Hello everybody and welcome to another game review on Out of Games. I’ve been doing quite a few older games recently, but not this time. Today I’m reviewing a game that, at the time of writing this article, is not even a year old. Released on July 18th 2024 for Windows and Xbox Series X/S, and for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 on March 13th 2025, we look at Dungeons of Hinterberg.

Dungeons of Hinterberg was developed by an Austrian indie team known as Microbird Games, and this is actually the company’s debut game. That makes today a special occasion since this isn’t just a game review, but also a look at the company’s first step through the door and if it can walk a mile (or rather, 1.61 kilometers) with the rest of the industry.

What I was immediately drawn to in the game was the very odd choice of genres to combine. Dungeons of Hinterberg is one part dungeon crawler, and one part social simulation game. In Nintendo terms, this translates to one part Legend of Zelda, and one part Animal Crossing. I can safely say that I’ve never come across a game genre combo as weird as this one, but as weird as this mash-up will seem to some people, it's not as far-fetched as I initially thought it was since the Persona games have a similar structure of trying to combine social gameplay with combat. Still, I hadn't come across anything like this when the game was first announced, and it made me very curious to see how these two gameplay styles, which normally have little to no intersectionality, could combine with each other.

Now what’s very interesting is the fact that I have very little experience with both of these genres. Outside a few of the Zelda games, I haven’t really played any dungeon crawlers (unless you really want to stretch the definition and count the Elder Scrolls games as “dungeon crawlers”). I have even less experience with games like The Sims or Animal Crossing. Suffice to say that I wouldn’t consider myself a fan of either of the genres that the game tries to be.

If I don't normally align myself with these two game genres, then what intrigued me to buy the game? Perhaps it was the bizarre genre mashup that seemed impossible to ignore, or the cel-shaded art style in combination with its setting. Whatever it was, something piqued my interest to buy and play the game, and here I am now with a review of it.

Home Is Where Your Game Is

Dungeons of Hinterberg follows Luisa, a young woman who takes a vacation in the town of Hinterberg, a fictional town set in the Austrian Alps that has attracted a lot of tourism after a series of dungeons and bizarre creatures have appeared in the mountain ranges around the town. Instead of forcing the town into lockdown, the government instead uses this as an opportunity to increase tourist flow.

Austria is a very under-represented country when it comes to video games. As much as I love to drive cars around the Red Bull Ring in any racing game, that racetrack is pretty much the extent of the country’s depiction when in the world of video games. I don’t get to see the rest of the country represented in any way, which is something that Microbird seems to have taken to heart because the game is Austrian through and through. The town of Hinterberg is based on the Upper Austrian town of Hallstatt, and its tourism economy mirrors that of its real-life counterpart. Depicting the cultural relationship that the two countries have with each other is the fact that many of the buildings in Hinterberg have German names like the “Apotheke”, as do the overworld maps like Doberkogel or Hinterwald.

I enjoy the setting of the game quite a lot. Microbird took an opportunity to represent their home country in a video game in a way that hasn’t been done before, and did as much with it as they could. Hinterberg is a quaint little town that’s interesting to run around and visualize a life in. All the surrounding environments feel like real places and provide some really fantastic views. Microbird seemed to know ahead of time that this art style and the views of nature together would resonate with people because there's literally a mechanic that revolves around stopping to look at your surroundings when there's a lot of scenery around. This game manages to convey the fact that this is in fact a place that people actually live in and that it exists outside your involvement.

Cozy Combat and Peaceful Puzzles

Luisa is a “slayer”, who, like many of the other characters around Hinterberg, arrives to complete all the dungeons that have sprouted around the area. She is armed with a sword and has the ability to learn and use magic spells.

Every dungeon is marked with a difficulty number, and it will tell you your stats relative to that number. The game does initially limit where you can go in an attempt to prevent the player from being too overwhelmed and coming across dungeons that are far too difficult for them at first, but if you happen to come across a dungeon that is ranked higher than your stats, the game won’t prevent you from accessing it. The difficulty of the enemies is determined specifically by your area on the map. In the early game, you’ll only be exploring areas with easy enemies, but those enemies won’t scale with you if you go back to them with better gear.

