Mother Hub is a neat first-person-shooter horror game by solo developer, Seth O’Dale (ODale Studios), which can be completed in one sitting. We play as Thea, an inhabitant of Mother Hub, an underground vault where humanity resides at risk of extinction due to a virus creeping through the population and a lack of resources. Because of this, Thea is sent by her community to the depths of Mother Hub to scavenge for supplies and maybe find a cure for the sickness spreading across the population in the meantime. While she’s down there, she’ll bear witness to the goings on within the vault and uncover history that has been kept a secret for generations.
As Thea we’ll explore Mother Hub, travelling through its narrow corridors in search of supplies and information. Along the way we’ll pick up audio logs from deceased inhabitants of Mother Hub, lending individual voices to the overarching narrative. While Thea isn’t voice acted, the audio logs we pick up are. And while some of the voice acting is a little forced, there were some really brilliant performances in there. Mother Hub has some body horror elements due to the effects of the mysterious infection spreading across the vault and the experimental procedures performed to combat it, and this element would have been nowhere near as effective without some of the voice performances which genuinely chilled me.
Mother Hub does have a soundtrack and what’s there is brilliant. It’s a strong mix between electronic, sci-fi-themed tunes and classic horror. That being said, it only shows up in parts and a lot of the game’s audio is only accompanied by ambient sounds. However, this does mean that when the soundtrack does show up, it’s more effective.
The graphics are made made to look like an early 2000s horror game, with the environments reminding me a lot of Doom 3 and Dead Space. O’Dale has done a great job at building tension using sharp, blind corners and low level lighting to make enemy appearances a constant surprise. And where there are visual limitations due to the technology available, the sound effects more than make up for it. That being said, I do think a lot of the game is too dark and raising the brightness didn’t help much. There were portions of the game that were so dark, in fact, that the flashlight barely made a difference at all.
O’Dale has been developing Mother Hub over the course of ten years and, because of this, the game has some limitations due to the time it started development that couldn’t be fixed without starting over. The major thing affected by this is key bindings, so unfortunately players are unable to adjust these. While the game does have controller support, the controller menu appears to just assign every action to a joystick, though in practice it has a basic controller layout that’s pretty easy to figure out anyway so this isn’t much of a problem at all. In fact, Mother Hub has a lot of technical quirks that I barely noticed in the larger picture.
As a solo developed project, bugs and overall jankiness is to be expected. But since Mother Hub is developed to appear like an early 2000s horror game, a lot of this just felt like part of the aesthetic. While I hope larger enemies glitching through obstacles and struggling to function around the boss room gets patched later on, there was an odd charm to the glitching audio effects, stuttering visuals and enemies being thrown about with ragdoll physics. There are a few other quirks that did slightly hinder the experience, the big one being the audio balancing. I felt like I was constantly adjusting the audio levels because, while the audio logs would come through quite loud, dialogue being played through speakers around Mother Hub was really difficult to hear at times. There were also occasions where certain controls would stop working. To begin with, I was unable to crouch until the game required me to do so, and at one point I was randomly unable to fire my weapon during combat despite still having ammo to spare. But these were pretty minor.
Combat in Mother Hub is great fun, while it doesn’t particularly do anything different from games in the same genre, it covers all the stops. As we progress, we’ll pick up more guns and the game also has an impressive variety of enemies for its short playtime. That being said, I didn’t feel much of a difficulty curve at all and I wished there were some higher difficulty options. While the loading screens have tips for occasions where you run out of ammo, I was never at this point and the only time I ran out of health was the instance where the game glitched and my gun wouldn’t fire. With some higher difficulty, certain intense moments would be even more effective.
As the story pans out, you uncover more about what’s been happening in Mother Hub through the generations that humanity has existed there and how Thea may be involved. While I felt like the unveiling of the plot was sufficient in providing enough detail to make it fully understandable through the collection of audio logs, this one time I wish there actually was some more exposition into the backstory when starting out. This kind of setting is perfect for intro text to appear on screen as the game boots up and give some initial backstory into the world, as I spent a lot of time at the beginning wondering what Mother Hub was exactly and why humanity had sealed itself away in there. This wasn’t helped by the fact that our journal only holds a certain number of audio logs, so we can’t go back on some older ones to give them another listen for any details we may have overlooked.
While it could be more challenging for those who want that experience, Mother Hub is a fun sci-fi first person shooter with an interesting story and fun combat. The developer uses every tool at their disposal to generate intense and horrifying moments despite the technical limitations, with some of the best voice performances I’ve heard from an indie horror game. While it’s advertised to take around two hours to complete, for me it was a little longer at nearly three hours, but this still makes it a short fun stint that can be completed in a single sitting.
Jess played Mother Hub on PC with a provided review copy.
