izigame.me

An Ocarina of Time for the modern day - and with its own totally unique twist.
Seriously though, this is the first time I've had a game make me want to play another game (LoZ OoT obvi) AND scratch the itch to play that game all at the same time. I'm normally a shop-your-wishlist kinda girl, but I randomly stumbled upon this while looking for SOMETHING to catch my interest because I was SO BORED and figured "eh, sure."
SUCH a good call. I just finished my first run through and I'll definitely be back for seconds! While I can't help but draw comparisons to OoT, Dungeons of Hinterberg stands entirely on its own merits. The art style is engaging and playful but doesn't overwhelm, and the gameplay is fun and engaging. I played through on normal mode, which was perfect for me, but I appreciate that there's an easy and a hard mode (which I might try on my next playthrough). The music was fun too (though I admit it was a bit weird to be walking through town after beating the last dungeon and having the normal evening music play).
What I really appreciated as (I hate to admit it) an adult was the pacing. The game is sort of broken out like a text-based adventure game, where days are broken into morning, noon, evening, and night chunks. Each chunk has its own actions to perform (ordering breakfast in the morning, open-world style adventuring + dungeons in the noon chunk, shopping & socializing in the evening, and recapping, lounging, and going to sleep at night). When a chunk ends, time passes, but by and large you can spend infinite real time between the start and end of a chunk. It always gave me good stopping places to put the game down and get ready to go to bed. Which, despite being in my late 30s, is a skill I have yet to master without such boundaries.
I also really liked the puzzles - and they're probably why I am reminded so viscerally of OoT. I consider myself a pretty good puzzle-solver, but there were more than a handful that gave me trouble and two where I had to just put my Deck down and walk away until the next day. I LOVED it. Though I'm pretty sure there was at least one or two that I solved in a way that the game did not intend... Oh well.
My only real complaint was that some of the location bosses were surprisingly easy, including the final game boss... or maybe I was just grossly overpowered by the time I ended my game, which is entirely possible lol
I paid full price for this game and was happy to do so - it's well worth the cost. I'll definitely go back to it at least once more, and I'm already planning on gifting it to someone for an upcoming birthday. I'll be nominating it for all the awards I can come Steam Award Nomination season too. I strongly recommend this gorgeous game - it's a joy from start to finish.