Hinterland impressions
Hinterland is out.
My initial impressions are positive, but I’ve only put about 45 minutes into the game so they are definitely initial. I like some of the more esoteric design decisions, like how you control only one character even though you are doing city-building, adventuring in a party, and lots of other things that usually allow you to control more than one person. It makes it feel very much like Diablo or (even more so) Depths of Peril.
You start out in your skeleton of a town which only has one building: your house. As time progresses visitors come to your town and you can offer to build them a house, which costs gold. Once they have a house in your town they can either stay in their building and help you that way (farmers make food, innkeeps bring in gold from visitors, etc.) or you can bring them out adventuring with you. The thing is, an adventuring character isn’t making you money/food/whatever, so there’s an interesting balancing act going on. There’s also a fame concept, where by the more creatures you kill / the more resources you acquire the more fame you gather and the more visitors are likely to want to set up shop. There’s also a King who sometimes makes demands, Raiders who attack your town, and some other stuff to juggle.
The graphics are one step above ugly – something more stylized might have been a better choice, but they get the job done and the game runs really well on my crappy laptop. The animations are pretty bad. Overall it’s a cool mix of sandbox and adventure – when you start the game it randomly loads up all the areas and monsters, and you can choose the length and difficulty of game that you want. Obviously I can’t make any sort of final statement about how good the game is, but it’s definitely interesting and something different (and at $19.99 the price is pretty reasonable).
