For this critical play, I enjoyed Adam Robinson-Yu’s A Short Hike, released in 2019, on my Steamdeck. You play as Claire, an anthropomorphic bird, and start out by being driven by your mother to a ferry that takes you to Hawk Peak Provincial Park, where your ranger aunt is stationed. This is a place you’re meant to “take a break from everything else going on,” including your phone, as you find out that there’s no cell reception. This poses a problem as you have to take a phone call you’ve been waiting for, and without reception on the island except at the very peak of the mountain, at Hawk Peak, you’re given your main objective for the entire game: get to the top of the mountain. But as much as you may want to run up to the top, skip all the stories and side quests and just get on with your day, this is a walking sim, and you will walk, forcing you to take detours, slow down, and get immersed into the story and experience of NPCs across the island.
So how do you get slowed down throughout the game? Well, your walking speed is already limited, and the gliding mechanic usually only puts you back where you started, but the real slowdown is in the golden feathers mechanic, the stamina currency of the game. You start with 0 golden feathers, and you discover you’ll need them to climb and fly up, both of which will be needed to summit this mountain. So, you try to acquire them. They’re for purchase from the visitor center? You’ll need to look around and find some money, but you get them. Oh no, the visitor center just ran out after 2 feathers.
You try and make it to the summit, but you can’t. You find a guy selling them for more than double the price, but you figure you don’t have a choice and buy all 4 of his feathers. Yet you still don’t have enough feathers, so you’re forced to go explore, talk to NPCs, and end up entangled in the local communities’ happenings and story. So, it’s only after you engage in other’s stories, whether it be guiding an artist to acceptance of their art or engaging in countless games of beachstickball with some kids, you’re finally able to reach the peak and beat the game, and it sure was worth it, as the call was actually from your mother, explaining all the fun stories you interacted with on your way to the peak and the beautiful view you look out upon, making it about both the journey and the destination. Looking at this through the MDA framework, the mechanic of the golden feathers limiting your ability to get to the top is what drives the slowdown dynamic, forcing you to interact with both NPCs and learn about the story, but also forcing you to explore the island and discover what it hides. That forced exploration of both the island and the story of it ultimately forms the aesthetic of discovery that is found throughout the game. By the time you reach the summit, you’ve gotten to explore the rest of the park and reflect on all your memories of earning feathers.
Unlike so many other games in the genre, the island is entirely open to you from the start, limited only by golden feathers, and has no set path. You are free to explore, unlike Firewatch, another great game in the genre, where you have a set story that you are guided through. And while I do enjoy that freedom, one thing that irritated me were the forced perspectives. The game has different zones where your camera will be for the most part locked into one perspective, which while it did result in interesting aspects of needing to work with what you’re given and using set binoculars to see from a different perspective, it became annoying when I was gliding around and my camera would snap into a view that made it harder to enjoy the landscape and often resulted in me crashing into a wall I couldn’t see, which creates a disconnect between the expressive freedom of the gliding mechanic and the rigid constraints of the framing.
Overall, this game was a delight that I can’t wait to 100%, and I would argue a Steamdeck or at least controller is the best way to experience this game if you want to try it for yourself. A Short Hike and its mechanics were both intentionally and incredibly designed, and it is most certainly worth the $8 on Steam.
