[Beware spoilers for A Short Hike.]
The sentiment “It’s about the journey, not the destination,” often attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, has become something of a platitude. The kind of thing we nod at without quite believing. We know we should slow down to appreciate life’s small joys, but who actually has time for that? adamgryu’s 2019 wandering game A Short Hike makes a surprisingly persuasive case that we should make time to slow down. As scholar Melissa Kagen wrote in her 2022 book Wandering Games, A Short Hike “helps us imagine what it would be–what it might be–to walk our way into a different sort of world,” a world where we stopped treating detours as failures and started seeing them as essential to our journey.
In A Short Hike, you play as Claire, a bird visiting her aunt at Hawk Peak Provincial Park. She’s waiting for an important phone call, but there’s no cell reception anywhere except the park’s highest point, Hawk Peak. Her aunt points her toward Hawk Peak Trail, and Claire grudgingly starts her journey. We’ve all been in Claire’s position, knowing where we need to go and why, even if we’re not thrilled about the effort required to get there. The question is: do we beeline for our destination, or do we stop to enjoy the scenery?
If you choose the former, making straight for the summit without deviation, you’ll quickly hit a literal and metaphorical wall. A sign warns: “NOTICE: Hawk Peak Trail is a strenuous hike! You might need golden feathers to complete it.” Claire can buy these feathers from nearby NPCs, but she has no money. The game has effectively locked you out of your goal. This mechanic resonated with my own experience being rejected for managerial positions because I lacked my own type of golden feather–leadership experience. And like Claire, I had no obvious way to obtain it.
But here’s where A Short Hike subverts expectations. As Kagen observes, the game makes this “gating mechanic feel like a nudge to explore your world a bit more” rather than a punishment. Venture off the beaten path and you’ll find coins to buy golden feathers, or discover the feathers themselves hidden in the wild. The game doesn’t just permit wandering, it rewards it materially and aesthetically. “Wandering around [the island] is framed as an aesthetic luxury, to be savored as a fundamental part of your experience,” Kagen writes. Signs throughout the park reinforce this, cheerfully noting that “Although this island is known for its titular mountain peak, it is also home to a number of beautiful beaches and forests!”
This mirrors how my own career impasse resolved itself. My wandering, taking on volunteer roles I hadn’t initially considered, led me to the leadership experience I needed, which opened doors to the managerial positions I’d originally wanted. I never would have found that pathway if I’d stayed rigidly focused on my original destination. As Kagen puts it, we’re “not wandering away from the point; the wandering is the point.”
The game reinforces this philosophy through its treatment of relationships. “Anthropomorphic NPCs endear themselves to you with their gentle grumbles and requests, which never seem high stakes,” Kagen notes, “and you find yourself in a typical RPG interaction model wherein friendliness is monetized and rewarded” with quality of life improvements that ease your journey. The parallel to real life is striking. “Running errands and doing unpaid favors allows you to happen upon the few actions that will earn you the [resources] you need to [reach your goal],” as Kagen observes. Think back to the last conversation you had that you originally thought was superfluous, but it ultimately led to insights and opportunities you couldn’t have previously dreamed of. This is the beauty of exploration.
When Claire finally reaches Hawk Peak’s summit, she’s rewarded with a breathtaking aurora-borealis-esque vista. This moment of beauty crystallizes what the game has been arguing all along: wandering isn’t a distraction from life’s rewards but the very mechanism that unlocks them. Yes, as Kagen acknowledges, “wandering without an end point feels very uncomfortable,” but it’s also the state in which the most glorious and wonderful things can happen.
A Short Hike succeeds because it doesn’t just tell us to appreciate the journey, it shows us a world where doing so is the only viable strategy. It transforms a familiar truism into a lived experience, proving that the detours, the conversations, the moments we spend helping others, or simply exploring for exploration’s sake, aren’t luxuries we can’t afford but necessities we can’t do without.
So wherever you are in your journey as you read this, whatever destination you’re fixated on reaching, are you going to beeline for your destination, or will you stop to enjoy the scenery?
