A Short Hike - In Depth Analysis and Review SCRIPT
POSTER'S NOTE: This script may have been slightly edited when doing the voice over for the video. Apologies about any inaccuracies.
A Short Hike - Indepth Review
Big spoiler warning right off the bat with this video, I do not know how to talk about this game without spoiling either massive parts of what the game is trying to convey to you or what the game wants you to experience. I know this sounds really cheesy but this game works at its absolute best when you know nothing about it aside from the surface level screenshots. If you want a spoiler free overview of what the game is, it’s an open world exploration game that’s essentially a walking simulator. The game contains no real “gameplay” like fighting or difficult platforming, it is a casual experience. And you absolutely should not be going into this game expecting it to be something more than that. My overall opinion for this review is that this game is an absolutely fantastic experience that you should play. The only actual gripe I have with the game is that the price point is going to be a little too high for some people’s standards, especially if you like to get the most mileage out of your money. I would say the best way to legally get ahold of this game would be to subscribe to Humble Monthly and pick this game up from the Humble Trove. You essentially get access to this game for free alongside all of your Humble Monthly games, so getting it through this service is probably the best way to go for most people. Okay that’s all the spoiler free information I can give away, I highly recommend you go play this game before you watch this video because I will be spoiling what the game wants to convey and how the game goes about doing that. This video will not be going anywhere, have fun.
At the core of A Short Hike, the game isn’t even about the hike. The title straight out lies to you. The game begins with a dialogue between the protagonist Claire, and her mother as they drive out towards where Claire, and the player, will be residing for the rest of the game. Claire then appears outside of her cabin amongst a bright and sunny day, where the first character you meet: Ranger, or Aunt May will inquire about why she has been inside all day. To which you, the player, will promptly learn that you’re expecting a phone call, and there’s no service on any part of the island, except for the summit of Hawk Peak. And from there you’ve been given your first quest, get to the summit and get your phone call. Just as a little break off, it is possible to wholly avoid this part of the game by simply diving into the ocean and going the opposite direction. However, assuming you take the natural progression path, when you begin walking down the pathway and receive a small tutorial dialogue on how to glide, you’ll find Jen sitting by the beach. Talking to her provides you another quest: bring back 15 sea shells. Now sea shells aren’t hard to find, you just need to scout out the beaches until you’ve collected enough of them, however there’s a catch and I think you know where this is going. By going out to collect these sea shells you will stumble upon new things to explore and new people to talk to, and those people are also going to give you new quests or tasks to do.
This is the foundation for which the game is built on, because before you know it, in an almost Skyrim-like fashion, you will be far off from the main quest doing all of these different little side gigs. And what started as a short hike, turns into a one to two hour adventure where you do everything else except the hike that you’re told to do. The game even meta-mentions that this would happen by having one of the characters ask Claire if she feels “lost and directionless,” and then give you a compass. There’s two other ways to interpret this off the top of my head: one, is that this is just a joke to introduce the compass, and yeah that’s pretty much it. Or two, which can be tied to the end of the game, so we’ll come back to this. But through these little micro quests, you are actually experiencing the game the way that it’s intended to be played. You run around, meet all these people, do all these tasks for them, go fishing and gliding, and look through binoculars to see if you missed anything below, and this all has a narrative purpose.
You’re never told why you come to this island besides just, “It’s nice to get out of the city.” And you never learn anything about that as you continue playing the game, just that you’re waiting for a phone call. It’s a well wrapped scheme of omission that aims to recontextualize, the entire game. Because when you get to the summit of Hawk Peak, Claire finally gets that phone call, at what couldn’t be a more convenient time. Claire has actually forgotten that this was supposed to happen, and she has a heartfelt conversation with her mother where you learn that her mother has gone through surgery and that she wasn’t told anyone about it until after the fact. It’s never specified when this surgery happened, how Claire found out, or how long she has even been on the island, you just have to assume that she’s been there long enough that people know her name. But that information isn’t important, what’s important is that Claire’s mom probably brought her here to make her forget about the surgery or the worries that encompass it. The player is never told this information because the game wants you to feel the same way Claire does where you can just forget about your worries and have fun. It’s quite obvious how this information is introduced and then very quickly swept under the rug with no impact as you travel the Hawk Peak updraft back to your cabin. You’ll also speak with Aunt May and Claire will tell her that the surgery went okay and that things are fine, and then Claire will recount the experiences that both her and the player have gone through during the game. And that’s where this final interpretation of the line “lost and directionless” comes in because that could be Claire’s mental state in response to the news about the surgery. The hike is a metaphor for getting over worry and you don’t need to know that because it’s not relevant to the player’s overall experience.
