Hob

Hob is a top-down exploration game that, despite some great art direction and its vague story, can quickly become repetitive in its design, as we are constantly executing the same extremely simple actions over and over again in different locales.

The world of Hob is one in which technology and nature are both entwined and in conflict. The first area is a lush forest, bursting with plants, trees, and animals, but also littered with ancient technological ruins. The whole world functions as an enormous jigsaw puzzle: the lands can shift and move to fit together, allowing us to progress further.

We look at everything from a top-down perspective, which reinforces the verticality of the level design. There are tons of tall structures and holes that go deep underground. The lands rise and fall. We can climb huge structures and descend through tunnels and decayed buildings.

The protagonist’s purpose is made clear right from the start. There is corruption spreading throughout the world, with a purple blob-thingy with claws contaminating the environment, killing whoever comes near it. It’s our mission to rid the world of this menace and save our people.

Hob’s story reflects the state of the world. The protagonist is a mechanical being who is being helped by other mechanical beings and we can clearly see that it was their people the ones responsible for mechanizing the world, allowing chunks of it to move, rise, and fall. There is a connection between machines and nature, but there is also conflict, as nature, with its purple toxic substance, is finally fighting back.

The story is a simple one, then, being mostly told through gestures and undecipherable dialogue, spoken in gibberish. Meanwhile, its lore, which expands on how the world ended up in that state, is told by some vague shining panels we can find in temples hidden around the world. During the climax, we have an important choice to make, although one of the outcomes is of little consequence. The revelation that precedes this moment, however, shows how far one can go to destroy the “other”, corrupting even their own nature in the process.

Although simple, Hob’s narrative still suffers from some issues. The opening moments, for example, establish a strong connection between our character and a robot who makes a personal sacrifice to help us – a bond that soon begins to fade as the robot, after this moment, just walks around the world, pointing loosely at the faraway places we must go: if at the beginning, he’s a friend, now he’s just a pretty useless guide. Besides that, there is the fact that vague stories can clearly work — see Abzû and Journey — but Hob is vague in excess. As already said, we can find some temple-like structures around the world, where the protagonist sits down to observe some glyphs shining. But what do they mean? There is a certain solemnity to the occasion, but the format is too abstract. Vague messages can make the player become more invested — trying to uncover their meaning — but for that to happen, the messages must at least look like messages. In Hob, the shining panels, at first, can look like they’re activating something, just like the other glowing things in the world.

This leads us to Hob’s most serious problem: there is no immediate logical connection between our actions and their result in the world. By moving a lever, we can make a whole continent rise from the abyss or simply move some platforms around – and we usually can’t tell beforehand which of the two outcomes will happen. In other words, it’s not the case where the puzzles follow a clear logic of “If I do this, that will happen,” being much more like, “If I touch glowing things, stuff will happen.” For a game that is all about its world, this disconnection between action and consequence, where we can predict our impact on the environment, is a grave issue.

And then there’s the problem of repetition. Our biggest actions here are the usual ones from the old Zelda games: pushing blocks and moving levers, which usually glow to show they’re interactable. The results of these actions may vary most of the time, but the most impactful things we do in the game remain always the same: pushing blocks and moving levers.

The game is a Metroidvania at heart, with tons of backtracking and moments when we can just wander off to explore the world. We may even find some upgrades, such as a grapple or a dash ability, that let us visit new areas, but the most interesting moments in the game happen when we gain access to new areas not because we got stronger, but because we helped cure the world of its purple disease – like when we manage to open some gates to flood a big region.

The collectibles, however, are a letdown. Most are orbs that can be used to buy skills and new armor, making for an indirect, unsatisfying upgrade. The others — skills, heart pieces, energy, and armor — are all related to combat, improving our survival chances. But the rub is that combat is not the game’s focus, and for a good reason: it’s slow, easy, and – like most of the game – repetitive. We can easily dispatch every monster by just spamming the attack button mindlessly. If they decide to attack back, we press a button to block it, and if they’re armored enemies, we must remove the armor first with the appropriate ability. Making our character increasingly stronger, therefore, although better than just making them look different, doesn’t mean much either at the end of the day. It would have been better if most skills were related to traversing the environment here, instead of being about the overly simple combat system.

Hob, then, is a beautiful but flawed game that presents a fascinating world, but fails to capitalize on it as much as it should.

April 22, 2025.