I happened to be on vacation in the Pacific Northwest when I played Dungeons of Hinterberg. I’ve never been to the Alps, where the game is set, but from what I’ve heard the PNW is the closest you can get in America. Hiking there made me feel the way I did as a kid, when the monotony of walking was cured by the mystery of forests carpeted with effusive ferns and mushrooms. Every fallen tree could be a doorframe leading to another dimension, a new adventure.
Dungeons of Hinterberg lives and breathes this feeling. You spend most of your time running around four hub worlds, seeking 25 dungeons that span from frozen galaxies to neon underwater castles. Finding them requires climbing up and down mountains, snowboarding into caves, and kayaking across toxic purple waters. The premise is simple: go hiking to find a self-contained world, then jump inside to see what new things await you there.
The premise of the story is a little more complex. You are a young woman named Lucia who’s come to a small alpine town called Hinterberg that became famous after dungeons started appearing in its surroundings. Monster hunters, known as Slayers, arrived to challenge them, and the town made dungeon crawling into a tourist attraction, selling armor and providing stamp books for wannabe adventurers to track their dungeon completion. As a Slayer, your goal is to challenge all 25 dungeons, as well as figure out what’s behind a series of earthquakes that are threatening the structural integrity of the dungeons and therefore the financial stability of Hinterberg.
This premise leads to the gameplay loop: every day you go out in the field to either complete a dungeon or boost your HP or stats. You can choose between one of four hub worlds, each of which has between five and ten dungeons for you to find and challenge. In the hubs, you’re free to run around and explore until you locate a dungeon, which takes up your time for the day. Exploration was my absolute favorite part of the game, apart from the dungeons themselves. Areas have little secrets tucked away, and there are environmental puzzles that tie into aspects of each area like water mills and ski lifts. Moving through them by running, jumping, and using the two additional skills you are given in each area is fluid and enjoyable.
When I saw Hinterberg’s combat the first time I immediately thought of one thing: Genshin Impact. You can see why when you look at a battle. When you fight enemies you’re encased in a wall of black flame that lasts until you defeat them all, which you do with light and heavy sword attacks as well as magic spells. There are even cooldowns for special moves. The similarity worried me. Firstly, Genshin’s enemy variety is lacking in my opinion, and I worried there would be a similar lack of variety across areas in Hinterberg. Second, I find Genshin’s dungeons hard to get through because they’re all so similar, and I was concerned that each of Hinterberg’s dungeons would basically be extensions of the overworld, all with the same simple puzzles tying into its theme (cold area, forest, field, etc.).
On the latter point, there’s no issue, as each dungeon expands past the hub areas in ways that are inventive and fresh. For example, the starting zone is a cluster of mountains, but the early dungeons are built around a lazy river, a treetop, and a minecart graveyard. There are jumps to 2 and even 3.5D where you scale impossible heights and hopscotch across acidic pools. While some of the shared color palettes across areas got old—the snowy area Kolmstein was the worst about this—the dungeons themselves retain their own personality. They’re also not too long; I finished most of them in under 30 minutes.
Unfortunately, combat doesn’t have the same freshness. Enemies repeat across areas, and rather than introducing stronger enemy types they instead scale based on the area they’re in, which means being in the wrong place is more of a threat than fighting a new kind of monster. I would have appreciated fewer enemy types per area and more emphasis on making their design distinct from each other. Combat itself remains fun though, with dodging being a major component. It feels great to circle behind an enemy that’s throwing projectiles and send it to the ground with a few attacks, then roll out of the way of its friend. Dungeons usually end with bigger versions of normal fights, but sometimes there are true boss battles with distinct monsters that are more interesting, though easy.
The other thing you’ll spend your time doing in dungeons is puzzles. Most of them are based around using area-locked magic skills, such as creating a tornado or summoning a huge jelly cube to climb on. Many are about flipping a switch or positioning something in the right place, making them standard dungeon stuff. The most frustrating ones are timed and require fast reflexes, but they’re saved by a mechanic that also helps the combat: instant restarts from the same room and often the same step in the puzzle.
Across dungeons, puzzles can initially be hard to read because of each area’s skill lock. Skills interact with environmental materials differently, and when you don’t know what those materials do at the start of an area, puzzles can be difficult to figure out. When you do know they sometimes become too easy. However, I never got stuck in a way that taking a short break couldn’t fix, and the developers thought of a way out of some truly ridiculous situations I got myself into that I was sure would result in a softlock.
Dungeon crawling is bookended by a social system that feeds back into combat. During your afternoons and evenings, you can hang with other Slayers and town residents to raise your social stats and learn more about the area. Those social stats let you talk to new people and more importantly, they react to your armor and weapons, raising their effectiveness when you reach a certain level. NPCs in town can also unlock new dungeons, clean your weapons, and fit in gems you find. It’s very similar to the social loop in the Persona games, down to your nighttime activities of watching TV, reading, or getting some extra sleep.
I found the social aspects the weakest part of the game by far. Not only is the town pretty empty, with only a few shops and bars used for events, but the characters themselves aren’t very interesting to talk to. They mostly drive home the main story, which is about how Hinterberg’s government is exploiting the dungeons to profit from vacationers and monster-slaying hobbyists while ignoring the town’s residents. The game itself points out how your destination could all be an artificial tourist trap, but I think I was supposed to disagree more than I did.
The hollowness of the town contrasts with the beauty and variety of the dungeons, which was where I wanted to be. The only aspect of the town I really used was buying items, and even that I slacked on, preferring to stock up at vending machines in the wild. I didn’t even do that at first, which I came to regret when I went into a dungeon tired and with no HP potions. Still, besides stocking up on healing supplies, I always found better equipment in the wild than I could buy, and the gift system was opaque enough that I didn’t engage with that either. I never needed anything that I couldn’t naturally find. I think the game would improve if the social system were discarded completely and we only saw Hinterberg in cutscenes. As it was, I rushed through these segments, which is a shame—in the fiction they’re two-thirds of your day.
Dungeons of Hinterberg’s inspirations are very clear if you have a passing familiarity with RPGs. There’s Genshin, as I’ve mentioned, and I’m sure Breath of the Wild will be thrown around as a comparison, not without reason. There was one dungeon with a raft sequence that reminded me of the same scene that happens in Bastion, so much so that it felt over the line of inspiration and into imitation. The social aspects feel funneled from Persona when a bespoke approach would have served this game better. That’s not to say the story isn’t original; its throughline about questioning the ethics of tourism was clearly close to the writers’ hearts. The story’s execution, however, left something to be desired.
If Dungeons of Hinterberg had several more months in the oven and a few cuts, it may have been an excellent game instead of just a good one. Still, I don’t hesitate to recommend it, because the heart of the experience is so inventive and the less interesting parts can mostly be ignored. When it comes down to it I’d rather have its enjoyable stretches and mediocrity separated into different parts of a game so that I can struggle through what I don’t like while looking forward to what I do. Hinterberg ends up being a lot like a hike: sometimes beautiful, sometimes tedious. But its dungeons do approach greatness, and it’s worth trekking through the less-than-perfect aspects to see them.
Dungeons of Hinterberg was developed by Microbird Games and published by Curve Games. Our review is based on the PC version. It is also available for the Xbox Series X/S.
Emily Price is a former intern at Paste and a columnist at Unwinnable Magazine. She is also a PhD Candidate in literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. She can be found on Twitter @the_emilyap.
