On the surface, “A Short Hike” seems like it is exactly what the name suggests. We start by getting the clear task of making it to Hawk’s Peak, which we reach by hiking the trail. At the destination of the peak, my character would take a phone call and hear the answer to the question she was nervous about. But as I started to make my journey towards this, I was quickly distracted and sidetracked with a variety of other miscellaneous tasks.
Similarly to how Kagen reads “Eastshade” as a fantasy of work, “A Short Hike” is a fantasy of escape. However, it is not purely a positive fantasy about escaping stress, but rather, highlights the downsides of escape and avoidance. While the game makes escape feel like a welcome, harmless distraction, Claire’s quest-filled hike is partially a way to avoid confronting her anxiety about her important phone call. These extra tasks may serve as a distraction, but they don’t actually remove this anxiety.
When I was collecting shells or asked to find a watch, I was no longer thinking about my phone call, but searching for the shells and wondering what the next step would be. This marks the interchange between actual emotional uncertainty with low-stakes, unserious worries. My question of “what is awaiting me on this call?” turned into “where is my next coin?”. This gave me a sense of control, because the latter question was something that I could quickly address and solve, escaping something that wasn’t in my hands.
At times, the game felt very relaxing – going around the mountain, meeting people, completing tasks. But other times, the game became frustrating. I felt like I wasn’t making enough progress towards my real goal and was getting distracted. This idea agrees with Kagen’s point about the discomfort of unproductive play. Kagen writes that games have trained people to expect a loop where you “complete a task, receive a reward”. “A Short Hike” goes against successful productivity because there is no failure, fight, or time limit. I felt incredibly unproductive when I wasn’t making visible progress towards my goal. This reveals the other side of escape, where although the emotional stress is avoided, there is a sense of dissatisfaction and guilt – similar to the feelings associated with procrastination.
The core tension of the game lies in the way the game handles purpose. On one hand, “A Short Hike” criticizes direct, goal oriented play by making the journey more important than the summit. On the other hand, it also demonstrates how difficult it is to actually be truly free from the weight of the destination. Even when the player is supposedly relaxing and avoiding their real task at hand, the game gives them smaller tasks to complete, showing how escape just becomes another checklist.
At the end, the checklist finally disappears. We make it to the peak and take the phone call that we have been waiting for since the start of the game. This phone call reveals that the hike was never just a hike, but a way of delaying a complicated and heavy feeling. This is why “A Short Hike” is a fantasy of escape: it displays avoidance as a productive and social idea, and tries to convince the player that distraction is the same as peace. But even if we collect every coin, talk to every person, and explore the entire island, escape does not make the difficult thing disappear, it just makes the path back to it a bit more pleasant.
