Bob Was Hungry is a precision platformer by Shorebound Studios. And by precision, think along the lines of Super Meat Boy and the like. It’s a guarantee that you’re going to die. A lot. By a magnitude more than you succeed.
As the story goes, Bobs are a race of little fuzzballs with bottomless stomachs and poor impulse control, much like Kim Jong Un would have if he were to hypothetically walk into a Hometown Buffet. This greedy eating leads to less fortunate Bobs being forced to traverse the cosmos in search of new planets to ransack for anything remotely considered food. Your Bob is one of these; his rations have run out, and he has to land on less than hospitable worlds in search of food.
Graphically, the game is mostly basic. They decided to go with a charming aesthetic which, while pleasing to the eye, does feature a fair dose of repeating textures. Considering that the entire development team is comprised of about three people though, and none of them are artists, it works out much better than it should. The bright, vivid colors certainly help, and the fact that you rarely spend much time in the game really looking at anything outside of determining whether it’s an obstacle or not also contribute.
The sound is well matched to the game. While the music and effects aren’t mind blowing, they serve their purpose. You will, however, have a difficult time getting the title screen music out of your head.
Gameplay is fairly standard for a platformer. There are pits, traps and obstacles that you need to finesse your way around. There aren’t any enemies, thus removing an element of chase, but that doesn’t matter much. Overall, the arrangement of the levels gives you plenty of challenge. Spikes (both stationary and retracting), saws, moving drills and crumbling blocks bring adversity to your quest for food. Specifically, the food at the end of each stage.
In addition, every stage contains a condiment that either makes a good or bad combination with the food you collect. As far as I can tell, the things you get are completely random, so there’s no way to get something specific. While a vexing mechanic, it ultimately affects nothing. The end level of each world changes things up a bit; you have to collect several parts to (presumably) fix your ship. You need to collect all of them, and the game pulls no punches.
Which sadly brings me to the controls. While they are fairly reasonable for most tasks, sometimes you just don’t really have the sort of control you’d like for this sort of game. Specifically, while you are in the air. I noticed that no matter which control method I used, I simply never felt like I had all that much say in how far I actually went or where I landed. Which is a problem because, fairly early in the game, they start throwing single block jumps over bottomless pits at you.
It may just be me, it may be the fact that I’m using the wrong type of controller, I don’t know. All I know is that I died over 300 times on the last level of the first world, mostly due to control and physics based reasons. You have just enough aerial control to realize how screwed you are, and hitting the corner of a surface doesn’t count as allowing you to jump, but does send you careening into the abyss. And believe it or not, I don’t consider that enough to condemn the game.
While not all of Bob Was Hungry‘s challenge comes from actual design, I can honestly recommend it to anyone who truly likes these sorts of games. Sure, it’s a little rough around the edges, but you can see all of the hard work put into it. And considering how small the dev team is, that’s no mean feat.
Title: Bob Was Hungry
Developer: Shorebound Studios
Publisher: Shorebound Studios
Platform: PC
Price: $14.99 ($9.99 on Steam through September 2)
*A a copy of this game was provided for review*
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