When one goes on holiday they tend to go into it with a plan to either relax or explore. Whether that’s sitting on a beach by the ocean or hiking in the mountains. Dungeons Of Hinterberg gives you both of those options but adds the excitement of becoming a dungeon master who slays monsters and gains magical powers. If that sounds like a fun vacation to you, just wait until you get to the town of Hinterberg!
From the moment you start Dungeons Of Hinterberg you feel like you are on holiday. You come into the gorgeous little village nestled in the middle of the mountains. You check into your hotel and are greeted by some of the locals and fellow tourists. But this isn’t just any old tourist town. Hinterberg is full of magical portals. 25 of them to be exact and the goal is simple. Come enjoy your vacation, slay a few monsters in the portals, learn some magic and leave Hinterberg a changed person with a new perspective on life. Stay long enough and who knows maybe you complete them all!
You play as Luisa Dorfer. A lawyer from Vienna who isn’t quite sure if she actually wants to be a lawyer. She wants some spice in her life and thinks coming to Hinterberg and trying some of these portals will give her just that. You are taken to the first portal by the local guide Klaus. A simple introductory dungeon. Things go awry and Luisa immediately questions what she’s doing in Hinterberg before meeting fellow slayer Alex. Alex is a free spirit who is all about living in the moment and convinces Luisa to keep moving forward.
After a few dungeons the plot begins to unfold and you start feeling like something is off with Hinterberg. I won’t go into any more details here as I don’t wish to spoil anything but Dungeons Of Hinterberg’s story is full of many twists and turns, though I could see what was coming fairly early on. The story is well put together and connects the game quite well but I wouldn’t expect you to feel puzzled by it or shocked by how it unfolds.
I also found the game to be quite beautiful in general. The world building and art style is fantastic. I know everyone loves an intense graphical game, but give me these super artistic games any day of the week.
Become The Dungeon Master
The core of the game play is centered around the 25 dungeons. There are 4 unique areas in the game, Dorberkogel, Hinterwald, Kolmstein and Brunnelsumpf. Each one with a handful of dungeons to complete. Each area also comes with its own set of skills. In Kolmstein for example you gain a magical hoverboard and can essentially snowboard around the alps for traversal while you are given a beam of ice to shoot for enemies. In Hinterwald you are given a tornado like spell which you can pick yourself up and get to higher areas as well as a spell to throw things. You bring these skills into the dungeons of those areas. It keeps things quite fresh.
You also tackle the dungeons in any order you like. You start in Doberkogel but the rest quickly open up. Each dungeon has a rating attached to it to help you decide where you should go next. The rating is based on your gear level. The gear is fairly straight forward with not many options but it does the trick. Where you really see the RPG elements of the game are in the social aspects (more on that later). Your gear can eventually be upgraded and your sword can get charms attached to help boost stats.
As for the dungeons themselves each one truly feels unique. The premise is always the same. Enter the dungeon, fight a few monsters, solve a few puzzles and get to the end to earn your stamp and move on. While the dungeons in each area were of similar theme, none of them ever felt like I had played it before. There is also 1 boss dungeon per area and these dungeons typically aren’t long but again each boss felt unique and fun.
Hack N Slash With A Splash Of Magic
As mentioned above each dungeon in Dungeons Of Hinterberg is all about defeating some monsters and solving some puzzles. In terms of the game play the combat is solid. It’s your standard affair of hack n slash mixed with your magic spells. Your encounters come in little mini arena’s within the level, trapped in that spot until you defeat them all and can move on. Some enemies have a layer of protection around them which can only be hurt by magic. Your sword has magic damage in it but the most effective method is your spells. Usually each encounter only had a couple of those enemies.
I will say outside of those specific enemies I rarely ever found myself using magic in the fights. I don’t know if that was just my play style because I had a stronger sword early on and stuck with that method or if it’s truly meant to be more of a hack n slash with a tiny bit of magic mixed in. I also found the encounters to be a little less frequent than I was expecting. A few dungeons took 20-25 minutes and it felt like I only had 3 or 4 encounters. While I’m not complaining, if you were coming into this hoping for a lot of combat you might be a tad disappointed.
