By 5pm last Sunday, after flying around two days of Summer Game Fest demos and a third day of Xbox promises, I was ready to head home. I didn’t expect his second-to-last game to be the one I’d be thinking about all week long. Armored Core 6. Hinterberg’s dungeons nailed me.
Because, at least in bullet points, Hinterberg is a real “I’ve been, I’ve been” collection of video game-esque elements.
- Sable-inspired overt Moebius art style.I’m afraid I’m overusing it now
- Classic Zelda-style dungeon puzzle solving
- Action RPG swordplay combat in a walled arena.It looks decent, but it’s nothing like a Devil May Cry class
- 20 years ago, Sonic was cool, but the rail polish was a bit ugly
- Character relationships with townspeople to level up
I love all of this in the game, especially the art inspired by the Mobius comics. One look at Hinterberg and my reflexive reaction was, “Wow, that’s pretty.” But that’s only enough to get me through the first few hours of Sable, and Hinterberg’s basic elements are too many third-persons I’ve seen in his action/adventure games to tell me anymore. did not attract the attention of The way you put the pieces together has to be really special.
Or maybe she’s really Austrian.
I kick off the demo when the indie studio co-founders Regina Reisinger and Philipp Seifried softly talk about how the game is rooted in the history of their small resort city in their home country. I fell in love with Hinterberg within minutes. The premise of the game is basically, “What if the tourism boom is eroding the culture of a historic small town?” But instead of skiing, people are coming to check out the local magical dungeons.
If Shigeru Miyamoto had set The Legend of Zelda in his childhood Kyoto and thrown in a bunch of clueless tourists loitering outside a historic temple, we’d have what Hinterberg is aiming for. deaf. There’s an immediate humor in magic being real, but it’s kind of dated. Your character, Luisa, is burnt out by her corporate life and instead of starting a farm, she decides to defeat hordes of goblins in the Alps and learn to use a magical hoverboard. Sounds like a great vacation, to be honest.
Luisa is dressed like she’s going to a yoga class, except she has a sweet sword strapped to her backpack. One of her first acquaintances in town was a hipster journalist, and she hates being left out of the press. hmm, all this magic stuff. bored! Can’t wait to go back to Vienna.
But Hinterberg itself is fun. As an American, Austrian towns ironically feel more like exotic video game settings than pure fantasy worlds. you are not the chosen one. You’re just a person renting a bed and breakfast, relaxing at the bar at night, and having a fulfilling day in between.
A persona-inspired relationship system means that in exchange for allowing interviews with too-cool journalists in the Alps, Luisa gets gear to make her combat fit a little better. Despite this conventional life-sim system, it’s much more interesting to me to ask why a man complaining about night life chose a mainsword to slay goblins. He really doesn’t realize how good the conversation is here compared to your average bar.
The theme alone makes Hinterberg look like a fun game, but the adventures and battles were also started by just two developers and now have a total of 10 developers on the project. It looks surprisingly sharp for a game. They estimate that it will take him 20-25 hours to finish the game. So it’s a pretty fulfilling adventure.
Each region around Hinterberg that Louisa can visit has its own magical look and feel, complete with different types of magic that can be used to traverse the region. The countryside is dotted with portals into dungeons, which range from bite-sized combat encounters to elaborate multi-room puzzle gauntlets. The world seems pretty free, and the more I look at it, the more excited I get. You can climb to the top and explore all the dungeons in the area and tackle them in the order you choose. Swordsmanship was on the simpler hack-and-slash side, but more importantly, the magic was mixed creatively so that the variety seemed promising.
There are countless Zelda and Persona-inspired indie games out there today, but perhaps no other has reinterpreted them with such a clear and personal vision. Dungeon of Hinterberg will not be released until 2024, but we hope to have a demo on Steam much sooner than that.