One game I really like is A Short Hike, which I played earlier this quarter. It is an indie exploration game where you play as Claire, a bird visiting Hawk Peak Provincial Park. The game invites you to explore the park, climbing, gliding, fishing, and chatting with other characters as you make your way to the mountain’s summit. Rather than pushing a central quest aggressively, the game focuses on a gentle unfolding of activities, discoveries, and optional goals that reward curiosity. Based on the reading, A Short Hike is best described as having a loop-based architecture with light touches of arc structure. This is because activity loops are short, repeatable actions players can engage in order to gain new skills. For example, the player is first tasked with finding golden feathers, which increase your stamina for climbing and gliding (learn). Then, one has to decide where to get it, because you can either buy it with money you gather or you can try to look for it by doing a quest for an NPC (decide). Then, you take the action of doing that quest (action), and you have to play within the constraints of the game, like how fast you can go, how high you can climb, and how widespread the resources are (rules). Eventually, you find the golden feather and you are able to go onto new parts of the game, in which you will have to do another set of challenges to gain more golden feathers (feedback). These loops are feed into one another, thus inviting more exploration and creating a natural learning loop.