You also can equip 2 or 3 attack conduits at a time. These are special moves in combat. Again I for whatever reason rarely found myself using these moves and just stuck to basic melee attacks. It's not that these attacks are bad I just never felt I really needed them.
Combat for the most part was smooth during my run. Near the end of the game I did have a couple of glitches, all during boss battles. They wern’t completely game breaking but they did force me to restart the battles on multiple times where my spell would get stuck casting and my character would glitch around the arena. Hopefully a day 1 patch will fix those.
The Puzzles Are The Stars
What really makes each dungeon stand out though are the puzzles, and boy are there a lot of puzzles. I was expecting a dungeon crawler game with some puzzles mixed in when I went into the game and after the first few dungeons I realized this is a puzzle game with some RPG elements mixed in.
All the puzzles revolve around either pressing some buttons to change tracks or change directions of things combined with your magical spells. The puzzles are really where the magic element of Dungeons of Hinterberg shines. For how little I used magic in combat the magic was used constantly outside of combat. Thankfully your MP only drops in combat so you can mess up and experiment with the puzzles as much as needed without fear of running out.
There is a very good variety of puzzles too. Many you will see and figure out almost instantly but I found myself multiple times per dungeon taking a minute to stop and really think about what I was needing to do. I even got stuck on a couple. One I got so stuck and couldn’t see a way to fix it and thought it was a design flaw so I quit and restarted only to quickly realize that it was just me not figuring it out. A second puzzle I got so stuck that I didn’t think I was going to be able to get past. After 20 minutes of trying to figure it out I got lucky as the puzzle just so happened to be in the demo where seemingly EVERYONE was getting stuck in the same spot. Once you figure it out you will think “how on earth did I miss that?!” because of how simple it was, but the game does a great job of those lightbulb moments that make puzzle games great.
The Social Life
The loop of Dungeons Of Hinterberg is another great aspect of the game. The game is broken down into days. Each day has a cycle. You wake up in the morning and decide which area you want to head to. Once you decide which area you want to go to it turns to the afternoon. You can explore the area however you want. Tackle the next dungeon or find a scenic area to take the afternoon off. If you choose the scenic route you will level up one of your core 4 attributes, Renown, Amusement, Familiarity or Relaxation. These attributes are needed to both make your equipment potentially better or help you speak to other characters who give you perks for getting to know them.
Once you choose either a dungeon or a scenic spot to rest and complete either task we move on to the evening. The evening is where you can stock up on supplies, buy new gear and talk to the other characters. Talking to each character will help level up one or more of these attributes and raise your friendship level. Each friendship level comes with a new perk and just like the afternoon you only get to hang out with one friend per evening.
This social aspect is really a great addition to Dungeons Of Hinterberg. Because you only have the option of 1 interaction per evening your choices matter. Do you want to become friends with Hannah to upgrade your gear better? You can but it will take multiple nights and you then might not speak with Marina much and miss out on the perks she gives you. It’s a great balance and each character has an interesting little sub plot built in to really flesh out the world and story. Of course since the idea behind the game is to beat all the dungeon’s you could always delay that by choosing the scenic spots more often than not to get more character interaction.
You can also choose to do something non social such as head to the spa or check out a movie which will also give you a boost in certain attributes. I didn’t use these options very often though as I was more focused on getting to know the characters in town and leveling up those friendships to get the perks.
Conclusion
Seemingly every year one or two indie games make their way into the hearts of gamers and critics alike and become talked about in the Game Of The Year conversation. With it’s aesthetically pleasing art style to its enjoyable characters and fantastic dungeon designs Dungeons Of Hinterberg is a must play. I had contemplated giving it a 9 but due to a few odd bugs I had to drop it down. I’m sure with a patch around release those will have been fixed but I can only judge what I played. While there’s still a lot of games to come out after my roughly 20 hours with Dungeons Of Hinterberg I can confidently say it will be in the conversation for me.
Dungeons Of Hinterberg was played on Xbox Series X and is available on Xbox Series X/S and PC on the 18th of July. A review code was provided by the publisher Curve.
