Hob

I don't really know I feel about Hob. On one hand, I really liked all the design and art of it. On the other, its buggy as hell and feels 95% finished. I think I fall on the 'you should definitely play Hob' side of the fence, but I don't know if I would pay very much money for it?

Hob is a sort of post-Zelda platformer with some Souls combat and some light RPG upgrades, driven by collectables (sword, health and energy upgrades, other cloaks that give different effects). It has the vita chamber from Bioshock (each of which takes too long to respawn you, especially when the game gives you one of the longer animations). It sort of has a Metroidvania sort of structure, where you get a handful of ability upgrades that allow you to access new areas, but also most of the areas are unlocked by completing others. The story is told through environments and a handful of secret-unlocked chambers that reveal the backstory with simple pictographs that don't really make a lot of sense. As a whole, it works pretty well together, with everything meshing together in a really rewarding way. I didn't love a lot of the platforming, but I've never been a big fan of it and the bugs made my sort of tepid acceptance turn sour quickly, so you mileage may vary.

The platforming is pretty simple, a lot of running and jumping and most of it feels fine. As you unlock upgrades, they get more complicated, but not really that much more so. Combined with the exploration, it feels really rewarding, and the environment art holds up through the whole game. It starts to fray at the edges some where some of the bugs start to break it. I only had two or three really irritating points, but the whole game is lightly dusted with moments where the physics breaks or a jump doesn't connect. The isometric perspective they use to pretty good effect, until it starts to get in the way of going through an area multiple times or the perspective makes it hard to tell distance. There aren't many of those instances, but they're annoying when they pop up.

The combat is sort of soulsy, with a lockon, a dodge with invincibility frames, and a lot of stick and move. It gets a little deeper with the added abilities, but beyond yanking armor off enemies it doesn't really change that much, including the enemy variety which is pretty thin, but since the game isn't long it doesn't feel very limited. It has a difficulty setting that adjusts the aggressiveness of the enemies, but I never played with it. Only one enemy I really didn't like, because it was a suicide enemy you only saw a couple times so never got an idea of how to actually deal with them. Enemies rarely respawn (only the little dog like guys come back, and they're basically fodder) so once you've cleared areas you can explore at your leisure. The tall grass in areas occasionally makes some of the fights annoying, but less in a difficulty way and more in a I-can't-see-what-I'm-fighting way. Sword upgrades make the combat much shorter, since they seem to do dramatic damage upgrades, but the biggest and tankiest enemies always feel like they take just a little too long to go down, especially when you have to spend time yanking armor off. Because the system is so straightforward, it never felt very buggy on its own, more often I got stuck on levels of environment I should have been able to walk up or the lockon trapped me in a corner, but I never felt anything was really frustrating. There is only one boss at the end, and because they fight in a completely different way from the rest, its an initially annoying fight that took me a few tries to figure out what I was supposed to do.

The characters are really charming, and the story on a surface level is very interesting. It sort of falls apart when you dig into the 'actual' story and the implied narrative, and the endings are disappointing in that regard. Basically the story seems to be (and take this with a big piece of salt because I don't think I actually understand it, but its the conclusion I came to after reading what other people thought) a race of people left their planet after their sun went out, and colonized and mechanized the planet they came to. But they were destroying all the native life, so one of the three Leaders decided to embrace the naive life, and became the core of a corrupting force meant to combat the invading colonial mechanization. The robot guardians/workers began choosing some of the colonists to go out into the corrupted world to try and fight and defeat it, and that's where your robot friend comes in and leads you throughout the game. The endings deal with this, where you either choose the other Leaders (and kill the corrupting one) or embrace the corrupting one. The 'good' ending seems to be the killing one, since its much longer and has many more of the traditional 'good' markers, happy people being able to live again and your robot friend finally being able to rest. But the other ending, that takes a lot of the work to even understand why you have the option, is extremely short, just showing the world corrupted and your robot friend finding someone new and the cycle begins again. So it sort of flips the good and bad ending, but doesn't pay it off, and just sort of made me look at the game, which I had found very charming up to then, in a different and less charming light, which was a huge bummer.

But the bugs are easily the worst part, and there are a lot of them. My first death was during the tutorial for the first arm ability, where you punch a platform to move it, but I got caught beneath and the physics freaked out and I just respawned (the pause menu has a 'respawn' button built in for times when you get stuck in the environment as well). The most irriating bugs have to do with the physics, which does not like it when you need to do platforming on spinning platforms. One particularly irritating one had an obvious chest that should have been simple to jump off a moving arm to get to, but because the physics thought I should be trying to climb onto it, I kept jumping off onto the platform, climbing onto nothing, and falling off and dying. There are climbable walls that are annoying to jump to because they're too fussy about the exact angle to attach to them, the hookable points can be annoying to find the angle with the camera fighting you as well, enemies can fall off cliffs and not despawn so they just sit at the bottom of a crevice making dangerous noises, and one enemy required jumping over a rock in a stream with current, but because the current applied mysteriously to the jump over it as well, he was completely unreachable. The whole game is littered with moments like this. It holds back what should be a really fun experience and makes it frustrating.

The end result is still good, but flawed in avoidable ways. It feels like they ran out of funding 80% of the way through polish and just had to hit ship and never got the chance to patch it, and that may well be true since Runic Games shuttered after its release. But since its only about 8 hours long and continues to be very charming the whole way through, there's little reason not to give it a go, but maybe don't pay over 10 bucks for it.