

You get out of the car to find out what's going on, and a mysterious energy field blocks your passage back the way you came. Now there's nothing you can do except walk along the dark road, all by yourself, listening to the chirping of the crickets, in hopes of finding someone who can help you. The night cannot possibly get any more messed up than this, you tell yourself.

Oh, how delightfully wrong you are!

This is the setting of Barrow Hill, a PC adventure game released by Shadow Tor Studios in 2006, and playing it at night with the lights out is a great way to give yourself the creeps. And the reason behind this is simple: atmosphere. Simply put, Barrow Hill has atmosphere coming out of its own jewel case, as designer Matt Clark went to incredible lengths to immerse the player into his fictional world. While you wander about Barrow Hill, you hear the rustle of leaves around you, the quiet chirp of crickets, the shifting of stones, gurgles of water, and the noise your own footsteps make as you tromp across whatever surface you're walking on. The soundtrack itself is masterfully done, with quiet, understated tunes for your exploration, punctuated by a few jarring ones to get your blood pumping. Shadow Tor sells it on their website, and it's well worth the purchase price in my opinion. Several times, the game requires you to light your way through the darkness with nothing more than an old gas-powered lantern that casts a dim circle of light across your surroundings. And something seems to be out there, following you...stalking you...

Barrow Hill's tagline is "Archaeology Meets Adventure," but there's very little "Indiana Jones" or "Tomb Raider" as this is a graphical adventure game and not an action shooter. You won't be gunning down any of the local Cornish wildlife, and you'll soon discover that what you're facing would shrug off bullets anyway. The name of the game is your brain, and figuring out just what on earth Conrad Morse and his group of archaeologists, along with the student protesters who have converted a nearby barn into their makeshift headquarters, managed to stir up on the old burial mound (and whether or not it's possible for you to set it right).

The area one can explore within the game may surprise players with how "small" it is and how few locations there are. Not counting the various lengths of road and forest trails one can traverse, there are really only 3 main areas to Barrow Hill: the petrol station with its attached restaurant and nearby three-room motel, the dig site itself, and the swamp from which Emma Harry broadcasts her evening music program on Barrow Hill Radio. Despite this seeming lack of explorable area, there is a surprising amount of exploring and investigation to accomplish, and a number of locations like St. Anneka's Well and the Owl Barn, that are only a few screens in size but offer much in the way of details and occasionally menace. And while Barrow Hill itself is a fictional locale, the architecture itself is based on real locations that can be found in Cornwall. The website itself offers a virtual tour of these areas used for inspiration, which is fun in and of itself to explore both before and after you've completed the game.

Additional depth is provided by the presence of notebooks, journal entries, photographs, drawings and other bits of ephemera that the player can examine, read, or otherwise interact with in order to get an idea of what has been going on and how to solve the mystery. Once you reach a certain point in the game, you'll get contacted by another character, who needs your assistance and who will henceforth maintain an infrequent level of dialogue with you via your phone (you'll never actually meet face to face). As if that isn't enough, you can flip through the radio stations (and listen to some really outrageous commercials or programs), use both a GPS device and a metal detector to solve puzzles, and manipulate various parts of the environment (such as a blender in a kitchen) in order to create what you need in the game. Barrow Hill very nicely dispenses with a good portion of the pixel hunt that plagues many other games of this type. A cursor over an object will show that a tool can be used to interact with it; in order to do so, it is only necessary to click on the object in your inventory and if it can be used, it will be. It's also possible on occasion to pick up and carry around larger objects such as boxes or ladders to be placed down elsewhere, and again, merely taking them to the right screen and dropping them will result in their proper use.

Another thing Barrow Hill does very well is keeping your avenues open all the time. If you can't seem to solve a puzzle, just walk away, explore somewhere else, and work out some other things. You very well may find a clue or two that you need which will help you. At the same time, you can solve many of the game's puzzles without finding or reading the clues in the first place, and several items in the game are placed for the sole purpose of making it slightly easier on you without straight-up nailing you over the head with the answers. In short, it's very hard to remain completely stumped in the game, and often going elsewhere and having a look around or coming back later with new equipment will provide you with the answers you need. There are still a few event "triggers" that you'll have to set off in order to advance the plot, but these are few in number, they're all automatically tripped as you follow the storyline, and each one makes sense. There's very little randomness in Barrow Hill's unfolding storyline, and that's a very nice change from linear adventures that block a path up until you perform some action that somehow allows you to progress further.

Barrow Hill is far from perfect. The voice acting in the game is a mixed bag, with some characters tending to prattle on too long about this, that or the other especially if they happen to be in danger at the time. Emma Harry herself is an absolute delight, though some of the lines she has to perform seem unnecessarily drawn out. Also, I was struck by the fact that even though at one point you are talking on the phone with someone, it seems like you don't have anything to say to them, even when they ask you a specific question. It's just a minor annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless. Also, if you're playing for the first time, it's quite possible to get a good 75% of the way through the game without having a blessed idea of what it is that you are actually striving for. Paying close attention and reading everything will help a lot, but it wasn't until I stumbled upon something by sheer chance that I started to put the pieces together and began looking for the other items I would need. Hint: keep a pen and paper handy, because there are a number of things you'll need to write down; the game doesn't feature a journal or any other sort of device for recording important tidbits of information, and the endgame puzzle is a doozy that requires you to combine a lot of the information you've found in different locales all together to produce a multitude of correct answers. Also, Barrow Hill includes two endings, one good and one not-so-good; it's entirely possible that you'll finish the game with the "not-so-good" one only to scratch your head and wonder if that is all there was to the whole thing. The "good" ending is the one that makes sense, so make sure you do everything and don't take any shortcuts, even if they seem obvious.

When all is said and done, though, Barrow Hill is a tremendous treat for adventure gamers who enjoy their stories well-plotted, their puzzles (mostly) logical, and their atmosphere thick enough to drown in. Fans who have played the game already will no doubt be delighted to know that work on another game in the series, Bracken Tor, is currently in the works. Matt Clark offers up a nice take on the idea of stone circles and burial mounds, mixing the real world and the fantasy world in a well-plotted story. It's always nice to play an adventure game that takes place in the real world, which is what I loved about Scratches, and Barrow Hill is happy to provide. In the end, you're in for a spooky time, and if that's what you're looking for, then you'll find it with Barrow Hill. People looking to shoot zombies or fight off aliens need not apply, but those who like thinking their way through to a solution will feel right at home. Two very big thumbs up, grade A all the way.