Hinterberg borrows from Zelda and Persona, but its setting really gives it a vibe all its own.
By five pm last Sunday, after two days of Summer Game Fest demos and a third day of bouncing around Xbox appointments, I was ready to go home. I did not expect my second-to-last stop to end up being the game I’d keep thinking about all week, even more so than Armored Core 6. Dungeons of Hinterberg just got its claws into me.
I didn’t see it coming, because at least by the bullet points Hinterberg is a real “been there, done that” collection of videogamey stuff:
A blatantly Moebius art style a la Sable, which threatens to be overused any day now
Classic Zelda-style dungeon puzzle-solving
Action RPG sword combat in walled-off arenas that looks decent, but not, like, Devil May Cry-caliber
Rail grinding, which Sonic made cool, and then kinda un-cool, 20 years ago
Character relationships with the townsfolk to level up
I like all of these things in games, especially art inspired by Moebius’s comics—one look at Hinterberg pulled a reflexive “ooh, pretty” out of me. But that was only enough to carry me through the first few hours of Sable, and the basic elements of Hinterberg I’ve seen in so many third person action/adventure games that they don’t really grab my attention anymore. The way the pieces are put together has to be something really special.
Or, apparently, really Austrian.
I was in love with Hinterberg a few minutes into its demo, as soft-spoken indie studio co-founders Regina Reisinger and Philipp Seifried started talking about how the game is rooted in the history of small resort towns in their home country.
