In the midst of all this you also need to find time to defend your town from the occasional band of no-good raiders, complete quests for your king (if you don’t, your level of Fame suffers, which affects your ability to recruit visitors to your town), and go out into the wilderness, clearing each zone of the monsters that inhabit it. Some of these zones yield treasure, some yield resources that enhance the quality of your town, and some offer both. To aid you in these tasks you can recruit anyone you hired to stay in your village to come adventure with you. Different NPC types can provide different benefits to your party. Any type can provide the usual hack and slash help in combat, but if you bring a healer along, for example, then he can keep you healthy while you’re in the wilderness. (Without a healer in your party you have to rely on potions or return to town to heal.)

The catch with recruiting your townies, though, is that to adventure with you they have to stop doing whatever their day job is in town. So, if you take a farmer off his farm, he'll no longer produce food. If your town isn't producing enough food to support it, people will leave, leaving their abandoned homes behind in the process. (Abandoned homes can be demolished or re-used by hiring someone of the same job type to stay there.) Almost everything in this game has some sort of cause and effect associated with it.

All these tasks do keep you furiously busy, traveling back and forth, procuring better equipment for yourself and your citizens and continuing to develop your town's infrastructure. It's also furiously repetitive, especially the combat which consists of clicking on an opponent and watching your character and the targeted monster beat on each other until somebody falls down. It’s a similar mechanic to Dungeon Siege, and it suits the game fine, but it also doesn’t take long for the repetitive grunts and clangs of combat to start wearing thin.

Whether it's finding new types of resources to enhance your town or waiting to see what types of new visitors might turn up, a lot of the fun factor derives from finding out what’s in the game for you to discover. Once you reach the end of that discovery process, though, the only novel element left is trying out different mash-ups of your player character and various NPCs. There’s fun to be had in that part of the game too, but how much depends on you. Then again, for $20, a short-lived, but highly addictive experience is pretty much exactly what you're signing up for and you could do a lot worse with your money than to spend a couple of weeks playing Hinterland.

Questions or comments? We'd love to hear from you .