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Game Review: A Short Hike
Hey, remember going outside? That was pretty cool, right? At least, in theory--right now I'm sitting in my sun nook and watching snow come down furiously outside my window, which means that Fool's Spring is over and winter has returned to Chicago. At least until tomorrow, when it'll be 13° C out. Welcome to the Midwest--other places have four seasons, and so do we, we just have them over the course of twenty-four hours.
I first heard of A Short Hike when![[twitter.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
meowtima played through it a couple weeks ago, so I put it on my wish list. Then a week or so ago it went on sale, and after waffling over it for a couple days I bought it. ![[facebook.com profile]](https://www.facebook.com/favicon.ico)
aaron.hosek had bought it at the same time, and we fired it up at the same time. He works for Chicago Public Schools so he has more free time than me right now and beat it first, and came back into our group chat and said it was a masterpiece. And especially now, in the Plague Year when life is not super great, I agree. Get this game.
With the greatest of ease.
The protagonist of A Short Hike is Claire, who comes with her Aunt May to Hawk Peak to go for "a short hike." After a short intro pre-dawn car ride that explains the premise, the game turns you loose. Aunt May is sitting by the fire, but you don't have to talk to her, and in fact the first thing I did was run around the entire island to see what the limits of the world were. There are a bunch of other characters to talk to or not, as you like, or you could just make straight for the summit. Claire does say she's waiting for an important phone call, and the top of Hawk Peak is the only place with any reception.
The best way to describe the game is "chill." There's no time limit, there's no map or icons, and there's no quest log, so there's never a sense of tasks left undone or anything that I had to accomplish that I was ignoring. The game world is small enough that I didn't need anything more than the compass I received early in my wandering, and I actually totally forgot about it and didn't even turn it on until the very end.
I didn't need it at all. Every time I thought of somewhere I needed to go, it only took a couple minutes to get there or find the NPC. There were never more than a handful of tasks I wanted to do at any time, so the lack of tracking wasn't a burden. The one task I forgot about--finding someone's lost wristwatch before nefarious thieves found it and sold it on the internet--I remembered immediately when I received the watch from someone who had been planning to sell it on the internet.
The only real means of progression is finding "golden feathers," which increase Claire's stamina. A Short Hike takes place in a world full of animal people, much like Night in the Woods, but unlike that game the people of A Short Hike are animals in truth instead of just as an artistic choice. Claire is a bird, and she can fly. Golden feathers determine how many times she can flap to gain height before being forced to glide, as well as how long she can climb up cliffs or run once she finds the running shoes. I found all twenty feathers, but that was definitely overkill. I probably could have done it with five or six, and I would have found at least that many if I had tried speedrunning immediately to the top of the peak.
I can't imagine speedrunning this game, since the leisurely pace is a major part of the charm, but I'm sure someone has done it.
Behold, the province of Sandonia!
For me, so much of A Short Hike is about mood and lack of consequences. There's no time limit and no expectations, so when I went around the mountain rather than talk to Aunt May at the beginning, that was fine. I got a good sense of the controls, found a few objects that I turned in to people who were looking for them, and just had fun. In games with checklists, it's very easy to get focused on checking off the next item or quest objective, because as humans we look for a sense of accomplishment for a job well done and, as the saying goes, video games allow us to perform feats that we could never do in real life, like being given a task and then completing that task. I get that--I finished all the achievements in this game, like the fishing minigame--but even going everywhere and doing everything only added maybe an hour to my playtime.
That's a mark of my personality, though, not the game. Gameification works on me as well as it does on anyone.
But the reason I wanted to do all of that is that A Short Hike is just fun to play. I played World of Warcraft for literally thousands of hours, and I had a lot of fun, especially with raids and dungeons and some of the longer quest chains. But there are a lot of individual parts of that game that, in isolation, are just boring busywork so I can get to the fun part. Even with my most recent game, Final Fantasy I, I played it and wandered back and forth in the forests killing imps not because those battles were all fun themselves, but because I wanted something simple and nostalgic and soothing to help with the chaos and uncertainty of the Plague Year. With A Short Hike, traversing the island is fun. Climbing and exploring was fun, discovering hidden treasures and new places was fun, talking to the other people on the island was fun, basically every individual part of the game was fun. The only things that I found frustrating were the third race, from the base of the mountain to the summit, and finding all the fish in the journal, and both of those were completely optional.
I spent a bunch of playing time just flying around Hawk Peak, dragging water to the flowers that act as trampolines, climbing up and down, and taking screenshots. Even though the game is about climbing, there's a true-to-physics trait where diving builds up speed, so climbing to a high place, diving for a bit, and then zooming across the landscape was incredibly fun. Once I could routinely get high enough to do that, I would just climb up and then dive, watching the landscape unfold beneath me as I soared around the mountain. Just playing.
That's why they're called games, right? Because we play.
It's really easy for me to get focused on the end goal even in my entertainment. I write reviews of all the games I play and books I read, both as a record of my thoughts that I can share with others and refer back to and also as a way of producing something to show that I wasn't just "wasting time." When I watch anime, after every episode I usually go read online discussions to see if there's anything I missed. I generally apply that to all my entertainment, which is useful insomuch as I know people have read my reviews and wanted to read books or play games because of them, but it also speaks to a deeper issue about how I always think I have to be working toward something and can't just...be.
