A Short Hike feels like the most innocent game. You’re a little bird visiting her aunt at Hawk Peak Provincial Park, and the whole point is to climb to the top of the mountain. The sun is warm, the pixel art is soft, and nobody is asking you to fight anything. You just walk, glide, and chat with the other visitors you meet along the way. It feels like a break from everything, especially from the violence in Bastion.
But Melissa Kagen, in Wandering Games, gives us a useful question to sit with: what is the game actually asking you to do, underneath the gentleness? Kagen argues that games like these often promise freedom from late capitalism’s obsession with productivity, but then quietly smuggle that same logic back in through their mechanics. The wandering looks free, but the economy is still running.
A Short Hike is a perfect example of this, except it does something sneakier than most. Claire needs golden feathers to climb higher, and she collects them by helping the people she meets along the way. She gives a marathoner a headband to replace the one she has lost. She takes a bored kid out on a boat for a speed boat ride. She returns a stolen watch, helps someone fish, and plays a game of beach volleyball. None of these things feel like tasks. Nobody hands Claire a quest log. The game never says “do this and you’ll be rewarded.” The feather just appears afterward, almost like a surprise, as if the kindness itself produced something good in the world.
This is where the game gets interesting to think about. Kagen describes how the “do what you love” philosophy works in late capitalism: it makes labor feel like passion, so you stop noticing you’re working. In A Short Hike, the equivalent move is making labor feel like friendship. Claire isn’t grinding for feathers, she’s just being a good person. The fact that being a good person also happens to get her exactly what she needs to reach the summit is something the game never draws attention to. The economy is invisible because it runs entirely through care.
What makes this complicated, and worth defending a little, is that the game doesn’t feel cynical about it. Unlike the gig economy Kagen critiques, where workers do emotional labor for platforms that pocket the profit, Claire’s kindness helps the people she meets. The marathoner gets more motivated to win after receiving the headband. The bored kid has an adventure, and both she and Claire get to race to reach all flagposts. The exchanges are mutual in a way that real gig work rarely does. So is the game reproducing a capitalist logic, or imagining a better version of one, where care is valuable, and helping each other is how we all get where we’re going?
I think it’s both, and that tension is what makes A Short Hike more interesting than a simple cozy game. On the surface it delivers exactly what Kagen says wandering games promise: slow, purposeless, gentle play that feels nothing like work. But underneath, every act of kindness is quietly doing structural work, building the feather count, enabling the climb, completing the game. A Short Hike keeps its economy so soft and warm that you only notice it once you stop playing and start thinking back.
That moment of noticing is, I think, what the game earns. It doesn’t expose its own logic, you have to do that yourself. But when you do, you start to wonder whether kindness was ever really free, or whether the most human thing about us is that we’ve always needed each other to get to the top.
