A Short Hike: Walking as Storytelling
A Short Hike is a 2019 indie walking simulator developed by Adam Robinson-Yu, available on PC, Nintendo Switch, and other platforms. In it, you play as Claire, a young bird trying to reach the summit of Hawk Peak Provincial Park. The premise is simple, but the game uses that simplicity deliberately. Every design decision, from how you move to what you find along the way, reinforces the same idea: the journey matters more than the destination.
Walking as the Core Mechanic
In most games, walking is a means to an end. In A Short Hike, it is the point. The game builds its story through exploration rather than exposition. You are given a loose overarching goal of reaching the mountaintop, but the path there is filled with small side quests, chance encounters with other park visitors, and pockets of scenery worth stopping for. None of these feel forced. Playing it, I never found myself thinking “I need to go to X to find Y” in the transactional way that many open-world games produce. Instead, I wandered because the world was genuinely inviting, and the tasks I picked up felt like natural byproducts of that wandering.
The golden feather mechanic is a good example of how the game incentivizes exploration organically. Feathers increase Claire’s stamina for climbing and flying, and you collect them by exploring, talking to characters, or purchasing them from vendors scattered across the island. The game never tells you to go find feathers. You discover them because you are already curious about what is around the next corner. The mechanic rewards the behavior the game is already encouraging, rather than demanding it.
The flying mechanic adds another layer to this. Being able to glide off ledges and dip into small caves on the mountainside opens up the environment in a way that pure walking would not. It gives the traversal a sense of lightness and whimsy that fits the tone of the game perfectly. More importantly, it makes the world feel like something worth exploring from every angle, not just the path forward.
Relation to Course Concepts and Readings
Through the lens of MDA, the core mechanic of walking and flying produces dynamics of unhurried exploration, which in turn generates the aesthetic of discovery and quiet wonder. This aligns with Nicole Clark’s point in the Salon reading that walking sims make players “recognize and consider decisions and the way they influence gaming outcomes and environments.” In A Short Hike, the formal element most at work is the game world itself. Robinson-Yu designed the island as a layered space where verticality, density of characters, and visual variety all do narrative work. The mountain is not just a goal to reach. It is a structure that shapes how the story unfolds.
Ethics: Violence and the Implications of Its Absence
Violence played no role in A Short Hike. There are no enemies, no fail states tied to conflict, and no combat mechanics whatsoever. Compared to games like those played in studio that use violence as a primary driver of engagement, the absence here is striking because it reframes what “challenge” can mean in a game. The difficulty is not in defeating something but in slowing down enough to pay attention.
In my opinion, this matters for how the story is told. In violent games, the player’s relationship to the world is often adversarial. You are moving through a space in order to overcome it. In A Short Hike, the relationship is more like a visit. You are a guest in a place that already exists, talking to people who have their own things going on. That shift in dynamic changes what the game is asking of you emotionally. Rather than the adrenaline loop of threat and resolution, the game builds something quieter: a sense of warmth and belonging. The exclusion of violence is not just an aesthetic choice but a structural one that determines what kind of emotional experience is even possible.
