Hob is like Zelda. The older Zeldas. Or a newer one if you've played A Link Between
Worlds. So it's more like this: Than it is like this: I was very excited when I saw a trailer for
Hob because I've been wondering for a while now: why don't more smaller developers try
to make a game like the top-down Zelda titles? They're a favorite for many people—a bunch
of us grew up adoring them. I played A Link to the Past to death as a
kid. And yet that type of game has been relatively
untouched in the indie scene, while we get platformer after platformer. So along comes Hob, which might help answer
that question but it's more likely to lead to even more questions. Before we dig in with spoilers, I think it's
proper to show you all just how much this game really is like Zelda, just in case you
missed its release in September. You might really enjoy this game, despite
its many problems. You have a sword and a shield. You can use both during combat. You run around enemies and wait for openings
while fighting. Clearing some rooms of enemies will trigger
the opening of the way forward. Otherwise you're looking for switches and
levers to pull, puzzles to solve, and some light platforming with a jump command that's
a little like a top-down version of some of the stuff from the 3D Zeldas. Although it's not an auto-jump. You're in control of it. There are even many blocks to find and push
around to make a path forward. Some of them are even stuck on tracks! In these ways, it's like Zelda. In every other way, Hob is its own game with
its own sense of identity. In part, this is great. There are some really good ideas in this game
that are worth seeing. The rest, however, feels like they were included
out of obligation and weren't given enough attention. And even those are separate from what I think
is Hob's biggest, most glaring problem. There will be spoilers from here. Also, here's a brief reminder that I've begun
streaming on Twitch. I'm doing a longer stream for Nioh's PC release
right now. There should be a link below. One half of Hob is wonderful. And I don't use that word as a lazy synonym
for "good" or "great". I truly mean that it's full of wonder. This is found in Hob's level and world design,
although it also overlaps with visuals and some moments in gameplay as well. You play as a little hooded half-person, half-machine. A mix that matches most of the world that
the game takes place in. Initially this may appear like a tired, overused
setting: it's a place that has long ago fallen to ruin. Some battle has been fought and lost. Some corruption has taken hold of it. You wander around this forgotten world and
slowly peel away at what's happened. Parts of it wake up as you do so. This should all sound really familiar if you've
been playing games recently. What sets Hob apart is that you are no mere
bystander wanderer—limited only to watching—as you move through this lost world. Whereas you do cause changes and remove some
threats in games like Dark Souls and Hollow Knight—two of many games that have settings
like this—your actions do little to directly improve the state of the world immediately
after you achieve your goals. In fact it's questionable if your success
will change anything at all at the end. Hob, on the other hand, is like an extreme
version of the changes you can cause in Ori and the Blind Forest. It's a lot more holistic in approach. In Hob's world, parts of the land have been
quaked out of alignment. The landscape is like a set of broken stairs,
and this is something that you fix as you journey through the game. Same for fixing the world's main power generator,
and then restoring those lines of power to every place. The rivers are all dried out and sure enough
you'll be reconnecting them to the main water reservoir. Even that overused alien infestation type
of corruption can be purged and removed from the map. There are a few things that I'd like to make
clear here if you haven't played the game before we continue. None of what I just described is limited to
just one area. Nor is it simply cosmetic. You unlock access to new parts of the world
with each part of it that you restore. While many of these stages of repairing start
in one place they then have to be continued in every major part of the game. View it like this: the world is sick and damaged. You fix its broken skeleton—the individual
plates that each area sits on top of—and then reconnect water and power like you're
replenishing the dried up arteries of the land. Then cleanse the diseased tumors that must
have caused all the trouble to begin with. It's a tangled mess of machine and flesh that
you set right. The strongest moments of wonder are hinted
at when you're in the guts of the planet: a true underbelly, where it's more machine
than the nature resting above. You can see two things down here: previews
in the distance of the land that you will cause to ascend later as a new area to move
through, and your introduction to how this concept is used in gameplay. It's one of the coolest features in Hob, but
it's also unfortunately where the problems I have with it begin to show up. This mix of construction and remodeling of
the world isn't limited to just set moments where you're pushed into a new area. It's an ongoing mechanic that is incorporated
into exploring and puzzle solving throughout the whole game. Early on you will see floors, pillars, and
