Game 18 of 2024: Darkside Detective

 Darkside Detective

Developer: Spooky Doorway
Publisher: Akupara Games
Platform: PC
Genre: Point and Click, Adventure

Difficulty: Easy
Hours: 5

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 8/10

Darkside Detective is a rather small adventure game filled with separate bite-sized cases to solve.

See? Cases.

You play as detective Francis McQueen, lead investigator of the Darkside Division. McQueen and his partner, Officer Dooley, take on the supernatural cases of Twin Lakes City, including gremlins, lake monsters, and poltergeists.

And toilet ghosts.

Darkside Detective plays like most point and click adventure games, but perhaps even simpler. Your inventory never grows too big and I didn't find any puzzles particularly difficult. It's a charming enough game that provides a chuckle here and there, and the low-res pixel art is particularly nice. 

I'd play that game

If you feel like playing something spooky (without actually being spooky) this time of year while waiting to hand out candy to the neighborhood kids, Darkside Detective might just scratch that itch.

Game 17 of 2024: Dungeons of Hinterberg

 Dungeons of Hinterberg

Developer: Microbird Games
Publisher: Curve Games
Platform: PC
Genre: Action RPG

Difficulty: Medium
Hours: 20

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 8/10

Crap, I forgot to get screenshots. :(

Pretty fun little ARPG. Maybe a few too many dungeons? 

Dungeons of Hinterberg has a fun little story about a junior lawyer discovering her taste for adventure in the magical Austrian town of Hinterberg. See, sometime ago, dungeon portals just started randomly popping up throughout Europe (and I guess other places), and a tourist industry catering to would-be dungeon delvers emerged.

Hinterberg is such a place. You play as Luisa, a young lawyer on holiday looking for a little meaning in life. You begin each day having breakfast at the hotel, and your afternoons exploring one of the four different areas looking for dungeons to crawl. You don't even have to do a dungeon if you don't want, you can find a scenic spot and just chill for a day.

After your dungeon run, you come back to town to do your shopping and decide what to do with your evening. Do you want to see a movie or take a rowboat out onto the lake, or do you want to hang with that weird influencer or see who's by the campfire and chill with them?

You can forge relationships with a variety of different folks in town, and this was my favorite part of the game. Hanging with different people raises different stats, and when your friendship advances, you get certain perks, like additional tumbling stamina or specific upgrades.

The dungeons range from breathtaking to downright annoying (especially the wind dungeons, God I was so glad to be done with those); the frozen snowboarding dungeons in Kolmstein being my favorite.

I guess if I had any complaints, it's that the game gets a little repetitive near the end. By then you've fought every monster type enough times for fights to feel like a chore instead of a nice respite from solving dungeon puzzles. A pretty minor complaint to be fair.

Hinterberg is rendered in a pretty cell-shaded style that I really think does the subject matter justice. Every NPC is thoughtfully designed and visually distinct.

Dungeons of Hinterberg draws a lot of comparisons to the Legend of Zelda games, and I think that's mostly fair. They're clearly a huge influence, and if you're going to be influenced by something, it might as well be the best.