Playing The Excavation of Hob's Barrow on OpenBSD using ScummVM

on 2023-03-01

After many years without playing to a point & click game I decided to give The Excavation of Hob's Barrow a try after hearing a lot of good comments about it.

If you look at the PlayOnBSD database, you will notice that there was, until recently, issues displaying the text. But with the new version of ScummVM landing on the ports, I decided to give it a try (full disclosure, I did play first on Linux).

I have the Steam version. I tried with the Linux version but it did not work well for some reasons. So I tried the MacOS which worked fine.

You can download the game with steamctl issuing the following command (execute it in the directoty in which you want the game - in my case $HOME/.local/games/scummvm/TEHB):

$ steamctl depot download -a 1182310 -os macos
$ tree -L 4
.
`-- macos
    `-- TEOHB.app
        `-- Contents
            |-- CodeResources
            |-- Info.plist
            |-- MacOS
            |-- Resources
            `-- _CodeSignature

The files needed by scummvm are in the Resources directory.

You can launch the game using the scummvm interface and choosing the right game or by using the following command (see here for the documentation):

$ scummvm -p $PATH_TO_THE_GAME/macos/TEOHB.app/Contents/Resources/ excavationhb

You can also launch it full screen with the -f option:

$ scummvm -f -p $PATH_TO_THE_GAME/macos/TEOHB.app/Contents/Resources/ excavationhb

Now, you can enjoy the game.

Other games from the same editor are available on OpenBSD. At the moment I am playing Gemini Rue.