walls be altered and restructure themselves into new paths. Or the way that you move through an area to
get to an important trigger point—like acquiring a new upgrade—will be permanently changed
into something else when you make your way out of that area. What makes this impressive is that parts of
these paths are reused. It's not that they're all wiped clean—destroyed
and swept away—to be replaced by a new set of machinery. It gives the impression that this world was
created for some purpose and that whoever originally built all of this had a need for
the multiple settings in each area. It's just that now that half of it has been
ruined, you're using it to solve what now function as puzzles. It's convenient and a little contrived, but
Hob isn't really a story game so it didn't really bother me that much. This is also something that becomes less impressive
when your perception of how it was designed is twisted: consider that the final placements
of all of these different parts was probably the original formation, and that they were
changed in reverse. The areas were then designed around that and
set into their lowered position, so that they didn't have to be quite so carefully designed
ahead of time. This is actually really smart if they did
it this way and, even though I'm pointing it out, it doesn't diminish the effect that
it has when you first encounter these sequences. Some of them do get a significant amount of
use of both versions of the machinery as well, which must have been difficult to put together
and plan. It's when the game was most impressive to
me. However this leads us to a problem that may
have been caused by exactly that. In fact I'm almost certain that it's the cause. See, because of the unexpected nature of how
parts of the world change in reaction to your pushing and pulling of switches, levers, power
boxes, and all sorts of other things, it was never something that I could anticipate happening. The game does lead you through its puzzles
by pointing out power lines to follow, or symbols on the map, or dried out rivers, but
on a smaller scale—you have no way of really knowing how or when huge pieces of puzzles
will appear, or where they'll move to, or what effect every switch will have. Because of this unpredictable assembly, only
a handful of puzzles in Hob are things you can think through and then solve. And I mean a regular handful, not this giant
monstrosity of a thing that you're using. These puzzles that you can predict are the
simpler ones in the game, or simple smaller parts of larger puzzles. Like pulling this big wheel on a track to
make a platform to jump on. Or raising the water level in this area to
make the teleport platform go higher. What this means is that there are large stretches
of time spent underground—in what passes as something of a dungeon in Hob—wherein
you are just following the only path available to you. If you pull a switch and a path opens, you
follow it until you find the next switch and see what happens after that. If a new platform rises then that's where
you go. Or a four legged vehicle will appear and you
control that down the only path available and see what happens next. There are similar, more contained puzzles
in the overworld that function in the same way. Flip a switch. See what happens. Follow it blindly, like breadcrumbs on a trail,
until you get to the next switch and keep on going. The puzzles that may require more thought
than that are usually tedious—again likely because of this mechanic of changing the environment
which is slow to manipulate. Like rotating a pillar into the right alignment,
then solving the first step of the puzzle, and then going all the way back to change
its alignment again to finally solve it. This may not seem that bad but more than once
the game is slowed to boredom because of it. You've already solved this puzzle in your
head long before you've demonstrated it, and this was the trend I noticed with the puzzles
that require more than just flipping switches in a row. It was: interact with the first piece, use
that to change something, and then go back to interact with the first piece again or
reset it entirely in order to proceed. In this way, it's a good thing that the majority
of the "puzzles" are the unpredictable ones, because you can move through them quickly,
feel like you're making great progress as things change, and they can be cool surprises
when you see what just happened now that you've moved onto a new stage of the area. The problem with this is that you are risking
players getting lost along the way. If you're just meant to follow things from
one sequence to the next, and you don't immediately grasp where the "next" part is, then you're
left hopelessly wandering around trying everything to see what works. This is where some hints and sign posting
on the floor can help—usually power lines that I mentioned earlier that you're trying
to connect. But there is a much, MUCH, larger problem
here. It's the biggest problem the game has. Similar to how the Zerg-like infestation haunts
the world of Hob, this issue corrupts the entire game. Hob isn't finished. In fact, when I was done with my first playthrough,
I had to check the store page to see if it was in Early Access and I hadn't noticed before
when I got it. I streamed my first run of this game—you
can go watch the whole thing if you like on my second channel—and many people were shocked
