I enjoy it when dev teams try something different, even if it is kind of based on Persona style games.
In Dungeons of Hinterberg you play the role as a person in the same world that you and I live in, but there is a new "resort" of sorts that has found out a way to have real dungeons with real enemies and real powers. Our hero Luisa, is a rather bored and somewhat depressed 20 something who really enjoys fantasy and is tired of her regular life suffering away in cublicle sort of office life. This part of it sounds very familiar to a lot of people I would imagine.
She goes on a vacation to Hinterberg, a town that has gained some popularity as dungeons and various monsters started appearing around the town. Luisa was happy to sign on and comes ready to dominate...or something.
The story is pretty great because it touches base on real world issues such as displeasure with one's career and social life as well as love life. Hinterberg is meant to be an escape for fantasy nerds and they can meet other people with similar interests. I think this one subtle lesson about finding your group of people to improve your happiness is an important one and I enjoyed that part of the story.
Unfortunately, this game though, however well intentioned, suffers from really boring combat mechanics right from the start.
You lock on using R, you do a light or heavy hit using two buttons... and that's essentially all there is to it!
As dungeons progress you get given better weapons to improve your power, but it only boosts you just enough to keep the number of hits that you need to land to make a kill almost exactly the same throughout.
You do get given some skills such as an exploding bolder and some sort of whip mechanism that can pull things towards you, but these are used moreso for solving puzzles along the way, not so much during combat since your MP is so limited that you can only cast each a couple of times. Therefore, you go back to using your light and heavy attacks almost exclusively.
You have to climb stuff, but it is in a linear way and there is no other way forward, so what's the point? You can't do it wrong either so there is no skill here at all. You are just hitting a button at the only time that you can and then it does an animation. It is indeed possible to fall but then you respawn right at the place you jumped from. Honestly, this would only ever happen if you were doing it on purpose or seriously can't read what is written right in front of you.
The boss battles are more of the same although I can only hope they get a bit more complicated later. You just have a larger HP pool that you have to reduce with light hits over and over again until you eventually whittle them down.
I hoped, and continues for 3 dungeons in this hope, that things were going to get better and this was just an exceptionally long tutorial about basic commands. Unfortunately this was not the case or if it is, it happens much later in the game and I am not willing to endure that.
The eomotional journey that Luisa takes is kind of nice to see unfold. It's like the sad bumblebee girl in that video "no rain" where she finally finds a group of other people dressed as bees at the end, but in the end this is not enough to salvage the critically boring main parts of what this game really is.
The graphics are amazing, the sound is wonderful, the story is inspired and original.... AAAAAND it's boring as hell.
I'm not a developer, but I can imagine that the team involved in this was aware of this when they were finishing up and sent it out to market. A lot of professional organization in reviewing gave this game pretty decent marks, but I think they were mostly just being nice to an indie studio that we would all probably like to see more from. We have to remember that Hades by SuperGiant games, was once an indie studio that people didn't pay much attention to, and I think the sentiment towards Microbird Games is going the same way. They are so small and so new that they don't even have a wiki at this point.
I like the idea and the innovation, but the game just simply isn't very good. I do like the vision though and I will look forward to them hopefully improving a bit and making something a bit more playable in later years.