Dungeons of Hinterberg Review (PurpleXVI)
This game is probably for someone, but it's not for me.
It'd likely be a good introduction for someone who doesn't play a lot of games into something Soulsy but not very punishing and very casual, but I found all the safety barriers and handholding to be extremely aggravating from the word go.
You introduce me to the Austrian alps, you show me that there's an expansive mountainscape and cozy town just behind me, and almost an hour into the game you haven't allowed me to go poke around it without a leash yet. Every single area is crammed full of undiegetic "GEE WHIZ I SHOULDN'T GO THERE YET"-popups as the PC is unwilling to step around a cow or over a fence until game progress permits it.
The first boss battle made me hope that boss battles would be interesting in the sense of being somewhat puzzle-y, but there's none of that either, by the second one they've already become pretty generic slashfests(complete with obligatory phase where all you can really do is dodge projectiles), and combat against normal enemies feels a bit lacking because they're all in nice, open, fenced-off arenas that make sure nothing gets too complex.
NPC dialogue takes too long and is enforced too regularly. Apparently social interactions also give me mechanical advantages which means that if I don't care about the NPC's(I don't), I can't just skip them and go on my way. I need to participate, which annoys me when these characters are extremely blandly written.
"Climbing" could be an interesting mechanic, but it's literally just pressing the A button until you reach where you want to go. Conan Exiles showed us that climbing could be a fun minigame with just a stamina bar and requiring you to use your brain a little to spot ledges you could recover on.
Just let me off the goddamn leash and let me go take some risks that might paste me in the Ultra Dungeon even though I'm level 1. Yes, put up all the warning signs, I'll suffer, but it'll be my own damn choice.
Lastly, why the hell is the FOV slider a % slider instead of an FOV number? I usually roll with 110 FOV, so what's 0% FOV? 50%? 100%?
Oh and having multiple unskippable logos so that I spend almost 20 seconds waiting for the game to actually drop me in the main menu should also be punishable by waterboarding for the entire dev team.
This does not spark joy.