as I encountered glitch after bug after glitch. We'll go through a long, sprawling list of
them shortly but for now there's an important type of bug that can destroy your enjoyment
of these puzzle parts in the game. Simply put: it's when the trigger for the
next part of the puzzle doesn't spawn, or teleports away, or simply doesn't work. Let's go through some examples. A fair way through the game you're meant to
drag this box onto a square on the floor in order to trigger an elevator to carry it above. On my first playthrough this worked perfectly. My second time it didn't work. It failed twice, and I count myself lucky
that this happened on my second time through, because after trying twice I would have wandered
away and likely not come back here to try again for quite some time. All because of a glitch. You may be thinking this is a minor issue. For this particular example, all on its own,
you may be right. But there were a few others like this that
happened to me: buttons you're meant to punch not responding to the move. Or parts of ladders despawning after you've
unlocked them so they're no longer usable. Some of these are fixed by quitting to your
desktop and restarting the game, but the biggest issue arises when you don't realize that the
bug has occurred. The worst one that I encountered was in this
room. After moving a box, flipping a switch, and
then moving the box again, I followed a path to this room underground. There are enemies here and, after killing
all of them, I hit a deadend. This was clearly where I was meant to be in
order to progress through this area and yet nothing was happening. The issue was being caused by an enemy that
had glitched out during the fight and teleported out of the room. In a way I'm lucky that it ended up back on
the surface above the room and not permanently stuck somewhere, because otherwise I would
have spent over an hour running around the whole area looking for some secret switch
or something that I had missed. After killing the guy up top, the room below
activated and I could finally continue. There's an additional, more insidious problem
here though. Once you've experienced something like this,
it spoils the rest of the game in a very specific way. You start to second guess and question things
that are happening—when you think what you just tried should trigger something. Is it working properly? Is it just a bug? Or are you just wrong? Like this handle that would teleport me to
the other side of it when I used it. Was this just broken because of that warp,
or does this thing just not do anything right now? This is why bugs are so bad and, while they
may be funny and entertaining on a case-by-case basis, they can never be considered a positive
like I've seen some reviewers claim. Especially when a game is like Hob and brimming
with so many of them. Like this giant shark monster, which tries
to kill you when you're in the water reservoir, that decided to follow me through the sky
and make fly-bys for a while after I left the area. Luckily it couldn't deal damage and I could
just watch it do its thing in through the air. Just like a bunch of other enemies that glitched
out, becoming incorporeal statues instead of fighting. They were weird decorations that I couldn't
kill. Not that they're guaranteed to work even when
this doesn't happen, since sometimes enemy attacks would just not deal damage when they
hit me. Which might be balanced after all since it
also happened to me when fighting them. Especially when trying to use the power punch
ability. An enemy that glitched to stay alive in the
final fight in the game hit me during a cinematic that played. And this enemy here decided to somehow be
capable of tanking ten times as many hits as normal before dying. Maybe because it got half stuck in a wall. Even fall damage isn't spared from this type
of problem. Sometimes a fall would kill me when it shouldn't. One time a fall that should cause me to explode
wouldn't trigger, but then the game would decide to kill me anyway by just teleporting
me back to the respawn capsule without showing a death or a life lost or anything. But hey at least that's not as bad as the
time I died and only the camera was sent back to the very beginning of the game. It was linked to my movements where the respawn
capsule was further into the game, which made it very confusing before I was forced to close
the game and relaunch it. Other weird things in the world were models
vanishing when I was standing in certain areas. Leaving the area and coming back wouldn't
fix this. Only a full restart would. Grass would sometimes respawn when I sliced
at it with my sword—probably meaning that the fresh grass had already regrown but simply
wasn't showing until I attacked. Sometimes when you kill an enemy, a short
burst of bullet time is activated to make things more dramatic—at least I think that's
the intention. This effect would sometimes trigger randomly. For no reason. Making some sequences of simply walking around
suddenly more intense. No idea what's happening here. After connecting this river to the main water
supply, half of it didn't spawn. Not only did this mean it looked ridiculous,
it also meant the water wasn't there so I couldn't swim over these thorns like I was
supposed to be able to. The angle required on the analogue stick to
push some handles never made sense. This is impossible for me to show you but
