The Dimensions of Hinterberg

NOTE: The following essay contains spoilers about Dungeons of Hinterberg.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: Stop worrying so much about spoilers; stories are as much about how they tell as what they tell.

One of the words most often used to describe Dungeons of Hinterberg, the 2024 action-adventure game from Microbird Games, is “cozy.” Set in the titular alpine village of Hinterberg, surrounded by gorgeous watercolor vistas and ambient music, the atmosphere certainly matches the description. You play as Luisa, a young woman on vacation to get away from her life and her roommate and her law office, and you have come to this place not for its hikes and streams but for another reason: 25 portals have opened up in the world, leading to dungeons with magic and monsters. By day Luisa sets off to explore and conquer these challenges, and by evening, she returns to make connections with the people around her, and to the town itself. 

What makes something a cozy game? Genre definitions are a fool’s errand at best and an act of malice at worst, but in this case it’s particularly difficult to grasp. The term has its own Wikipedia article, which defines the genre as emphasizing nonviolence and relaxation, though its rise in popularity in recent years seems to be connected primarily to a sense of escapism and a the lack of a formal end state; you don’t want a buzzer to go off and kick everyone out of the pool. By these definitions, however, Hinterberg only half qualifies. Relaxation and escapism are textual themes of the game, but these are performed by the character, Luisa, and not the player. The player, instead, is performing a lot of violence—albeit on cute little black squiggly shapes—and solving a fixed number of puzzles to advance to a very conventional ending. It isn’t a cozy game, but it wears the genre’s clothes. 

But that’s the daytime. It’s really the evenings that earn the game its reputation, and this is probably unavoidable given that the overarching design is almost a charcuterie. Where Hinterberg struggled in reviews, insomuch as an 80 is a disappointment, lies in its choice to go wide rather than deep, and easy rather than difficult. It contains RPG elements, but lacks the fine-tuning or min-maxing of the beloved entries of the genre; most of the time, it’s enough to just equip the newest thing. We’ll return to the level design, but at a surface level, it draws comparisons to the temple design of Breath of the Wild, and offers constant homages to other action adventure classics. And the evening is structured similarly to the social link system of the Persona games, on a much smaller scale. Make friends, have conversations, earn tangible rewards for being a good listener. 

None of this is in itself innovative, which is why the truly original aspect of the game, its presentation, earns it those “cozy” accusations. But not all great games have to invent a new wheel; Hades, for example, is beloved not because it did anything new, but because it took those traditional elements and offered a level of polish that by itself delighted the player. Hinterberg doesn’t quite achieve that level, either in level or artistic design, but it so adeptly avoids all the traps and negatives so common in these types of games. Rather than an 8/10, it’s more accurate to call it an 8/8: It shoots for an exact level of ambition and nails it. At no point does the pacing, or the puzzles, or the combat ever actually irritate. It’s a game committed to first doing no harm, and that’s an admirable goal.

The trouble with the “cozy” label, beyond the blanket connotations that have grown around the term over the past ten years, is that it does a disservice to the perhaps the game’s most neglected aspect, across reviews: its narrative. Story analysis is always tricky in video games, because no one wants to spoil the plot in a review, and no one remembers to talk about it after everyone’s had time to finish their playthroughs. This is why it’s best to write reviews a year later. But without much of a description, that coziness—and the tranquil endlessness that it infers—led prospective players to assume that the writing of Hinterberg would work in the same way that it does in Persona; that is, one-on-one vignettes disconnected from the main plot, often revolving around the NPC’s dominant personality trait, and usually ending in a declaration of love. Then when the hero has maxed out the social link and earned their reward, they hang around the rest of the game as puppets, effectively dead from a narrative standpoint. It is literally a waste of time to talk to them. 

This mechanic is, to be fair, where the game earns its sense of endlessness. There are 16 characters to engage with, each with only 2-4 ranks of friendship as opposed to Persona’s ten. But even so, you aren’t really meant to form bonds with them all, and honestly, you shouldn’t really want to. Many of the people you meet in Hinterberg aren’t particularly likeable characters: Celebrities who are full of themselves, businessmen looking to use you, hipster and snob tourists. Some offer tangible rewards, including endgame loot, to justify having to listen to them; others don’t. Just like any town, there are going to be people that aren’t particularly pleasant, or useful. 

