Whether Dungeons of Hinterberg can be considered an action RPG or not is a matter of definition. The traditional action RPG is relaxing, pastel-hued, and likely focuses on quaint, repetitive gameplay that soothes and calms the player. stardew valley for agriculture; A short walk to walk; Antiquities of Dorfrom For laying tiles.
Hinterberg's dungeon-crawling and monster-slaying break the mold a bit, but you'll be able to do both with a soft, cartoonish art style that will draw you in. And since a significant portion of the game is devoted to puzzle-solving in picturesque settings, the comparison inevitably arises.
There's no blood in Dungeons of Hinterberg, and the violence is stylized, occurring against slimy, inhuman mobs that look more like Jeff Smith's creatures. Bone than wild animals. The protagonist Luisa spends her afternoons making friends, shopping and strolling around the village. In many ways, it is exactly what the name says: a vacation simulator, where Luisa can relax away from the stress of her daily life in the city. So that's it: open and closed, cozy, right?
But the aspirations of the development studio Microbird are not so simple.
“When you meet someone you don't have a good vibe with, the label of cozy play might not quite apply to us,” says Philipp Seifried, co-founder of Microbird. “I think most cozy games coddle you in this way, where everyone is nice to you, or even if they're not (…) they're so over-the-top in their bad mood that you just laugh at them.”
Dungeons of Hinterberg doesn't lock its characters into such a simplistic classification. “There are a couple of characters that we hope people don't want to hang out with,” says Seifried, mentioning Gertrude, a wealthy, older widow who disdains the changes that have been made to Hinterberg since she began vacationing there as a younger woman, and Thea, a local teenager whose attitude is gruff and borders on disrespectful before she warms up to Luisa.
Dungeons of Hinterberg also expands the cozy game classification with its focus on complicated themes like tourism, professionalism, and burnout. There’s almost a metagame element to it: Luisa is trying to relax, de-stress, and reorient herself by escaping to Hinterberg to challenge the dungeons, but life keeps getting in the way—in this case, the reality of what the mass influx of unregulated dungeon tourism has done to Hinterberg.
“It has an effect on the place you visit,” says Regina Reisinger, co-founder of Microbird. “There are people who benefit enormously[from tourism]but if you're a school teacher, your life isn't necessarily going to improve if you walk past hundreds of tourists every day.”
It’s a remarkably apt metaphor for cosy games as a genre, which have been criticized for romanticizing things like farming, food service, and gig work. For a game to be cosy, the argument goes, it has to make work fun in a one-sided way, stripping it of its real-world context and presenting an idealized version where inconveniences don’t disrupt the experience. Dungeons of Hinterberg embraces these inconveniences, tying them into the narrative of Luisa’s vacation.
By disrupting the comfortable routine that might define a cozy game, it gives Hinterberg texture and definition, but still allows Luisa to catch her breath in the woods, when she needs it. And as I dive into In my reviewbalances these themes skillfully.
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