in these instances, I had to hold the stick and make my character "push" in the opposite
direction that was shown on the screen. One time I fell right through a piece of the
floor as it was extending, probably because it didn't have a body associated with it until
it was finished its animation to become a bridge. Something vaguely similar happened another
time when I was able to move before respawning was finished, so when it did trigger I was
away from the capsule but still doing the animation. And last but by no means least, one time the
game decided to kill me out of nowhere. I wasn't fighting. I wasn't in danger. There were no enemies around. I didn't fall. The game simply stopped me in place, faded
to black like I died, and shot me back to the respawn point. Fortunately it wasn't too far away from where
I just was. This parade of glitches has been the worst
of a list I kept through only two playthroughs. So I can only imagine how many more issues
are in the game that I luckily didn't run into. That's not to mention how poorly the game
runs—frequent stuttering, freezes, and things not loading properly. And this is after some patches. The tragic thing here is that these issues
are not a result of a lack of love and care. In fact I think the way the world is put together
stands as proof that this was a project that at least one person really wanted to make. Instead, Hob's problems are caused by the
fact that the game couldn't be completed. A "fact" I'm comfortable pointing to since
Runic Games, the studio that developed Hob, was shut down while I was writing this script. I'm going to guess that one of two things
happened here: the decision was made before the game's release and they rushed it out
just because it was close to complete, or Hob was released early in an attempt to avoid
closure if the game managed to exceed expectations and become a big hit. Something that, unfortunately for Runic Games,
didn't happen. You can see further proof of this in what
I think is the most frightful feature that Hob is missing. There's no ambient sound slider. There's one for music. One for sound effects. But the third one is missing. Which means that everything else can be quiet,
but these big musical blasts when you encounter something new, or pick up something important—anything
like that—shudder out at full volume even if you have the others muted. Something that fundamental is missing from
the game. Surprisingly this concept is linked heavily
to combat in the game which you may have forgotten about, or maybe surprised to remember exists
after fifteen or so minutes of this video talking about other things. Glitches aside, I think the unfinished nature
of Hob hurts combat more than anything else. The set piece puzzles, with the world churning
to life and activating with massive gears and turbines, feel mostly complete. Maybe there were meant to be more pieces of
the world to elevate and explore, but what's here is refined and functional enough not
to feel half-baked. Combat, however, feels like all the ingredients
are still on the countertop ready to be mixed. Maybe some of them got damp and seeped together. And that's it really. Hob has very few enemy types. It has no bosses—save for a fight against
a reskinned version of yourself at the end. Enemies are recycled with different armor
types. And the whole thing feels like a heartbreaking
missed opportunity. Let's go through it: your character in Hob
can walk or run around. There's no lock on while fighting. And there are five—count them, FIVE—methods
of evading enemy attacks: rolling, running, jumping, blocking, and a teleport. There is also a charged version of your punch
attack, plus the ability to grapple line parts of enemy armor to peel them off. Enemies almost always have clear telegraphs
or warnings when they're about to attack so you can avoid damage. This is, without a word of exaggeration, one
of the most fertile combat systems I've played in a while. The different methods of avoiding damage alone
are worth a whole game exploring: enemies and especially bosses that have different
types of attacks that require these different responses to avoid them. A sweep you have to jump over, a thrust you
have to block, something else you need to roll, and damage patterns that you need to
run from or teleport through. The different types of attacks you have could
also be used way more creatively. Instead, your punch and grapple are glorified
Quick Time Events that are seen as busywork at the beginning of encounters before you
can finally start doing damage. At first they appear more like puzzles instead
of fights since you have to work out how to remove the armor protecting them. But this will only take a few seconds at most
and, once started, doesn't feel fun because it's just so simple. Enemies could have incorporated dynamic challenges
that required quick responses with these different abilities you have available—especially
bosses, if the game had any. Which is potential that the larger enemies
hint at. Especially this one that teleports between
different platforms. My second playthrough was on Very Hard and
it felt near identical to my first run on Normal. Every fight is the same once the armored enemies
have been stripped of their protection: spam your attacks then dart away from enemy strikes
without getting greedy and hitting them too much. There is some clunkiness in this combat system—especially
