Hob - Where Did This Come From?!?

Hob

Every once and a while a game will come from more or less out of now where and surprise me. Hob  is such a game. I only heard about it a couple of months before its release and was immediately intrigued. From the developers of the fantastic Torchlight series combined with a fantastic visual style and the promise of metroidvania - well I was in. Super in.

Hob is a beautiful open world exploration game. Full of puzzles and wonders, the available space expands as you work you way through an unspoken wordless story (seems to be a trend for me lately). Each series of solutions gives you more to work with and more to do.

You play as the titular character Hob, an adept adventurer who loses one of his arms to a unknown invading creeping force and has it replaced with the super sized arm of his mechanical companion. Initially you have little idea what is going on but something has clearly gone wrong and you set out to find not only what but why. In true fashion of the genre sometimes your path will be clear, sometimes it will be obfuscated almost to the point of frustration. Sometimes you will be moving forwards opening new areas other times backtracking over spaces that you thought you had completed but later finding that you had missed much.

Over the course of the game you will unlock new abilities for this arm, giving you further access to  exploration paths, puzzle solving and combat options. Some of these abilities essentially gate your progress through the game - basically giving you the key to move forwards. Your arm is not the only thing that you improve, there are a myriad of special abilities to earn, new costumes that drastically change the way you can approach the game, health and energy bar increases and a series of improvements to your sword that allow you to access locations that fill in some of the backstory. 

There is some combat in Hob but unless you play on the harder difficulties the enemies are of an obstacle on their own and more there to add depth to the puzzles/world and the environments. Hob does not feature boss fights, a departure from the genre, but as someone who is not always a fan of boss battles (at least when used to gate content - I could write a whole article about my feelings on them) I found this refreshing and was thankful. 

The core of Hob game play is the puzzles. None of the puzzles are what I would consider "hard" but many require you to understand what you can do and the options available to you. Anytime I got stuck it was usually because I forgot about a mechanic or didn't think about using an ability in a more creative way. The puzzle variety is good, from navigation to object manipulation they mix it up creatively and the results of solving the bigger of them is often quite satisfying visually as you are treated to some really well put together scenes.

All of the game would be good but the visuals bring it up a notch that make it fantastic. The color pallet is bright and textures are crisp. I love the particular style used that mixes stone work and machinery. You can easily tell where you in the world by the distinct key elements in the environment. Combined with a soothing soundtrack I often really enjoyed just travelling around in the world of Hob regardless of my current game goals.

Hob also goes the extra mile with lots of quality of life features that help with many of the things in other games that fall into "wouldn't it be nice" category such as good map, a fast travel system and a decent running speed. The designers of Hob seem to respect your time as a player, even though games of this style often require exploration and backtracking they go out of their way to make it less painful and tedious than it need to be. I really appreciated that as one of the things that annoys me the most in games is when they don't respect the players time.

I should note that as of the time I played the game (right after it launched) there were some frame rate hitching issues as the engine was having issues with how it loaded content as you played. After some patches it got a lot smoother and as I understand it they are still working on cleaning it up. Although I was initially slightly bothered by them I stopped noticing after a while and over all will take some frame hitching over a loading screen any day.

Playing Hob was a delightful experience. I loved every aspect about it, from the wonderful visuals, and creative puzzles, to the smooth controls and the many surprises. For the amazing steal of $20 (how is this game ONLY $20!) you get an easy 15+ hours of fantastic game play. Runic Games have done it again!