Hob (or in my case, the Definitive Edition of Hob) is a 3D adventure-platformer of sorts where you explore an alien planet infected with a strange purple goo.  The story is told wordlessly through the environment, and the game is completely devoid of music, the ambience being comprised largely of exotic animal noises.  The early portion of gameplay sees your main character losing his arm to the infection and having it replaced by a robot one, which is probably for the best, as without it, you would have no way of interacting with the strange machinery scattered about and, hence, no way to get rid of the infection.

Hob is unique in that I would call it an open-world Metroidvania, which is not something you see too often…if ever.  Yes, you might say that Metroid Prime qualifies as such, a statement to which I would disagree.  The Metroid Prime games are certainly an example of a 3D Metroidvania, but they’re not exactly all that open, considering the map is still comprised of countless little rooms in a manner not too dissimilar to 2D Metroidvanias.  While we have a decently large world to explore in Hob, it’s not always terribly open, as we must weave our way amongst the dense foliage of this alien world, making the mere act of navigation like a puzzle in its own right.

As the game progresses, we gain new moves, like the ability to punch enemies and break their armor or a grappling…beam that allows us to reach new areas.  There are also plenty of collectibles, which can grant us a stronger sword, increase our health, or give us even more abilities that can be unlocked with experience, like a shield or new garb that increases one stat, but decreases another.  Another interesting feature is how much we can change our environment.  Many times, we find switches that will raise huge sections of the ground, completely changing the landscape, and later on, we are able to flood a whole bunch of earlier sections of the game, creating rivers that make the world easier to traverse.

While I had a pretty good time with Hob, it’s definitely not without its flaws.  For one thing, the Metroidvania-esque nature of the world can sometimes make it really confusing as to where to go next.  I’m not sure how helpful the map even was in such occasions, as it doesn’t show such things as well-hidden ladders that lead you to your next objective.  Plus, you can’t even zoom in on the map (unless I’m missing something), which I found odd.

In addition to the world sometimes being confusing and difficult to navigate, the game is a bit buggy, as well.  One time, I returned to find that roughly 30 minutes of my progress had been lost.  From then on, I just let the game sleep on my Switch instead of closing out of it entirely, but sometimes when I returned, the colors would get super saturated for a few seconds, which was quite weird.  Graphical glitches galore, with these weird horizontal lines appearing all over the place.  Other times, the camera angles are just plain bad, especially this one time when I went underground and had walls obscuring my vision most of the time.  Now, this isn’t a glitch, but the fixed camera also leads to trouble with platforming, meaning you will probably miss a lot of jumps thanks to no sense of depth perception.  Wee!

I wasn’t a big fan of combat in this game, either.  There is only one boss fight, which is quite easy, but there are also these bigger enemies that wander about, a few of which are required to beat.  For these particular foes, they seem to take way too many hits, and the whole battle largely consists of waiting for them to stop swinging a weapon that covers a very wide area, then running in for a very brief chance to attack, and repeating.  Fortunately, the battles do get much easier once you get a stronger sword.  Or you can just do what I did, which is to find a slightly higher place to stand, and oftentimes, the enemy will just linger quite close to you, not attacking, and you can slash away until you win.  Keep in mind, this works better with the blue guys than the tall yellow ones, but it certainly makes things easier.

With that said, I would say that my time spent with Hob was well worth it.  Flawed though it was, the interesting puzzles, unique alien environment, and general relaxing atmosphere means the pros definitely outweigh the cons. So if you enjoy both open games and Metroidvanias, perhaps you’d want to give this game a try.  Hob: The Definitive Edition is available on PC, PS4, and Switch for $19.99 (I got it on sale for $3.99) and takes 10-16 hours to complete.