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Hob


Hob is an anomaly. It has a very inspired art style, its animations are beautiful, and overall it's a very responsive game. But it's stuck in the past in a very fundamental way. Usually, however, this would be disappointing, but somehow here it isn't. Hob's brand of adventuring is something that's taking place across the indie scene right now: not quite minimalism, but more of a cryptic-realism, if you will: a philosophy that the days of saturating you with information are long gone. What this entails is of course a certain amount of trust that you have to bring with you to the game. Does Hob earn this trust? In spite of not really doing anything radically new, it actually does. Hob is adventuring at its purest, because even when you have no idea why you're doing what you're doing (pulling that lever, hitting that switch, watching a giant contraption come alive and literally change the landscape in front of you), you still want to go ahead and try, for that sense of discovery. Along the way, you do start making sense of a "plot", but that's not the point. We're in the age of gaming where context is overtaking plot in a bid for gaming credibility. And not all games need to break the mold in order to do so, and Hob is a spectacular example.
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