That’s where I was primarily impressed with this game, the writing is almost too good for a Humble funded indie project made by one guy with help from a musician. And I’ve dedicated three paragraphs just to talk about the writing and I could write so much more about the animal crossing styled characters and humor, the side stories that these characters have that you can actively follow. On my first playthrough I came across these guys climbing up some play rock walls and I was told to acquire a golden feather and come back, but when you get a golden feather you’re already told how to climb and so I did just that. I climbed around and used my feathers for jumps and forgot about those guys back there. But they actually have dialogue if you come back and climb up these walls, infact through doing this you learn that they’re actually training to climb Hawk Peak and you’ll be able to spot these guys climbing the mountain later on through triggering this dialogue. And there’s so many more examples of this throughout the game like an artist suffering from creative blockage, or someone’s relative wanting you to remind them to hydrate themselves and take breaks. It all makes the world feel really expansive and it’s actually packed so full of content that even though I was pretty thorough in trying to explore and do everything I could, I still missed stuff. I didn’t even get the achievement for collecting all of the golden feathers, and when my girlfriend played she’d tell me about things that I had forgotten about or outright never found and experienced. It’s an exploration sandbox that leads to everyone having their own journey with the game. And that ending? You can complete that as early as you want, the speedrun for this game is 3 minutes and they completely bypass the minimum recommendations that the game gives you. You don’t even have to explore the world outside of just getting enough golden feathers to get to the peak. In a way it’s a game that feels personalized for everyone that plays it.
*ugh* I haven’t even gotten to the gameplay, graphics, or music. The biggest elephant in the room here is the retrograde graphics. Pixel art as an artform is often overdone in indie games because, let’s face the facts, many indie developers are not artists. Well actually Adam is, but we’ll get back to this. There’s something different about the way that the pixel art is incorporated in this game. You can tell because you’re able to swing your camera around in the game and the only way this would be possible is if everything was actually modeled and some form of pixelation was thrown over the visuals. Which means that this art style is entirely deliberate, and actually means something to Adam, the developer. A different art style could’ve been used for this game and still would’ve achieved the same general effect. In fact, the game features a cheat code that completely removes the pixelation, and it looks great! Some of the models are a little scuffed and everything is generally low poly, but with a little bit of polishing this art style could’ve worked. It turns out that this pixelation effect comes from a Unity package called GBCamera which essentially renders the visuals of the game at a small resolution, and has optional bit coloring, classic to the gameboy. At first I thought this was a mere visual effect just put over the game because the Itch.io description isn’t too descriptive on how it actually works. So I decided to ask Adam himself, and I also asked why he decided to use pixel art as the pivotal piece in his art style. And I actually got answers. GBCamera is essentially just a renderer that is capable of rendering in small resolutions that then can be blown up to the resolution of the player’s monitor. For why he used this for his game, he said he simply likes pixel art and that it allows him to make assets faster.
But something caught my attention with the way he worded his response, he thinks the art style is interesting and unique. Now while pixel art in of itself is not at all unique as it’s been pretty common throughout the history of gaming in many different forms, it’s not been quite used in this form before where a fully 3D game is pixelated. The only games that really cross my mind on this is Devil Daggers and DS games. Yeah you heard me right, DS games. The DS, much like A Short Hike, was capable of rendering 3D environments and models, the problem was that the DS had a limited resolution meaning that everything on screen was always very pixelated unless the assets were already based on pixel art. And that, in a way, drove the artistic direction that many DS games took. If things were small, they had to be distinguishable. If things were a fully detailed 3D world, it had to be simplified to avoid being noisy or ugly. The best overall analysis I can give of Adam’s opinion on the style is that he thinks games that are proactively retrograded is unique, and I have to say I agree. It’s a fresh breath of air, and Adam even had the foresight to include an option in the game to select how much the game is pixelated, because it can be an eyesore. My only gripe with this style is that there’s no option just to turn the pixelation off. There’s all of these other options like shadows, color corrections, image quality, etc. but there’s no option to just turn it off. As of the date of this video going up, it has been commented on that Adam has at least thought about adding this option, and if it is in the game by the time this video goes up I’ll leave a little message on the screen. It should also be noted that Adam has used this style in some of his other games, notably You’re Dead in Space and The Night That Speaks so clearly Adam has experience with this art style and he likes it enough to continue using and innovating on it. The somewhat ironic thing here is that You’re Dead in Space is very comparable to Devil Daggers in the sense that they are pixelated hoard shooters where you are expected to eventually die.
