Whether or not or not motion RPG Dungeons of Hinterberg will be thought-about a comfy sport is definitional. The standard cozy sport is enjoyable, pastel-hued, and sure centered round quaint, repetitive gameplay that reassures and calms the participant. Stardew Valley for farming; A Quick Hike for strolling; Dorfromantik for tile-laying.
Hinterberg’s dungeon delving and monster slaying do break the mould a bit, however you will be doing each with a delicate, cartoonish artwork model swaddling you. And with a big quantity of the sport devoted to fixing puzzles in picturesque environments, the comparability inevitably presents itself.
There’s no gore in Dungeons of Hinterberg, and the violence is stylized, happening in opposition to gooey, inhuman mobs that really feel extra just like the creatures from Jeff Smith’s Bone than wild animals. Protagonist Luisa spends her evenings making buddies, procuring, and wandering the village. It’s some ways precisely what it says on the tin: a trip sim, the place Luisa is ready to chill out away from the stresses of her every day life within the metropolis. In order that’s it: Open and shut cozy, proper?
However improvement studio Microbird’s aspirations aren’t fairly that easy.
“While you run into somebody you don’t fairly vibe with, that’s the place the comfortable sport label may not fairly apply to us,” says Philipp Seifried, cofounder of Microbird. “I really feel like most cozy video games pamper you on this manner, the place everybody is good to you, or even when they’re not good to you […] they’re so excessive of their grumpiness that you just simply chuckle at them.”
Dungeons of Hinterberg doesn’t lock its characters into that simplistic of classifications. “There are a few characters that we count on folks to not essentially [want to] hang around with,” says Seifried, mentioning Gertrude, a wealthy older widow who’s disdainful of the adjustments made to Hinterberg since she started vacationing there as a youthful lady, and Thea, a neighborhood teen whose perspective is abrasive verging on disrespectful earlier than she warms as much as Luisa.
Dungeons of Hinterberg additionally stretches the comfortable sport classification with its method to difficult subjects like tourism, professionalism, and burnout. There’s virtually a metagame component to it: Luisa is attempting to chill out, destress and reorient herself by escaping to Hinterberg to problem the dungeons, however life retains getting in the way in which—on this case the truth of what the large inflow of unregulated tourism from the dungeons has finished to Hinterberg.
“It has an impact on the place you’re visiting,” says Regina Reisinger, cofounder of Microbird. “There are individuals who revenue immensely [from the tourism] however if you’re a schoolteacher your life isn’t essentially going to be improved if there are lots of of vacationers to stroll previous every day.”
It’s a remarkably apt metaphor for cozy video games as a style, which have been criticized for the romanticization of issues like agriculture, meals service, and gig work. To ensure that a sport to be cozy, the argument goes, it has to make labor or work unilaterally enjoyable, stripping it of its real-world context and presenting an idealized model during which the inconveniences don’t interrupt the expertise. Dungeons of Hinterberg embraces these inconveniences, tying them into the narrative of Luisa’s trip.
By interrupting the comfy routine which may outline a comfy sport, it offers Hinterberg texture and definition—however nonetheless lets Luisa catch her breath within the woods, when she wants it. And as I dive into in my assessment, it balances these themes with a deft hand.
