Hinterland (PC)

It takes a village to murder a bunch of giants
10/6/2008 7:29 PM | 1 Comments | Page 1 of 3

Hinterland appears to be a game about building the fantasy village you'd see in your run-of-the-mill role-playing game. You have wizards and knights and trolls. You have loot and levels and taverns. In fact, Hinterland is really about Westward Expansion -- improving a town so that you can draw in immigrants, and wiping out any nests of savages that are in the way of progress. If they happen to drop a nice weapon or give you access to a rich resource, so much the better. And if the people in your village aren't powerful enough to help you, you can kick them out of their homes so someone more useful can move in. Why keep a level 2 farmer around when a level 7 farmer is faster on the draw?

Once you start thinking deeply about Hinterland, you discern that every medieval fantasy city is built on the dirty secret that the goblins were probably there first and wouldn't have attacked your settlement. But they have stuff you want, so off with their heads. Your king is an absentee landlord who will ask for taxes in gold or food but give you almost nothing in return, even when ogres and giants are killing you every other day. It's no wonder that these places need parties of heroes to get them out of trouble.

In Hinterland, you are the city founder, a hero commissioned to tame the wilderness. You start with a need for food and gold. Immigrants occasionally drop by to take residence, but will only settle if you meet their price and their specific demands. Necromancers will need a graveyard and a temple of evil. Bards want a musical instrument. Even building upgrades is contingent on securing the right resource, be that a source of fresh water or a dragon egg. The more famous you are, the better the immigrants who come to your doorstep, and the only way to become famous is to go a-slaying.

So you explore the hinterland, killing everything that's in your path and leveling up along the way. You can bring up to three other villagers with you, but if they leave town they can't do their jobs. If your blacksmith gets killed while adventuring, you'll need to find a new one. Once you hit a certain critical mass of villagers, however, these choices drop in importance. The new big choice is when and where to explore. But if your village is raided by hostiles while you are out gallivanting in gnoll country, it falls upon your villagers to defend the homestead, and many of them may not be up for the job. Once you take your most powerful villagers on a grand adventure, who will keep the monsters away?

These city raids can quickly lead you to an infinite spiral of doom. If a mob shows up and kills you, you lose fame. You resurrect with half of your hit points, but if the monsters are strong enough, you may die again or lose your best fighters while you rush to the scene of battle. This can happen over and over. Once you have negative fame, you have a small window to get back in the king's good graces, but by then it can be a lost cause.