Hob lands on a planet that is dying, and it never says a word about it. Runic Games built the whole story into the ground you walk on. There is no dialogue, no written language, no narrator. The world is the text.
Released September 26, 2017 for PC and PlayStation 4, Hob is an action-adventure game about a small mechanical figure who wakes up, pops a blade from his wrist, and sets out across a broken world of overgrown architecture and arcane machinery. It is the last game Runic made before the studio dissolved. It is also, for long stretches, one of the more quietly absorbing adventures of its year — and for other stretches, a game that mistakes confusion for mystery.
Trailer, via Runic Games.
A World With No Words
Hob is set on a science-fiction world full of bizarre wildlife, overgrown ruins and machinery that hums below the surface. The game shows you buzzing life above and the whirr of unknown machines below. The more you dig into the design of the place, the more you understand it is a planet in peril. Your job is to survive, learn skills, and change the nature of the world itself.
None of that is explained to you. Hob tells its story through environmental storytelling. Clues arrive through the environments, the enemies and the other creatures you meet. There is no dialogue and no written language. If you want the plot, you have to read the room.
The game gives you five lore rooms. In sequence, they lay out the history in symbolic animated glyphs:
- A sun dying around a planet, and a spaceship carrying four elders and twenty disciples
- The ship leaving that solar system before the sun dies, landing on a new world with an active sun
- The ship using the sun’s power to build the raised platforms and the high tower
- A second ship arriving and transmitting a virus or infection to one elder, who spreads it through the platform structures
- The robots waking as the infection spreads, with one of the four elders found dead
The infection shows up as spikes in the glyphs, and the appearance of those spikes comes with chittering, creeping sounds. A sound — “woahlah” — accompanies the transmission, and the queen at the end of the game makes the same sound. The final lore room holds one of the elders, dead, which suggests it was the elders who made the glyphs.
A prequel comic on the Runic Games website continues from there: a robot wakes, is carried to the surface of a platform, sees robots fighting the infection and dying, pops its wrist blade, gets stabbed by an infection plant, retreats, and is healed by one of the sprites. Greenery grows from the wound. Then it goes to open something.
Exploration and Combat, Nothing Else
Hob’s gameplay centers on two things: exploration and combat. That is the whole machine. You walk, you climb, you fight, you solve. The camera sits in a bird’s-eye isometric view, which suits a game about reading the shape of a world.
The puzzles are multi-layered. They stack, and they ask you to hold several pieces of a place in your head at once. The controller work is smooth, and the visuals are striking. When the game is running well, the loop is clean: see a thing, figure out how it fits, turn it, watch the world rearrange itself around you.
Combat is the weaker half. It is functional and it is frequent, and it rarely rises to the level of the exploration it interrupts. The game wants you to look at things. Then it wants you to hit things. Those two impulses do not always agree.
The Planet Is the Point
What Hob does better than most games of its size is make a place feel like a place. The wildlife is bizarre. The architecture is overgrown. The machinery is arcane and unexplained. The game never stops you to lecture. It trusts you to notice that the tower matters, that the spikes matter, that the dead elder matters.
That trust is the game’s best quality and its biggest risk. Environmental storytelling only works if the environment is legible. Hob’s is legible often enough to keep you moving, but not always. There are stretches where you will not know whether you missed a clue or whether there was no clue to miss.
The lore rooms carry a lot of weight. Five rooms is not much to hang a planet’s history on, and if you walk past one without understanding it, the story does not come back for you.
A Last Game From Runic
Hob was developed and published by Runic Games. It came to PC and PlayStation 4 first. An enhanced port developed by Panic Button arrived in 2019 for the Nintendo Switch. It is a single-player game, and it stays that way — no modes, no companions, no second player.
It is also the final game Runic made before the studio dissolved. That fact hangs over the whole thing now in a way it could not have at launch. A game about a machine waking up alone on a ruined world, made by a studio that would not make another, reads differently in hindsight.
The critical aggregate for Hob sits at 7.2 out of 10 across eight outlets. That number is fair. It catches a game that is confident in its art and its world, and less confident in how much of that world it needs to explain.
The Numbers on Hob
- Release date: September 26, 2017
- Platforms: PC (Microsoft Windows), PlayStation 4
- Later port: Nintendo Switch, 2019, developed by Panic Button
- Developer and publisher: Runic Games
- Modes: Single player
- Perspective: Bird view / Isometric
- Genres: Platform, Puzzle, Adventure, Indie
- Critic aggregate: 7.2/10 (8 outlets)
What Hob Gets Right
The best argument for Hob is that it respects your attention. It hands you a dying sun, a ship full of elders, a tower built from sunlight, an infection that spreads as spikes, and robots that wake up because of it. It hands you all of that without a single line of text. When the pieces click — when you stand in a lore room and the glyphs finally line up with the tower you climbed an hour ago — the game earns something most adventures buy with cutscenes.
That is a real achievement, and it is the reason Hob is worth your time.
The counterargument is that a story told this quietly has to be told this clearly, and Hob is not always clear. The infection, the queen, the sprites, the elder — these are strong images that never quite lock into a shape. You finish the game knowing the world was in peril and that you changed it. You may not finish knowing exactly what you changed, or why.
Hob is a beautiful, dangerous, wordless place. It is also a puzzle box with a few pieces missing, and it asks you to be fine with that. Mostly, you will be.
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