Despite its relaxing pastels and quaint mountain village, Dungeons of Hinterberg is pushing against the confines of cozy games

Whether or not action RPG Dungeons of Hinterberg can be considered a cozy game is definitional. The traditional cozy game is relaxing, pastel-hued, and likely centered around quaint, repetitive gameplay that reassures and calms the player. Stardew Valley for farming; A Short Hike for strolling; Dorfromantik for tile-laying.

Hinterberg's dungeon delving and monster slaying do break the mold a bit, but you'll be doing both with a gentle, cartoonish art style swaddling you. And with a significant amount of the game dedicated to solving puzzles in picturesque environments, the comparison inevitably presents itself.

There’s no gore in Dungeons of Hinterberg, and the violence is stylized, taking place against gooey, inhuman mobs that feel more like the creatures from Jeff Smith’s Bone than wild animals. Protagonist Luisa spends her evenings making friends, shopping, and wandering the village. It is many ways exactly what it says on the tin: a vacation sim, where Luisa is able to relax away from the stresses of her daily life in the city. So that's it: Open and shut cozy, right?

But development studio Microbird’s aspirations aren’t quite that simple.

«When you run into someone you don’t quite vibe with, that’s where the cozy game label might not quite apply to us,» says Philipp Seifried, cofounder of Microbird. «I feel like most cozy games pamper you in this way, where everyone is nice to you, or even if they’re not nice to you [...] they’re so over the top in their grumpiness that you just laugh at them.»

Dungeons of Hinterberg doesn’t lock its characters into that simplistic of classifications. «There are a couple of characters that we expect people to not necessarily [want to] hang out with,» says Seifried, mentioning Gertrude, a rich older widow who’s disdainful of the changes made to Hinterberg since she began vacationing there as a younger woman, and Thea, a local teen whose attitude is abrasive verging on disrespectful before she warms up to Luisa. 

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