About one in every hundred of us can smell whether a cup of tea has a teaspoon of sugar in it before we taste it. The average dog, however, could have a few sniffs of a swimming pool and discern whether there was a teaspoon of sugar in it.
They’re not like us. Not just because they defecate unashamedly in public and then ask their best friend to pick it up and walk around with it, but because their senses are calibrated in a totally different way. They experience the world scent-first, possess toddler-level reasoning and emotional skills, walk around on all fours, and can run at 40mph.
Living that canine experience, then, would be pretty fascinating to a human. And at the heart of it, that’s what Brno-based Brocap Studios’ Hubert is all about. Living life as a dog. Hearing his irrepressibly chirpy inner monologue. Sniffing things. Chasing sheep. Playing fetch. Getting chased by farmers. It’s a strong premise.
The execution is far weaker, sadly. Hubert had probably lost me even before the point when an onscreen objective popped up instructing me to ‘Find something for Lily to make the car growly again’, but that was certainly the moment I gave up hope in its writing. Tonally, it’s all over the place: one minute you’re espousing saccharine doggo-core one liners like ‘so… no walk?’, the next you’re being held at gunpoint by a farmer. Mere minutes later you’re fetching a toilet roll for your owner and listening to her tell you that her subsequent bowel movement might take a while. Then you’re taking a dump in a grow op. That’s before we even touch on the dream sequences.
By the time Hubert throws in some referential nods to other games (‘Now all we need is a watchtower’, says Hubert’s owner Lily after finding a walkie-talkie) it’s simply no longer clear what this game’s actually going for.
The odd changes in mood and inconsistent tone are a particular problem here, because it feels like the narrative is supposed to be the focus. Gameplay is very simple and mechanically limited, so as you’re playing, you’re waiting for a narrative payoff. The opening cutscenes tee that up, too. They set the scene for a game with a strong emotional heart. But over the course of five acts, Hubert never really develops its small roster of characters deeply enough to give you those payoffs. It’s neither wholesome and heartwarming nor mystical and avant-garde, nor an irreverent laughter fest. Instead it lurches between all three at a disconcerting cadence.
It’s not all bad. There are times when the jokes land, particularly when exploiting the fact that the humans can’t hear Hubert. “Here they are”, he says upon finding a flock of lost sheep, “but this doesn’t look like all of them”. A beat later, Lily says the exact same line, with the same delivery. I laughed.
The cosy vibes do sometimes permeate successfully, too. As chapters conclude you’re sometimes left to just enjoy the scene with Lily while some music plays. Indeed, when Hubert stops talking like a Tumblr meme and the game lets your bond with Lily breathe for a few moments, it can be quite touching. Then you’re sent on a fetch quest for some bog roll, and the atmosphere’s shattered.
Speaking of, while there are good ideas about how to gamify a dog’s life in here, in reality the design falls back on very literal fetch quests much too often. It’s dressed up a bit by having you follow your nose to seek out various objects – think Geralt’s Witcher Sense, or Hitman’s Instinct Mode, but with way fewer dead nekkers and brutal melee takedowns. It’s a nice bit of design to turn smell into something visual, but there are only so many times you can follow a wispy trail before your interest levels wane, and the mission design here is too meat-and-potatoes to counteract that. You’re almost always just going from one objective marker to the next with little interstitial dialogue to spice the journey up.
Conceptually this works best when you’re using your powerful olfactory ability to track down sheep, and then herd them back to a field by barking to get them running, and influencing their trajectory with your own position. This is where Hubert really comes good on its premise and makes you feel like a dog, interacting with the world in a different way.
But these gameplay sequences are hamstrung by some quite frustrating sheep behaviour, and an awkward timing to using your smell-o-vision. You can only activate it for a few seconds at a time, and the third-person camera movement means it usually takes a second or two of orientation to pick up a scent. The result is a lot of stop-start chasing as you sprint towards the scent trail, then are brought back into your normal vision with no clue which direction you should be heading in, then you re-enter scent mode and set off again. It would be so much better if this mode was simply active for as long as you held down the left trigger.
The most enjoyable moments are when you just get to run around. Hubert moves at a fair lick when you hold down the sprint button, and infrequently the missions let you open the proverbial throttle without having to use the scent mode. These are glorious moments, well supported by Hubert’s gleeful inner dialogue. The voice cast do their job with commitment and vigour, particularly Mike Bodie and Sara Secora as Hubert and Lily, even when the script isn’t really there to support them. For all the one-liners, it’s the more earnest moments that cut through. Lily admiring a view, Hubert spotting a squirrel or taking pride in doing a good job, that sort of thing.
It’s hard to be so critical of a game like this, which undoubtedly has its heart in the right place. It isn’t a cynical cash-grab. It isn’t a tired re-treading of safe videogame territory. It’s trying something genuinely fresh and showing great ambition. But it’s also the work of a two-person studio, so it would have been miraculous for Hubert to really make good on the potential of its premise under those constraints. Brocap clearly has a lot of ideas, and I hope they get to make more games. Unfortunately, playing this one feels like reading a friend’s screenplay: full of passion and ambition, but you’re reading it for them, not for you.
