Despite its magic and monsters, Dungeons of Hinterberg’s developers ‘wanted to show a real place’ that could explore ‘all the layers’ of overtourism
Since Dungeons of Hinterberg is a game about a vacation, it’s fittingly also a game about tourism. People flock to the imaginary Austrian village not to ski or sightsee but to explore dungeons, fight monsters, and use magic, which appeared seemingly randomly in Hinterberg a few years before the beginning of the game. Protagonist Luisa comes to Hinterberg to destress and have some fun, but by the end of the game she is knee-deep in questions about the impact the commercialization of magic has had on the city.
“It was for sure an angle that we wanted to explore, right from the start,” said Phillipp Seifried, cofounder of Microbird, in an interview with PC Gamer. “There’s this huge debate about tourism going on in places like Barcelona, which gets millions of tourists a year.”
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