Combat and RPG progression get a clever social twist in this relaxing fantasy.
I was looking for treasure and glory in the dungeon, but in the city I was looking for Reno. It was really weird because Reno looked like he was trying hard. He dressed like Blade Runner and spoke in aphorisms. He was the best killer and he couldn’t wait to tell you about it.
But Reno has given me a gift. If I spend an evening playing with him, he’ll unlock a combo meter. I just love combo meters. Dungeons of Hinterberg is especially good. Slice, slice, slice, and the numbers go up, as do your attack and defense. It’s a great way to do more damage while feeling more capable. It’s worth wasting an evening of awkward chat just to get it.
This is the epitome of Hinterberg Dungeon. The game is set in an Alpine spa town where the local economy relies on magic. Entrances to the dungeons are everywhere, and visitors come to solve puzzles and fight, and business is booming. You play as a former lawyer who came to the town because of professional burnout. Now, you choose a dungeon every day, pick up a sword, and go out to smash things to make yourself feel better.
That’s only half the game, though. Because at night, you return to town, the dungeon fun is over, and you have to figure out how to spend your time. In the beginning, you meet people and choose whether to hang out to improve basic social skills, which opens the door to better and different hanging out options in the future. But after about seven hours, two things become clear: You can maximize this by looking at your journal and finding out ahead of time what benefits hanging out with each townsfolk will bring. Also, there’s a lot more to do once you’re back in town, beyond just a clever way to handle RPG progression.
We’ll get to that. For now let’s look at both parts of the game, tackling the dungeons first. Dungeons are actually kind of magical, divided into several biomes that grant you specific magical skills that are usually tied to dungeon mechanics. So an early rock dungeon gives you a chain that you can attach to objects and pull them around, and a bomb that can blow through weak parts of a wall. A later dungeon – one of my favorites – is filled with Mario Galaxy-style ice balls that I can roam and dash around in, grinding rails with my magical snowboard.
Dungeons reuse art and assets, but they’re much more selective with their creativity: Each dungeon seems to have a great puzzle, whether you’re holding down switches, jumping between minecarts, or ramming open doors by conjuring jelly blocks. These puzzles complement the combat, which was a bit of a letdown for the first few hours of the game. Then it dawned on me.
And I was able to pull it off not just because I got the combo system from Renaud. I was able to pull it off because in addition to Soulsy’s stamina and dodging fun, I had access to magical powers from other dungeons, which meant that block of jelly that I could use to wrap around enemies, that magical snowboard that left an icy wake behind me, and some kind of electricity – well, not to spoil it, but it was one of the best things I’ve ever gotten in a game.
Beyond that, there are special moves, which you can equip and switch between. They all have recharge times independent of magic recharges, and some of them are quite fun. The first move I received was my favorite–a spin attack that always lasted longer than I expected–but the fun here comes from experimenting, mixing offense and defense, and targeted and area-of-effect attacks.
All of this is combined with interesting enemies and some surprisingly good bosses. Combat is a bit different from the rest of the game: when an enemy appears, you’re suddenly surrounded by a boundary. I usually hate this kind of thing because it imposes a rhythm and order on me that I never asked for, and I suspected early on that I might dread new encounters. But, you know: combos, spin attacks, the ability to trap people in jelly. It balances out.
Back in town, you can tactfully choose from all your options: buy new gear, upgrade your sword, buy new attacks and amulets that boost stats and require some inventory management. It’s deep. At one point, I found some awesome armor, but it was covered in a goo that I had no idea anyone in town could remove. And — no more talk of goo — that stuff spills out in interesting ways, too. Soon, I was collecting trash for someone, trying to help save someone else’s shop, searching for lost items and the perfect dog treat. There’s a charming confidence here, and not just in the soapy side stories and dinner dates. There’s a confidence in the player that they’ll find their way through it. Just as you choose which dungeon to go to each day and who to hang out with, you’re choosing how to unlock the game’s complexity. I’d say you’ve probably found a way to remove the goo from your disgusting armor long before I have.
It’s all neat and lovely, very cleanly put together, including the dungeons and village life, and it’s tied together with a cartoony and delightfully zany art style that makes use of cel-shading, enhanced by judicious use of halftones. I’d give anything for judicious use of halftones.
But that’s not the whole game, which is what I was saying before. I don’t want to say too much here, but while Hinterberg Dungeons is centered around all the virtues of fantasy and magic, it uses all of that to tell a few interlocking stories that are grounded in very real things. The main character’s story revolves around ennui, but also around questions of how a person should spend their time and what they should value, while the story unfolds in the village and slowly starts to blur the distinctions that the game has carefully crafted, touching on everything from the cost of travel to questions of authenticity. It’s gripping stuff.
Somehow, Hinterberg Dungeons manages to make sense of it all, just as it deftly handles the ice, autumn forest, and swamp biomes, as well as the water level puzzles and rotating bridge puzzles. There’s something fun about coexisting with the strange contradictions, I think, and nothing sums that up better than exiting the dungeon. You complete the last puzzle, eliminate the last enemy, and then there’s a neat little table in the corner where you stamp and register that the dungeon is complete. It’s all very neat and bureaucratic. Then you leave, through a purple portal that burns like a flame.
Curve Games provided a review code for Dungeons of Hinterberg.
