Some thoughts on Dungeons of Hinterberg
I’ve been playing Dungeons of Hinterberg lately. It’s the only game I’m really sort of invested in right now; I’m almost always playing several games, but most of them are very sort of casual. For example, the main games I’ve been playing lately are Mariomon (killer pokemon romhack), Crystal Clear (another good romhack), Dynasty Warriors 5 (mmm, potato chipp), Vampire Survivors, and Dungeons of Hinterberg. I’m sure you can figure out why Dungeons of Hinterberg sticks out among these.
Dungeons of Hinterberg is a dungeon crawling game where you play as a woman on vacation from her job as a lawyer. The Alps town of Hinterberg is home to some dungeons, complete with magic and monsters, that popped up a few years ago. It turned a normally quiet town into a tourist destination, hence why you’re here. It’s a lot of fun! I really like it!
I think one thing that really sticks with me is it’s kind of the best Zelda game that’s come out in the last ten years (disclaimer: I have not played Echoes of Wisdom). “But, Rose, Breath of the Wild AND Tears of the Kingdom came out this last decade.” You’re correct and I put hundreds of hours into both games (I think). But, they really feel sort of superficially LoZ games. They have Link, Zelda, and arguably Ganondorf; there’s Fairies and you get a Master Sword. What else is there? Idk, a lot.
Again, let me preface this by saying I liked Breath of the Wild; I had a lot of fun. But, I’m far from the first to mention that its dungeons are ass. That was one of the big things that they were aiming to work on in Tears of the Kingdom, supposedly. I don’t wanna say that dungeons are the sort of core of Legend of Zelda, but like, they kind of are. Much of the time you spend in those games is in dungeons, fighting monsters and collecting items. Breath of the Wild removed a lot of that—I don’t even remember enemies in the Divine Beasts and the concept of collecting interesting items for puzzles has been discarded completely. And I get it, that formula got stale. But also, I think the game suffers for it. Part of the fun of older Zelda games is getting a new item and finding out how you can interact with the world in new ways. You don’t get literally any of that in BotW. Once you’re off the opening plateau, you have the whole kit! And there are ways in which that’s cool, but as I get older, open worlds appeal less and less to me. I got shit to do.
Anyways, this brings me back to Dungeons of Hinterberg. It doesn’t give you new items each dungeon, in fact, much the opposite. You get a tool set based on which area you’re in and that, then, affects how you interact with things in the dungeon. That might not sound interesting, but it really is! Even though there are only a few regions and hence, spells you get, the dungeons are a lot of fun! Because they’re designed with those abilities in mind! The difference in difficulty levels is basically how big and bad the monsters in the dungeon are, but absenting that, you could do the dungeons in any order at all because the game gives you the tools.
I think dungeon design is difficult. I, as a GM, struggle with it often. I want them to be fun and engaging and interesting and so I stress about them even as I telegraph to my players that they will be in one. What I dig about Hinterberg is that you know what your tools are and you know, because of the set up, that they will be at least moderately relevant to the dungeon. Hell, the dungeon names oten tell you what the theme of the dungeon will be! But, rarely, like, once or twice, have I went and looked something up and at least once it’s because I forgot how one of my spells worked lol. My point is that the puzzles are some of the most fun and well-thoughtout I’ve ever seen. I can think of two that I was annoyed by and they still didn’t actually slow me down that much.
Idk, I played the Wind Waker recently (goated game, tbh) and I’ve been trying to play through Twilight Princess—if you’re a friend, you know my struggles here. I think Twilight Princess is trying too hard to be cinematic and cool and when it does that, it forgets to be a video game. And we can debate about the primacy or value of fun in video games, but these sort of telegraphed, highly scripted segments in that game are nigh-painful to me. But when I hop into the dungeon, it all clicks. I’m like “Oh right, Legend of Zelda! This is fun!” And I think that’s maybe the joy of Hinterberg is that that’s the whole game. There are other aspects, of course, but it’s great to just kind of slide into a dungeon and focus on solving some puzzles and whackin’ some monsters.
Probably worth acknowledging that since my initial draft, I have beaten this game. My opinion stands.