Dungeons of Hinterberg Review - Enjoy Your Slaycation
There is at least a small part of all of us that wishes we could be an action-adventure hero, even just for a day. A part who watches Buffy the Vampire Slayer and despite the overwhelming anxiety that stops you from even making phone calls in your regular life, feels like it would be just a little bit cool to be able to roundhouse kick monsters in the face. What if that was a real thing you could do, but under circumstances that meant the apocalypse was theoretically not so impending, and instead you were just doing it for sport? In Dungeons of Hinterberg, you’re thrown into a world where becoming an RPG hero is a tourist attraction and business is booming. But shockingly, escaping ‘real life’ to become a vacationing slayer may not be as straightforward as it seems.
In many ways, Dungeons of Hinterberg is built on a very meta premise. The protagonist, Luisa, has temporarily left behind her life as a lawyer in the big city to take a break in the snowy alpine town of Hinterberg – a uniquely magic place where travellers come from far and wide to take on dungeons and attempt to become ‘Master Slayers’ (they use this word a lot, you’ll quickly understand why I spent a lot of time thinking about Buffy). Upon arrival, visitors are given a stamp book, along with the goal of beating all 25 of the town’s dangerous dungeons by harnessing the area’s magic abilities and emerging from each one triumphant. When you complete a dungeon, you’re given a stamp – which is an adorable way to mark progress – and you’re one step closer to gaining respect and renown for your prowess. Though it quickly becomes clear that these dungeons are no match for Luisa’s raw talent, it also doesn’t take long for her to make an enemy of one of the town’s most prominent figures – someone who is not so keen on seeing Luisa complete her goal, and whose reasons for becoming a hindrance are very clearly deeply sinister.
To make your way through the dungeons, you’ll need increasingly powerful equipment, which can either be bought from a local store or collected in chests throughout your adventure. This equipment, coupled with the various enhancements to the magical abilities you’ll pick up along the way, acts as a narratively logical and familiarly game-y way to mark progression. It’s just levelling up, but the character knows she’s doing it, and the residents selling you the loot are all in on the secret. It’s not exactly a completely novel premise, but it’s done particularly well here, and it makes for a very charming one. If there’s one thing Dungeons of Hinterberg has a lot of, it’s charm, which carries the game through its weaker moments.
And there are definitely some moments that are stronger than others.
Each of the four regions surrounding Hinterberg features its own pair of magical abilities, both of which are locked to that region. These magical abilities provide the basis for that area’s puzzles and world traversal, but can also be used in combat with varying degrees of success. Some are more effective as attacks than others, but those with the best attack power and by no means always the most fun to use generally, and it’s hard not to develop clear favourites. While I do appreciate that it keeps the gameplay fresh to use new abilities in new ways in each distinct area, and it does help to ensure those areas each have their own personalities and ‘feel’ to them, some of them felt very much like things I wanted to have for the entire game.
My favourite ability, the hoverboard, was also one of my favourite things about the demo I played about a month before this game’s release. It makes the game feel more akin to its cell-shaded predecessor and brethren Jet Set Radio, from which it clearly drew inspiration. The movement on the hoverboard is smooth, satisfying, and fast, and makes world traversal an absolute joy – but its use is confined to one area, meaning for the rest of the game, you’re on foot. Which feels fine, until you use the hoverboard for the first time, and then when you try to go back to it, it suddenly feels like it takes a million years to get anywhere. It’s often pretty useless in combat, sure, and there are other skills that excel when it comes to attacking but are painful to use outside of battle, but I did miss it a lot when it was gone.
Without the variety afforded by these different abilities, however, combat did quickly become a little stale for me. The enemies, though obviously slightly varied in their attacks, never really inspired more of a strategy for me than ‘hit repeatedly, use magic and abilities when able, hit again’, so it wasn’t long before I started becoming frustrated by the frequency of combat. The dungeons are great – the puzzles are all similar enough in their design that you can tap into their patterns and solve them in satisfying ways, and the way they utilise the area’s magic is very clever – but with the exception of each area’s boss battle, the fights are the weakest part. The boss battles are a little more interesting, with each requiring you to use magic in specific ways that feel very Zelda-y in order to defeat them, and the designs of the bosses themselves are very striking. But they probably shouldn’t have been the only fights I really had a great time with.
There’s also a whole separate part to the game, which takes place in the downtime you have when you’re not exploring dungeons (or resting in various places in the overworld to replenish or improve your stats). You can use this time to shop and upgrade weapons, but also to mingle with the town’s various temporary and permanent residents. Some are local business owners with opinions about the role tourism plays in the town’s economy, some are visiting slayers with lofty goals of becoming world-renowned, and others fit somewhere in-between, but all are interesting enough to get to know, and many of them will provide you with some kind of benefit for earning their friendship. By talking to them and giving them gifts, you can unlock new armor and weapon upgrades, increase your health, or make shopping into a slightly cheaper venture – and the game encourages you to decide which relationships to direct your energy based on the benefits it will give you. It really wants you to be strategic.
It does feel like the time you’re given is nowhere near enough for you to get to know many of the town’s residents, presumably because it’s encouraging a second playthough – not that I think I’d make different choices if I did play again. Even with this being the case, you’re also offered alternatives to spending time with characters, like going to the cinema alone or visiting the spa in order to increase traits like Relaxation and Amusement, which can have effects on certain armor and weapons. There’s just way too much to cram into the evenings, and nowhere near enough time to experience it all – and I wish experiencing more of it had felt a little more achievable.
As a complete experience, Dungeons of Hinterberg does a lot of things right. The dungeons do feel satisfying to complete due to some solid puzzle design and clever integration of abilities, the world surrounding the dungeons feels well-formed, filled with charm and visually stunning, and there’s a compelling narrative underpinning it all. Despite some frustrations with weaker or finicky abilities, annoyance with the autojump mechanic (another carry-over from Zelda, but one I feel could have been left behind) and a general desire for more time to fit in everything the game was asking me to do, I will remember Dungeons of Hinterberg and its weird little world fondly.
Dungeons of Hinterberg was reviewed on Xbox Series X with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