I’m going to be blunt about the difficulty. It is extremely easy. You can challenge yourself by accessing higher-ranked dungeons earlier, but if you follow the main path the game lays out for you and complete the dungeons by difficulty order, you’ll quickly find that combat becomes a cakewalk. Opportunities to regenerate health and magic are plentiful, and the enemy attacks are very easily telegraphed. It only took about an hour and a half before I already had more health potions than I would’ve ever needed because the game throws healing pods at you left and right. To be fair, I did play on Normal and not Hard, which might’ve changed things more than I would expect it to, but this is definitely not a game that wants to challenge you.

While the combat in the game is not particularly difficult, it is very fast-paced and flowy. The swordplay in the game is built on a very simple formula of having one light attack and one heavy attack, but Luisa does not have access to a shield. Instead, your means of damage prevention is through dodge rolling Dark Souls-style. Your stamina for dodge rolling is also limited, meaning that your safety strategies do require some amount of forethought.

At first, you don’t have much you can do with combat other than these two simple attacks, but after a while, you unlock a number of extra mechanics that increase your strength and gain access to a number of new combat opportunities. The “Attack Conduit” mechanic allows you to freely swap and choose between a number of super-powered and flashy attacks, which are incredibly helpful and fun to use. You can also equip “Charms”, which power you up though improving your stats or unlocking some extra functionality (like a shockwave after each kill, or slowing down time after a perfectly-timed dodge).

You can shrink Charms so they take up less Charm slots, and you can equip more of them, and can enchant your sword to improve some of its attributes. While these mechanics are quite fun, the rate in which Luisa’s combat strength improves is a bit jarring. It only takes a few hours before you’ve unlocked a whole series of mechanics that only serve to make combat easier, and the items you find in chests tend to jump around in power level a bit drastically. It wasn’t uncommon for me to suddenly find a sword or a piece of armor that was twice as strong as what I was currently equipped with. Since weapons and armor don’t break or have special attributes you need to use, this means that most gear becomes entirely obsolete very quickly.

I can safely say that this is the very first game I’ve ever played in my life where I needed to unlock the combo counter… and the game actually has a very good reason for that. Every few hits you successfully score in a combo increases your attributes (like damage, for example) for as long as you can keep the combo going, which encourages you to go in for the kill as much as you can and not play too safe. This is actually a unique system that I quite like, but for some reason, neither your Attack Conduit moves nor your magic spells contribute to your combo counter, and I don't really know why.

Luisa can also gain the ability to use magical spells as she travels through each overworld. Each overworld has a “skill shrine”, which gives you access to two different spells for as long as you’re in either that overworld or a dungeon in that overworld. These serve mainly as mechanisms for puzzle solving, but they can actually be used in combat as well. In combat, they’re fun tools to prevent the combat from becoming monotonous, and the game actually encourages you to use them through enemies with “magic shield” health bars, which decrease faster if you hit them with magical attacks.

Just like the combat, none of the puzzles in the game are particularly difficult, although a few of them did admittedly leave me scratching my head for about a minute or so. The dungeons are where I can tell the developers had the most fun because they get a lot of mileage out of every ability the game gives you. There are quite a lot of fun areas with cool contraptions that the game throws at you, that even though they aren’t difficult to figure out, were nonetheless still satisfying to complete because it’s exciting to see the way all the different mechanics respond with each other. The way combat is implemented into the dungeons (and everywhere else in the game for that matter) however is a weak point because it locks you into a small arena that you can only pass once you defeat every enemy, giving the game a start-stoppy pace.

There are a few boss fights in the game too. Just like everything else in the game, the bosses are not particularly difficult, but they make for a fun deviation from the normal combat structure.

The Persona-l Journey

But we haven’t yet spoken about the other half of what makes the game, which is the socializing part. Each day is split up into four sections, which are Morning, Noon, Evening, and Night.

