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.»
«Three years ago magic appeared, and before that, it was a sleepy tourist place,» said cofounder Regina Reisinger. «Some people came for hiking or skiing, but it wasn't a grade-A destination, it was just a mundane, normal place before something weird like magic happened. This balance and tension was what really interests us.» The effects the appearance of magic has on the city provide much of the central focus of the game.
When talking about inspirations for Hinterberg, Regina and Phillipp both spoke of the Austrian city of Hallstatt, a famously picturesque village with a population of 700 that sometimes hosts up to 10,000 tourists per day.
«You get a lot of debate about what to do with this, because on one hand, it's beautiful that people from all over the world want to come and see your culture,» says Phillipp. «But at the same time it has an effect on the place that you're visiting. […] There are people that profit immensely off of that. If you own a restaurant, you're set for life, but if you're a school teacher your life is not necessarily going to improve if there's thousands of tourists to walk past every day.» This tension plays out directly in Dungeons of Hinterberg, as both locals and
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