Finally, a game I thoroughly enjoyed from start to finish. What made A Short Hike so wonderful was that I was relaxed. I wanted to keep playing for the sake of playing and extending the adventure. Summiting Hawk Peak was a great achievement in the context of the game, but the leisure that was intertwined with the storyline of the game made me want to come back after Claire took her nap (and thus, technically ended the game) and keep going. Out of all the games we have played so far, this is the only game that has made me want to come back and keep playing to complete the extra side quests, such as finding all the golden feathers or finding the treasure that is buried around the islands.
From the perspective of someone like me, who is not used to playing video games and is still getting the hang of hand-eye coordination in the context of video games, the relaxed ambience of A Short Hike made me feel less guilty about not being able to play like other more experienced gamers. For example, as fun as Bastion was, I was just stressed and anxious the entire time because the game was obviously built for someone with more gaming knowledge than me. With A Short Hike, it made me more excited to play because I could not die and I could not make a mistake. Each side quest and NPC was there to invite Claire’s exploration of the island and her eventual end goal of reaching Hawk Peak.
This relaxation, I think, is itself a critical observation about what most games deny us. If Eastshade, as Kagen argues, is a fantasy of work disguised as leisurely wandering, A Short Hike is a fantasy of guilt-free leisure. Kagen notes that under late capitalism, the “meandering, antiwork pleasure offered by non-task-oriented games” has become “stressful and unpleasant” because we have been trained to feel guilty whenever we are not being productive (Intro, p. 5). This guilt is something many of us know intimately, and as a perfectionist, Type-A student who rarely stops worrying, I recognized it instantly in Kagen’s description.
This is exactly the anxiety Eastshade fails to dissolve. Kagen shows how the game’s PC “becomes an attentive errand runner almost immediately,” with friendliness “monetized and rewarded” and exploration gated behind glowstones earned through unpaid labor (Ch. 3, pp. 53-54). What looks like a leisurely wandering game is actually an RPG that reinstates the labor-reward feedback loop in a gentler form.
A Short Hike refuses this structure. The side quests do not gate progress; Claire can summit Hawk Peak without helping the hiker find her headband, winning the beachstickball game, or finding the 15 shells. The golden feathers expand what Claire can do but never punish me for skipping them. As I noticed in my own play, “I could not die and I could not make a mistake.” This is precisely what makes the game’s leisure feel real rather than performed. The game removes the punishment side of the labor equation from the source of the anxiety Kagen describes. A Short Hike is not free of structure. There are coins to collect, feathers to find, fish to catch, but none of these mechanics punish refusal. The structure invites without requiring.
This is why my desire to keep playing after Claire’s nap matters as more than a personal preference. In Eastshade, when night falls and the PC gets cold, the game “transports you automatically to your previous bedroom” (Ch. 3, p. 54), which Kagen reads as the erasure of poverty in service of fantasy. The game immediately encourages a smoothing-over of any inconvenience that might mar the dream of being a wandering artist. On the other hand, Claire’s nap functions differently. It is not erasing hardship; it is treating rest as a meaningful part of the adventure rather than an interruption of it. The game wants her to rest because it can be a normal part of a leisurely afternoon, and it wants me to come back afterward not because there is more work to do but because there is more island to enjoy.
Kagen ends her introduction with Brendan Keogh’s observation that “wandering without an end point feels very uncomfortable… We want to stop, but we can’t just stop” (Intro, p. 27). A Short Hike solves this elegantly: there is a clear summit, a clear phone call, a clear return home, but reaching the peak does not lock me out of the world. I am given permission to stop and permission to continue, and neither choice is coded as failure. Where Eastshade offers an entire reimagined life only to refill it with errands, A Short Hike offers only an afternoon and protects that afternoon’s emptiness and freedom to explore leisure. A Short Hike fantasizes a feeling I might want to have. And in giving me that feeling of being relaxed, unhurried, unpunished, it does what no other game we have played has managed to do.