Morning is a segment where nothing really happens but an occasional story-related cutscene. It basically exists just to give you a timeframe where you can choose an overworld to go to. Noon happens when you choose an overworld to go to, and then you spend the entirety of that time of the day in that overworld. This is the time of the day when you go out monster hunting and completing dungeons, but you can also spend time at scenic spots which increase your stats (we’ll elaborate on that in a bit).

Evening is where the majority of the social aspect of the game comes into play. You can take this moment to talk to the NPCs in Hinterberg, which consist of other tourists and village locals. By talking to characters and giving them gifts, you can unlock extra side quests and build up relationships, which will reward you with perks and items. You can also spend this time doing a solo activity like watching a movie or going to the spa. No matter what you do, this will improve your social stats, which will unlock side quests and sometimes even improve the quality of your gear.

Night, similar to Morning, is just a transitory segment. You can use this to either to go sleep, or watch TV or do some reading, which both increase your social stats, but also reduces your maximum HP by 25% that day.

Because every social activity takes a day segment, you are encouraged to try to optimize the way you plan out your vacation activities (as weird as that sentence may sound) to help build up certain relationships to improve your character and stats faster. Hanging out at scenic spots do the same thing, going through days without doing dungeons, which in turn means you can also use this to optimize stat gains at night. You will lose 25% of your HP, but if you decide to spend the next day at a scenic spot, then you pretty much ignore that downside entirely. There is a bit of a balancing act in the social stats that ironically makes relaxing during your vacation to be sometimes suboptimal, but in general, this won’t really matter too much.

From an immersion perspective, Luisa as a character feels much more grounded in reality because of the segmented day system and the way she interacts with everyone around her. She isn’t your typical RPG protagonist with unlimited stamina, no hunger, and no need for sleep. She is a human being that, while being skilled in the ways of sword fighting and magic, still has basic human limitations that you and me in real life have. She can’t spend every minute of every day outside fighting. She needs to get back to her guest house at the end of the day and sleep.

Luisa is also very relatable as a character due to the fact that she goes through very human problems over the course of her adventure that most of us can relate to at one point or another. She vacations in Hinterberg to get away from her current life for the time being. Any time you visit a scenic spot, she will generally think about her current life, what she’s doing and what she has accomplished. The game’s narrative becomes surprisingly deep, dealing with topics like burnout, commercialization, overtourism (mirroring the same issue faced by the town’s real life counterpart), and environmental issues. Luisa’s personal struggles feel very real since she’s a character that we can all see ourselves in, and it reflects the feelings that you might have if you too were going on the same adventure that she is in the game.

Vacation Verdict

I’m going to get one thing out of the way right now. If what you’re looking for in your Zelda clone is for it to have extremely difficult puzzles and/or combat, Dungeons of Hinterberg is not the game for you. As I have mentioned multiple times over the course of this review, this game does not try to challenge you much. A few areas might give you a little bit of trouble, but on the whole, the game is very easy on both the puzzles and the combat. For many people, this will be a turn-off, but it also makes it a very good game for people who are otherwise unfamiliar with these types of games.

If what you’re looking for is a more story driven game where the puzzles and combat are the strawberries on the cake instead of the foundation, then Dungeons of Hinterberg absolutely delivers on that front. As a story game, it did exactly what it wanted to do, which is that it got me to think about myself and think of my situation in relation to Luisa’s. Every story element is naturally woven into the game’s overarching narrative and subthemes. Any flaws that the game does have are made up for by the fact that the game's storytelling is simply fantastic.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time through Dungeons of Hinterberg. If you’re looking for a Zelda-like game and don’t mind it having easy combat and puzzles in exchange for story quality, then you will absolutely love the game through and through. If you’re Austrian, you might also appreciate the game for its representation of the country that would normally otherwise go unnoticed.

Dungeons of Hinterberg can be bought on the Steam, Epic, PlayStation, or Xbox stores.