when it comes to how inconsistent it is to cancel moves like dodging into sword strikes
and the like—but the current implementation of fighting in Hob led me to first think that
it was included just out of obligation. Games like this have combat, therefore Hob
should have some combat too. But the more I've thought about it, the more
I see opportunity being squandered here, and it makes me think that with more time it would
have been realized. I hope that was the plan all along and that
Runic Games just didn't have the resources to get there. Although maybe not and maybe I'm wrong, because
exploration and the puzzles are the same sort of way The difference is that they benefit from the
spectacle of what's happening, and the cool clicking of the land and mechanisms coming
together. Whereas the enemies are always kind of boring. The only thing that does seem to be fully
realized in the game are the many secrets tucked in the corners of the world. Some of these unfortunately suffer from a
temperamental camera that switches perspectives at the wrong time, or refuses to move at all,
but many of these secrets were enjoyable to find. They're used to upgrade your health, energy,
and sword damage, or allow you to purchase some new moves. This is a strange decision considering that
none of the enemy encounters ever require this, and that nothing ever demands more than
spamming attacks and dodging away from their counterattacks. Including the last boss, with its horde of
strange clipping minions, nothing needs more than this from you in order to beat it. That final fight is also when some of the
story clicks into place. I don't think it's worth discussing in detail
but I'd like to at least mention it. Hob's world, from what I can understand, has
been corrupted by some sort of alien or foreign presence that has arrived unintentionally. This queen of the infestation is nothing like
the monsters she has spawned throughout the land and, from her willingness to draw her
corruption out of you at the end here, I wonder if she's just a victim of circumstance and
doesn't realize what's she done. Hob has many different factions: there's the
people that your character represents, that only emerge at the end of the game. Then there are the machines that I assume
these people built. The alien corruption and, the way I interpret
it, their trapped queen. And finally the forest sprites that I view
as the nature of the world representing itself to fight back against the corruption—some
of them unsuccessfully. I don't know where the teeth-monsters fit
into this but they're just not that important. It's a world where co-existence can sadly
not succeed. Your choice at the end leads to either a resolution,
or the robot you meet at the beginning of the game repeating the cycle by opening another
door to find another like you. A process that is strongly hinted at happening
at least once before now with your predecessor now serving the queen. The one you fight at the end. It's vaguely interesting and I wonder if it
suffers in the same way as the rest of the game: that it's also unfinished. Or it could be something that's trying its
hardest to provide context while staying out of your way. There's no voice acting or dialogue in Hob. The robot points to what it wants you to do
instead. The corrupted queen mimes along with her unintelligible
sounds at the end—looking to me to act out some sort of crash or catastrophe that happened
in the past. This was good and bad since the game was never
slowed down by what could have been a terrible story. But it also meant I had no real idea what
I was supposed to be trying to do for most of the game or what I was building toward. A problem compounded by the fact that Hob
is sort of an open world game. It's closer to a Metroidvania with new abilities
unlocking the way forward. There aren't many of these however, and some
of the paths they open require some tedious backtracking through prior areas. It's also something that your robot friend
eventually stops helping you with—there's no replacement either. Instead you're given map markers out of nowhere
for the next place to go, whereas the robot pal was the one to provide them before. It's like the game gives up and just tells
you where to go. Ultimately it fits with the linear puzzles
in the game. Follow the latest breadcrumb caused by whatever
you interacted with previously and hope that nothing has glitched out. It all became a series of vibrant, messy color
as I went through it all. Even the second time, which I ended up enjoying
more after knowing what upcoming changes I would cause in each area. It allowed me to appreciate the different
versions of Hob's world and understand how neatly it all fit together—or how pipes
and parts of the land would become relevant later on, instead of only half remembering
the first time through since I had no way of knowing what would be important. It's that impression that I'm left with now. What else would have become something really
interesting, or engrossing, or even challenging with the combat, if Hob had been fully finished? Would there have been more developed enemy
types, more vertical stacks of land to raise, a mechanical handful of bosses, or even an
ambient sound slider? I think there are some great ideas trapped
and buried within Hob, that were waiting to be rescued, and ready to emerge pristine to
stand tall. I am very sorry that I had to criticize so
much of it.
