A Short Hike is a beautifully styled adventure game where you travel around as a blue bird, meeting people and completing tasks as you hike to the top of a mountain. It’s fitting that the main character is a bird, because the game sends you on a series of wild goose chases that make the “short hike” feel less so. Though my experience was characterized by stress at times, I can appreciate A Short Hike’s lesson of making peace with the mundane. Playing this game reminded me a lot of why people like running: the idea of personal discipline, connecting with nature, and finding your flow state. Running is a hobby that reminds you that life is about the journey, and A Short Hike challenges you in similar ways to rethink your relationship with instant gratification and true fulfillment.
[Image of fishing in A Short Hike, which forces you to slow down during the activity.]
Part of the adventure in A Short Hike is wandering around and realizing your own abilities. The play experience involves a lot of collecting new tools around the map, but the key tools are golden feathers. Since your max flight is always changing, there’s a lot of trying and failing. Oftentimes, I found myself trying to climb peaks that seemed just out of reach, only to find them reachable from a different angle. At first, I thought this was a design failure, but I slowly realized this uncertainty embodies the idea of “you never know until you try,” which relates to Kagen’s argument in the introduction of Wandering Games that failed attempts as you err and meander matter. In this case, helping you learn more about yourself through slow discovery.
[Image of sliding down a tall mountain I couldn’t have hoped to climb with 10 feathers let alone 0.]
Similarly, the first time you talk to some characters, they might not say anything interesting, but if you keep talking to them, they may offer more direction or something fun (like my sun hat!). Since there are multiple ways to collect golden feathers—you need ~7 to complete the game, and I ended with 12—the game pushes you to talk to everyone, and yet no one person is all that important in the grand scheme of things. This relates to Kagen’s argument that wandering games challenge the assumption that play only matters when it produces clear progress. Arguably, none of the characters were crucial, and you could finish the game very easily in under an hour—but what would you gain? The YouTuber Flamespire described feeling disappointed after speedrunning the game after looking forward to it for a while, and discouraged their viewers from “making the same mistake.” The urge to treat a game as something to efficiently complete stems from the ideas of labor that Kagen raises: we are accustomed to thinking of labor as something that must satisfy some obscure quota or yield measurable progress. A Short Hike flips this on its head, as your labor is primarily for you and advancing your goal of reaching the peak.
[Image of conversation after looking for the headband for many minutes simply because I wanted to help the runner.]
The satisfaction of reaching the top is wonderful, but it’s also brief. And when you dive back down, you’re immediately met with cold water, and the same people from before. Nothing has changed but your perspective.
[Reaching the top of the hike vs. 30 seconds later back in the water where you began.]
This mirrors real life in a poignant way: you may work towards an important goal for a long time (getting into a good college, saving up for tickets to your favorite band, etc.), dreaming about it for years. But once you achieve your goal and the experience is over, fulfillment fades and the need to move on returns—especially with instant gratification, where the cycle is even quicker. Similarly, A Short Hike teaches a lesson about where to seek fulfillment. While the end of the game is nice, my satisfaction comes from mini activities like beachstickball and fishing. I savored those hot springs as if I were in them and loved giving my aunt a shell necklace. Ultimately, these activities are what make A Short Hike worth playing.
[Some of my favorite moments interacting with random characters throughout the game.]
On that note, I want to push back on how far Kagen’s framework should be taken. While her reading of Eastshade makes me suspicious of A Short Hike’s own mini-economies of errands and coins, the two games seem to use those systems differently. In Eastshade, Kagen argues that artistic wandering becomes entangled with labor and currency, turning the fantasy of creative freedom into something closer to gig work. A Short Hike, by contrast, does not seem to romanticize labor so much as use reward as a form of gentle wayfinding. During play, I noticed coins were strategically placed to get you to stand on specific spots or lead you to certain people. These places or conversations are often beautiful and interesting; it would be a pity to miss them. Looking at Adam’s interview with Game Developer, it seems that was the exact sentiment he wanted when developing the game. These rewards did not feel like the point of the game, but small nudges toward the kind of wandering Kagen values: movement that encourages detour and discovery.
Because of this, I hesitate to treat every coin or errand in A Short Hike as evidence of a larger capitalist logic. The game knows players are trained to look for progress, so it uses small signs of progress to guide them toward experiences that are not really about progress at all. Of course, Eastshade is a very different game from this one, so this reading is a bit speculative. But if Adam Robinson-Yu encountered a debate over whether A Short Hike is capitalist, confusion would probably be a reasonable response. I wonder about the limits of applying such sweeping labels to games that clearly aren’t making grand claims about capitalism or ideology at all. Kagen’s framework is still useful, but it makes me hesitant to read every economy in a game as proof of larger political commentary.