Critics have labeled the writing as shallow, because with a half-dozen conversations at most from beginning to end, it’s nearly impossible to write a good character. Hinterberg escapes this trap by not making the story about the characters. The story is, to use the cliché, about the town itself, and the vast majority of the conversations avoid deep personal connection. You have the opportunity, through your dialogue choices, to play Luisa as a zealous do-gooder, a burnt-out cynic, or a supportive cheerleader. But regardless, she’s cagey about her past, and the story is better for it. The story is about getting away, and therefore can’t dwell too long on what everyone’s getting away from. They’re escaping, and they’re drawn here, to this magical place. 

Microbird Games is an Austrian developer, and its portrayal of the remote Austrian village, ruined and saved by the monetary and social force of tourism, is authentic. These portals opened one day, drawing thousands of pairs of boots to trample the scenery, and millions of dollars to compensate for it. Julian, the wealthy entrepreneur, despises Luisa and tries to run her out of town for threatening his golden goose; he later changes his mind when he realizes that the city is killing it far more effectively than the hero could. Her best friend turns on her for trying to ruin something that is bringing so many people joy, and so many villagers money, writing her off as an outsider, a “tourist.” The ecological messaging is apparent, as earthquakes and wild magic threaten the safety and serenity of the town. There is a point where the price is too much, and Luisa, the outsider, comes not to save the world but to restore balance. It’s a thoughtful, well-written story undone somewhat in the end by the antagonist, whose motivations go off the rails. 

But there’s another subtext of the story beneath the tourism angle. One of the questions that gets raised by Albert, a Belgian professor studying the town’s supernatural phenomenon, is: why? Why did these dungeons suddenly appear? This is the sort of question that you generally don’t want to raise in your game, because the obvious answer is “because it’s a game,” or wrapped in its usual veneer, “because you have to save the princess.” But in this case the story has an answer: “Because it’s a game.” Magic, this expressionless, intelligent, and benevolent presence, has created these dungeons because it wants them to be beaten. It has created a game for Luisa, just as the developers have created a game for the player. They are the same.

 At the end, when Luisa has connected with the mute source of magic, she has an epiphany:

The people who created Dungeons of Hinterberg played video games. You can see it in the little nods that fleck the surface of the game: the ladder into the first dungeon is modeled after the well in Majula in Dark Souls II. Creating variety, dungeons are patterned after the gameplay of Super Mario Galaxy, and Bastion, and Monument Valley. Some considered these moments derivative; they certainly aren’t as deep as the games they acknowledge. But they aren’t trying to be deep. It’s meant to be a sampler, a little celebration of the games that the designers love. 

The act of loving in a loving homage is difficult to define and extremely important, because what, underneath the setting of Hinterberg and its unseemly local politics, the game is really about. In video games, we are all tourists. We enter other people’s world’s, muck around the place, take what we want, and leave. A video game is every bit as escapist as a ten-day vacation, and in both cases, it’s entirely up to the tourist to decide how much they want to take away. They can play, have fun, and leave—the game does provide a fast-forward button, an acknowledgment of that freedom—or they can read the item descriptions, engage with the story and characters. They can choose to connect. 

That Dungeons of Hinterberg gives the player that choice, one that many deadline-pressed reviewers clearly declined, is both an act of thematic consistency and confidence. Usually, when art deigns to acknowledge the audience, it’s done either as a wink or, as with the monologue of the critic in Brad Bird’s Ratatouille, a dismissal. In a sense, that makes Hinterberg a cozy game after all, if that’s what you come into the experience wanting it to be. Sometimes we just need that escape, to play as someone else for a while. You just have to remember that, to remember that even as a tourist, virtual or physical, someone is making the world you live in, and that you’re forming a connection. The only question is whether it’s one-way, or two.