Thank you Shorebound Studios for sending us this game to review!

Bob is a round alien that likes to eat. He was happily flying around in space and was running out of food until his ship crashed into a meteor and landed on a strange planet along with his dinner that he was about to eat.  Bob’s goal is to locate his dinner and ideally a condiment to go along with it.  

Each of the one-hundred and seventy levels has a condiment and a meal hidden within it.  The meal is required to unlock the next level, but if you want to have your time recorded and the harder difficulty unlocked, you’ll need to collect the condiment too.  There are various Steam achievements for unlocking various meal combinations.  To earn these achievements, you’ll have to play each level several times over.  That wouldn’t be a big deal if the levels were not very challenging; however, Bob Was Hungry prides itself on being a difficult platformer.  

Many people compare Bob Was hungry to a 3D version of Super Meat Boy when it comes to difficulty.  Many of the obstacles in Bob Was Hungry are not visible until it’s too late.  With that said, I felt that many of my deaths were truly earned and that the level design is very sadistic indeed.  I wish I could tell you that there are check points, but there are not.  Each death means that you’ll have to start over from the beginning and re-grab the condiment that’s often difficult to get to.

Most of the deadly obstacles involve spikes.  Clumps of spikes on the ground, spikes in the wall, moving spikes, spinning spiked wheels, and crushing blocks that have (you guessed it!) spikes all over them.  True to the platformer genre, there are plenty of moving, rotating, and crumbling platforms to jump across as well.

Deaths are celebrated in this game and there are Steam achievements for dying 12, 100, 1,000, and 10,000 times.  Fortunately, the deaths are not gory and simply show Bob breaking up into many pieces.  The graphics are very colorful and look nice.  There are five different worlds to mix things up a bit.  Bob will traverse though plateaus, caves, tropical and arctic zones, and even space!

Despite dying a lot, I wasn’t too flustered and often laughed at my predicament.  My son laughed at his many deaths as well so I know that I’m not alone.  Perhaps the cheerful music helps calm the nerves.  The sound effects are minimal, but the death “thump” is very fitting.

Due to this game’s difficulty and not knowing everyone’s patience threshold, it’s hard to give this game a solid recommendation.    It is cute and fun, but very difficult.  The asking price is a reasonable $9.99, but it has been on sale for as little as $0.50.  It’s definitely worth picking up on a sale and there is a demo to see if this game is a good fit for you.