I can't say that A Short Hike totally worked against that, because I did get all the achievements, but I also spent a lot of time just flying around the mountain or wandering through the forests. I certainly haven't done that in many other games I've played recently, but in A Short Hike, it was fun. Playing the actual game, without aiming toward something, was fun. It's a little sad that I have to keep calling that out as a high point, but nonetheless, it was a true joy to play. For a couple hours, I could just lose myself in flying around a mountain, soaring on thermals and bouncing on flowers, and I can't think of anything else in a game that I needed more.
I first heard of A Short Hike when
With the greatest of ease.
The protagonist of A Short Hike is Claire, who comes with her Aunt May to Hawk Peak to go for "a short hike." After a short intro pre-dawn car ride that explains the premise, the game turns you loose. Aunt May is sitting by the fire, but you don't have to talk to her, and in fact the first thing I did was run around the entire island to see what the limits of the world were. There are a bunch of other characters to talk to or not, as you like, or you could just make straight for the summit. Claire does say she's waiting for an important phone call, and the top of Hawk Peak is the only place with any reception.
The best way to describe the game is "chill." There's no time limit, there's no map or icons, and there's no quest log, so there's never a sense of tasks left undone or anything that I had to accomplish that I was ignoring. The game world is small enough that I didn't need anything more than the compass I received early in my wandering, and I actually totally forgot about it and didn't even turn it on until the very end.
I didn't need it at all. Every time I thought of somewhere I needed to go, it only took a couple minutes to get there or find the NPC. There were never more than a handful of tasks I wanted to do at any time, so the lack of tracking wasn't a burden. The one task I forgot about--finding someone's lost wristwatch before nefarious thieves found it and sold it on the internet--I remembered immediately when I received the watch from someone who had been planning to sell it on the internet. The only real means of progression is finding "golden feathers," which increase Claire's stamina. A Short Hike takes place in a world full of animal people, much like Night in the Woods, but unlike that game the people of A Short Hike are animals in truth instead of just as an artistic choice. Claire is a bird, and she can fly. Golden feathers determine how many times she can flap to gain height before being forced to glide, as well as how long she can climb up cliffs or run once she finds the running shoes. I found all twenty feathers, but that was definitely overkill. I probably could have done it with five or six, and I would have found at least that many if I had tried speedrunning immediately to the top of the peak.
I can't imagine speedrunning this game, since the leisurely pace is a major part of the charm, but I'm sure someone has done it.
Behold, the province of Sandonia!
For me, so much of A Short Hike is about mood and lack of consequences. There's no time limit and no expectations, so when I went around the mountain rather than talk to Aunt May at the beginning, that was fine. I got a good sense of the controls, found a few objects that I turned in to people who were looking for them, and just had fun. In games with checklists, it's very easy to get focused on checking off the next item or quest objective, because as humans we look for a sense of accomplishment for a job well done and, as the saying goes, video games allow us to perform feats that we could never do in real life, like being given a task and then completing that task. I get that--I finished all the achievements in this game, like the fishing minigame--but even going everywhere and doing everything only added maybe an hour to my playtime.
That's a mark of my personality, though, not the game. Gameification works on me as well as it does on anyone.
But the reason I wanted to do all of that is that A Short Hike is just fun to play. I played World of Warcraft for literally thousands of hours, and I had a lot of fun, especially with raids and dungeons and some of the longer quest chains. But there are a lot of individual parts of that game that, in isolation, are just boring busywork so I can get to the fun part. Even with my most recent game, Final Fantasy I, I played it and wandered back and forth in the forests killing imps not because those battles were all fun themselves, but because I wanted something simple and nostalgic and soothing to help with the chaos and uncertainty of the Plague Year. With A Short Hike, traversing the island is fun. Climbing and exploring was fun, discovering hidden treasures and new places was fun, talking to the other people on the island was fun, basically every individual part of the game was fun. The only things that I found frustrating were the third race, from the base of the mountain to the summit, and finding all the fish in the journal, and both of those were completely optional.
I spent a bunch of playing time just flying around Hawk Peak, dragging water to the flowers that act as trampolines, climbing up and down, and taking screenshots. Even though the game is about climbing, there's a true-to-physics trait where diving builds up speed, so climbing to a high place, diving for a bit, and then zooming across the landscape was incredibly fun. Once I could routinely get high enough to do that, I would just climb up and then dive, watching the landscape unfold beneath me as I soared around the mountain. Just playing.
That's why they're called games, right? Because we play.
It's really easy for me to get focused on the end goal even in my entertainment. I write reviews of all the games I play and books I read, both as a record of my thoughts that I can share with others and refer back to and also as a way of producing something to show that I wasn't just "wasting time." When I watch anime, after every episode I usually go read online discussions to see if there's anything I missed. I generally apply that to all my entertainment, which is useful insomuch as I know people have read my reviews and wanted to read books or play games because of them, but it also speaks to a deeper issue about how I always think I have to be working toward something and can't just...be.
I can't say that A Short Hike totally worked against that, because I did get all the achievements, but I also spent a lot of time just flying around the mountain or wandering through the forests. I certainly haven't done that in many other games I've played recently, but in A Short Hike, it was fun. Playing the actual game, without aiming toward something, was fun. It's a little sad that I have to keep calling that out as a high point, but nonetheless, it was a true joy to play. For a couple hours, I could just lose myself in flying around a mountain, soaring on thermals and bouncing on flowers, and I can't think of anything else in a game that I needed more.
no subject
After reading your discussion of playing Untitled Goose Game as a group activity, we bought it and played a bit each day. So thanks! I'd been into the game for ages, but it was specifically the group participation aspect as described by you that sold me on it. :)
no subject