Dungeons Of Hinterberg is a very, very good name for a video game. It has a vibe, the word Hinterberg, you see, a very specific vibe that Microbird Games has mastered perfectly.
When we hear Hinterberg, we feel adventure, we want mysterious mountains and picturesque (but very strange) villages. We want horrible German outfits, strange woodland creatures, gnomes and madmen who stand around in tights and listen to rap on a beatbox.
Surprisingly, all of these things – even the mountains – are in this game. And they’re gorgeous. The cartoony cel-shading/hatching style can be divisive, and it’s intentionally crude and weird around the characters’ faces at times – but it also reminds us of a really cool PS Vita game, like The Gravity Race or something like Sable. It doesn’t try to be a graphical powerhouse, but the art direction and style are wisely chosen, making it an independent effort that has a great personality of its own and, to us at least, feels exactly as colorful and dreamlike (and strange) as we had hoped.
Entering the game, you play as Luisa, a rather irritating high society lawyer who is tired of being super popular and cool in the city. Luisa has decided to change her life into a vacation, where she can be super popular and cool with other super popular and cool people in a place that is not the city. The thing is, vacation involves going into dungeons and killing monsters for fun. So these are the RPG dungeons we all know and love, transformed into fun adventures for hipsters who need a break from drinking oat milk in their fiberglass thinking pods at home.
We’re not huge fans of any of the characters in the game – I don’t know if you picked that up from the last paragraph – but maybe we’re not the intended audience for this particular type of narrative experience either. Hey, maybe you’ll find a great sense of belonging in it! In any case, the game overcomes that obstacle pretty quickly, and it’s something we could forgive, even considering the social aspects we’ll detail – because everything else is just so damn good here.
And while dialogue isn’t our cup of tea, it has to be said that placing your dungeon-crawler in a “realistic” environment and world worked very well. It grounds all the monsters and dungeons in a sort of strange semi-reality that makes exploring all the areas on offer a unique pleasure. It also gives us a way to forgive some of the overly annoying NPC chatter, because we all have friends like that in real life, right?
Hinterburg gives you four different regions to explore, each with the usual seasonal colour scheme. As you move from region to region, you gain new magical powers from a skill shrine, and these powers are unique to the area you obtained them from. So you’ll start with fire-based magical skills in the first area (I’m not trying to spell that), then move on to the second area where wind-based elements come into play. This is the best part of the game. Microbird has crafted some really quite complex and fun puzzles to solve in areas that are fun to wander around in. As the music tinkles and meanders, deer dart across your path and you struggle to figure out how to get Luisa to one platform or another (lift her with the tornado attack, FFS!) it slides into a nice old school Zelda atmosphere. (These are the faces, the horrible Zelda faces from the N64. AHHHHHHH!)
Getting new powers between regions is another great idea that works well here, even if they’re quite similar at times, and the constant switching between them as you fast travel between regions and backtrack to get goodies, creates dungeons that don’t get as stale as they might have if all the powers had been given to us at once.
Luisa can also use Attack Conduits, which are collectible programs that let her perform a bunch of fancy moves in combat, like spinning around with her sword or jumping into the air and landing for an area attack. On top of that, she has access to collectible Charms that give you stuff like a perfect dodge slowdown, an attack boost, or shockwaves when you kill an enemy. It’s all very mundane, and the fights here are small-scale and not overly difficult—as long as you’re the right level of Monster Slayer.
The dungeons are all labeled with levels recommended for posh tourists, you see, most of the high-level dungeons are inaccessible at first, due to beefy baddies or environmental obstacles, and the game is wonderfully freeform in the way it sets Luisa up in Hinterburg and lets you just hang out and explore and talk to people or wander around and find dungeons if you can. Character– a daily-style setup, although we didn’t really feel like we needed to focus on it as the game isn’t that complex, but it feeds into the simplified social structure of the proceedings, which in turn feeds into Luisa’s ever-increasing stats. It’s also very familiar and easy to get into.
Spend some time between dungeons talking to the locals and you’ll end up with very simple fetch quests and the like that, when completed, will give you stat boosts that will also unlock perks like the ability to take screenshots – you’ll get that from a photographer! – and a bunch more that we won’t spoil for you. The main narrative conversations here are ALL RIGHTThere’s a reasonable cast of main characters, but the NPCs you encounter outside in the world as you explore are Pokemon-base franchise level. It’s a bit of a shame, but we get it! It’s not a huge game with 100 people working on it, and it works for what it needs to do for the most part.
Once you’re in a dungeon, things really pick up, with the vast majority of your time spent using your abilities to solve puzzles. It’s a good move, fitting in with the laid-back tone of the main story and playing to the strengths of some very decent environmental problem-solving. The combat is also pretty good, following the Souls playbook closely with spacing, attack timing, lock-on and all that jazz, and doing a good job of it – though we can’t say the framerate always feels completely solid during the busiest encounters. There are also a few new ideas for enemies and attacks along the way, but don’t go into this one expecting massive fights and terribly dark and dangerous dungeons.
But it’s really the atmosphere here. It’s the colourful regions, the laid-back nature of the puzzles and combat, and a genuinely intriguing world to explore that make this game worth digging into. It doesn’t need massive boss fights or overly elaborate systems to work, and it’s not aiming for those things at all. This is a holiday dungeon crawler. A dungeon crawler that you can wade through and smash up if you’re prepared. Then you can head to the nearest hipster tavern and drink frothy (and probably very expensive) beers with one of your painfully hipster friends.
If you’re expecting a serious challenge or a complex storyline, you’ll be disappointed. However, if you want a relaxing game that looks and sounds great and handles dungeons and NPC antics a little differently, we think you’ll be a happy bunny. We really like Hinterberg’s style, and it’s exactly the kind of thing we’d love to see in a sequel.
Finally, AND regarding performance, beyond the minor issues we encountered in performance mode, everything ran smoothly, with no serious bugs during our test. There is a quality mode that we haven’t tested in detail yet, but it also seemed smooth (it was hard to tell the difference, in all honesty).
Thankfully, there are also some accessibility options worth mentioning. The game treats death very lightly by default – so experimentation is relatively painless – but you can also turn off player death entirely, which is great. There are full tutorials for every mechanic and region, the controls can be flipped on both axes, and the stick sensitivity can be adjusted on a scale. You can also dim or turn off the hatching effect and screen shake, and there’s even a motion sickness mode. I don’t know if it’s supposed to make you more or less motion sick, but it’s there, so give it a try first and then let us know what you think. Cheers!