Vast tracts of land.

Hinterland

hin⋅ter⋅land  /ˈhɪntərˌlænd/

–noun

Often, hinterlands. the remote or less developed parts of a country; back country: The hinterlands are usually much more picturesque than the urban areas.

After much prompting by Penny Arcade and RPS, I finally gave Hinterland a look today. Not wanting to give greenbacks to an indie developer I had no prior experience with, I went the demo route. The game tossed me into the untouched wilds with a lone directive: develop a community for your king. Oh, and if you run out of food you and the townsfolk die. The lack of direction is refreshing; no bossy NPCs to walk me through a basic tutorial are to be found in the hinterlands. The developers wisely assume if I'm savy enough to have found their non-retail game in the first place, this likely isn't my first rodeo.

I start out as a Journeyman, the jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none class. The game gives me a town center to begin and a couple of visitors wander up to see what the hell I'm doing out in the sticks. These are folks I need to recruit to grow my burgeoning metropolis. Visitors have requirements to be met before they can be talked into staying: certain buildings need to be present, enough gold to build their shops/homes, and your fame (think of it as your reputation) has to be a certain level or higher. Fame is earned by clearing out goblin encampments in the land around your town or performing similar feats of derring-do to impress the king. Don't die, you automatically lose fame.

After nearly dieing of starvation a few times, I gathered enough gold to talk some farmers into joining my community. The visitors in your town aren't always the ones you need. Some of them are not practical in the early game, or are too far out of reach to absorb into your township. The randomness of it is a nice touch. I had to sift through fortune tellers and wannabe priests to find the people who would keep me from starving. Fortunately, the game allows me to 'dismiss' people I don't need at the moment, hoping a roll of the dice will send someone more useful my way.

As my adventures in the hinterland surrounding my town continued, my pouch began to bulge with unused items drawn from the corpses of my slain foes. Where was my merchant? Who could I sell my ready supply of rusty armaments? Finally, a purveyor of goods happened by. He was costly, but my need was great. I quickly stacked goblin carcasses 5 deep to earn the gold needed to upgrade my poor-man's hostel to a welcoming inn. I was now 1 day removed from the potential vendor's departure and needed more gold to sway him into taking up permanent residence. Dashing across the country, I appropriated more gold and loot from beings of evil disposition. Making it back to town in the nick of time, I gladly paid for the merchant's business and prepared to inundate him with all manner of bedraggled weaponry.

Hinterland is shutting down now.
Thanks for playing.

Touche' Hinterland demo. Touche'.

I am buying this game today, Steam has it for $14.99 as part of their big holiday sale. Greenhouse always has it for $19.95 and is usually the cheaper (if only by $.04) deal. Even if there wasn't a fat discount at Steam, I would buy it there anyway. I have this odd habit of wanting people to see what I'm playing. I've even passed up replaying loved titles from my yesteryear for lack of Xfire support. But that's a discussion for another blog.