Nature can be mediated in games in exceptional ways. One such game is A Short Hike, in which you play the young bird Claire who is send to her aunt at Hawk Peak Provincial Park for summer. Once there, Claire is eagerly awaiting a phone call from her mother. But there is no reception at the park, and Claire has to traverse to Hawk Peak Summit to use her phone. That’s quite a tough journey for such a small bird.
A Short Hike is open-ended, free, and highly replayable. While it’s an indie that can be finished in a few hours, it has a delightful setting that you want to go back to time and time again. But what is the come about, and why do we find it so moving?
Exploration, Freedom and Nothing
A Short Hike provides an beautiful, artistic setting with charming characters. Designed by Adam Robinson-Yu, this charming title definitely can be described as a wholesome game or a cute game. It contains harming aesthetics, game play designed around comfort and freedom, as well as a small-scale story. Like Wide Ocean Big Jacket and Night Into The Woods, A Short Hike is pastoral and cute, centers around a small community of characters, but also packs a punch. The ending is shaped around connection, both with nature and with other people, which is simply beautiful.
In terms of game play, A Short Hike is a compact free-roaming experience that some reviewers and players even compared to Breath of the Wild. Both provide a gorgeous environment with a lot of freedom. A Short Hike encourages you to spend time wandering and helping other animals. You can collect sea shells, fish, find feathers and so much more. It’s not about a sense of achievement or winning, but about exploration and taking your time. In Polygon, Nicole Carpenter describes the game as being about nothing:
“The game is a subversion of technology and of nothing, a nuanced critique of what it means to do nothing and everything.”
For a game that thrives in nothingness, A Short Hike manages to cover a lot of ground. Yes, you can idle about, but there are so many small tasks, witty dialogues and spaces to explore that you never get bored. In three hours of A Short Hike, I feel like I’ve accomplished far more than in 100+ hours of Tears of The Kingdom. In today’s society, doing nothing has stigma. We need to productive, because that’s how our capitalist system is set up. When we are not working, we are busy checking our phones, creating hobbies, or even buying into a whole wellness system to permit ourselves to do nothing. That’s the time that we can truly think, live and explore.
In today’s games, littered with fetch quests and grinding, I think many designers should have a good look at this indie. A game can be minimalist and still feel like a vast world if you offer players freedom.
Nature and Freedom
A Short Hike thrives in how it mediates natural environments. Soaring down the mountain is a sense of achievement that I haven’t felt in many other games in this way, including Tears of The Kingdom. This indie game might be compact, but it feels like an immense world.
Nature is highly important in today’s games, as I addressed before in this article on ecogaming. In game studies, this is increasingly addressed. For instance, in Playing Nature, Alenda Chang describes games as simulations or replicas of natural spaces that players can experiment with. These environments allow players to experiment and fail. In other words, games offer us the possibility to interact with nature, and see how that plays out. This allows for meaningful interactions, but also for immediate scenarios around the consequences of our actions. Play is ideally suited to simulate nature as well as climate change.
A Short Hike is designed as nature. This is pixeled nature or technological nature. Players focus on journeying towards the peak of a high mountain and face different weather conditions and obstacles. Every rock, tree and waterfall is carefully placed to allow for these challenges, but also as a homage to nature and wildlife. Nature, and specifically mountains, is the core element of the game. In Eurogamer, Chris Tapsell compares A Short Hike to the game Lonely Mountains, and writes:
“…their magic is in the way they spark a kind of heightened awareness of the world you’re playing in, the joy of these games being the joy of being in nature itself.”
A large part of the affect in A Short Hike comes from its landscape and its immense mountain. The summit is more than a place, it has feeling and character. Mountains relate to culture, identity and even sacrality and deities in some cultures. A Short Hike captures just how impressive they are.
While playing A Short Hike, I was reminded of Shadow of The Colossus, one of my favorite games. Set on an open-world island, player character Wander takes down different colossi to save a woman that he loves. We don’t know if she’s his partner or his sister. We don’t know much about his motivations at all. But this is part of the beauty of the game. Playing Shadow of The Colossus is a deeply lonely experience. There are no humans on this island, only ruins. Your only companion is your horse Agro. Still, the nature is very much alive in this game. Each rock, bird, turtle and tree is deliberately placed. Your journey goes from the plains to deserts, forests and the sea. The final colossus is located near a dark, stormy sea. It’s almost as if nature wants to warn the player, or stop them.
Similarly, A Short Hike peaks near its end. Snow storms and difficult weather provide challenges for the player. The end is rewarding and soothing though, with a beautiful view of the aurora borealis from the peak. Claire connects with nature, and with her mother before soaring down again. It’s heartwarming.
Preservation
Creating an immersive game around nature is difficult, but rewarding. The Last of Us, Shadow of the Colossus, Red Dead Redemption, these are the success stories of our time. A Short Hike is no exception then, but it is a great example of this trend and what games can do. As a hiker, I also appreciate how it shows the beauty of hiking, of doing nothing, and just traversing landscapes. Yes, it is also a story about someone who frantically tries to get signal on her phone. But these two things are related in this story of disconnecting, doing nothing, and immersing yourself in nature.
A Short Hike is a Romantic game that captures the beauty of nature and hiking very well. It is not explicitly about climate change, but it is related to preservation. It’s a game about a national park, and wildlife. It mediates what nature means to us. As people, we are moved by nature, moved by mountains and moved by the animals that inhabit these spaces. A Short Hike translates these feelings beautifully. As our physical nature becomes more scarce and increasingly commodified, these type of games make us reflect on nature, freedom and wildlife. What is it worth? And what can we do to preserve it?
Read more Game Theories here:
Dear Esther | The Last Guardian | Deltarune | Night in the Woods | Oxenfree | Abzu | To The Moon | Contrast | Thomas was Alone | Final Fantasy VII R | Final Fantasy VIII | Death Stranding | Stanley Parable | GRIS | The Witness | Monkey Island
Nicolle Lamerichs 