Hob was the final game of Runic Games, the studio that gave the world Torchlight and Torchlight 2. After two incredibly popular successes - the Torchlight modding scene is still active to this day - Hob was the game that sunk them.
And it's not hard to see why. Hob applies to the atmospheric school of thought, where there's no dialogue, no real OST, no bossfights (well, there's one, at the end), no flavour text, no characters, and come to think of it - no real atmosphere, either. The top-down perspective makes the action feel washed out, enemies are tanky, levels are all largely linear and this is hidden through pure obfuscation. Didn't exactly win critics or audiences over.
But I kind of liked Hob, and if you can get it for the prices you can get here, it's probably worth a spin. It's fundamentally a Zelda-like - explore environments, get better stuff, see little snippets of worldbuilding, and instead of quest progression or the like you're instead seeing the environment around you transform in giant leaps and bounds, as your role is essentially an assistant maintenance engineer cleaning some gunk off a giant terraforming machine and turning it back on.
The scale Hob operates is entire acres shifting and scaling once you've cleaned out the gears and turned it on. It especially shines on a replay when all the obfuscation has drifted away and you're beelining for the next set of upgrades and triggers, and really grasping HOW the machine works rather than just being generally confused and underwhelmed.
What Hob lacks in character progression, it makes up for with its incredibly ambitious, multi-faceted environmental progression instead.
Which still mostly amounts to flipping switches and doesn't really make up for the intentionally diluted other elements, but you know. It's neat.