Let’s take a couple steps back to when I said that Adam was an artist, and the biggest piece of evidence that I’m going to use for this claim is Adam’s upcoming “Untitled” RPG. Comparing this RPG to Adam’s other games, even A Short Hike, immediately gives off the vibe of, “This was not created by the same person.” But when I sent Adam some questions, one of those asked if Adam was the leading artist for A Short Hike and if he was the lead artist for his upcoming RPG. Basically, he said that yes, he does most of the art assets, most because he does get help from some of his friends. And I just want to point out just how good his upcoming RPG looks. It appears pretty based on Paper Mario but it seems to be adding some more depth to that art style. It looks really good, and so does A Short Hike, and Adam should get the credit that he deserves.
Something else that is really good is the gameplay. Outside of just walking around and jumping, as you progress through the game you will earn the ability to sprint, do multiple mid air jumps, climb, dive, glide, speed glide, and you’ll find special feathers that give you the ability to jump higher and use less stamina while climbing. All of these features make the game feel much like a metroidvania and after you spend a couple hours in the game you’ll be jumping halfway up the map and doing speed glides everywhere you want to go. You’re given all the tools you need right from the beginning and everything you pickup is just upgrades that let you use those tools better. And you’re given a lot of freedom and versatility with those tools. And I would chalk that up to the world design. Everything is very compact and close together, and sometimes just stacked on top of each other in a way that makes traversing the island simple, time efficient, and just exciting. You don’t need to spend five minutes walking in one direction to get to a certain area when everything is pretty much just right next to each other with shortcuts, bounce flowers, and even an updraft to make traversing even easier that will continually get easier as you play the game. An example of this is the, what I’m going to call, Breath of the Wild climb that Claire is suited with. You’re able to climb up any slope or building granted that you have enough feathers left, collecting more feathers or even collecting the silver feathers allows you to climb for longer. The same goes for your jumps, collect more feathers to do more jumps, collect silver feathers to jump higher each time.
Another central piece of Claire’s moveset is her gliding ability and the potential you have for drastically improving how you use it. There’s a hidden island you can travel to that will teach you how to dive into a speed glide, and when you get the technique down you find that the game becomes very open. Your methods of travel will basically revolve around using speed glides to travel the longer distances around the island because it is just that fast. And while we talk about openness and speed, we should talk about speedruns. It’s natural for a game that can be completed at any time to be easy to speedrun, but speedrunners have, naturally, found a way to beat the game with less than the recommended amount of golden feathers. This is because of two methods, one being a bug and the other a feature. The first one is, what I’ll deem, chest jumping where you jump off of a chest while it’s opening animation is playing. And the other is these bouncy flowers that you provide water to in order to unlock shortcuts around the island. Whether intentional or not speedrunners have been able to use these methods to cut the game’s length down to less than three minutes. That might not sound like that incredible of a feat, but it highlights just how many different ways you can play and navigate A Short Hike. If you don’t want to be on your feet for the duration of the game, then you don’t have to. If you want to play the game by finding and doing the least amount of things possible, then you can even if it may defeat the purpose of the game. In these ways A Short Hike is comparable to a sandbox in the way that the game is very open with very little limiting rules or mechanics and in fact promotes the free use of what it provides you. That is what makes the gameplay effective at allowing the player to access the contents of its game.
Finally, I want to address the music, and I’m not a music guy so I can’t provide very complex insight on it, so it’s all going to be pretty basic. And in just one word, the music is good. The soundtrack contains exactly the type of music you’d expect from a game like this, while having a somewhat Celeste-y vibe to it as you progress up the hiking trail. I contacted Mark Sparling, the composer, and asked him some questions about what direction he was given and what his inspirations were. He actually gave a pretty drawn out answer to my questions which I can summarize down to: Adam and Mark discussed what type of music to use and reminisced on similar music that had the same tone such as Animal Crossing, Legend of Zelda, studio Ghibli’s music, as well as music artists and bands such as Sufjan Stevens, Punch Brothers, and Nickel Creek. Mark then produced Beach Buds along with an assortment of different tracks. However Beach Buds ultimately stuck and the rest of the game’s soundtrack fell into place.
The game features a simplistic, yet dynamic music system where certain parts of music tracks or different tracks altogether play in corresponding areas that gives the game a sense of progression. It should be noted that this was Mark’s idea. This system works well in correspondence to how varied the music is and how the music has been produced in the way that one music track holds different “stages” of music. As a system designed to derail players from feeling like the music is too monotonous, it’s pretty good at doing just that despite its simplicity. There wasn’t one time where I thought, “Man I don’t want to listen to this anymore,” over my three playthroughs.
It should also be pointed out that the music is well diversified. It’s a mixture of banjo, chiptune, electronic beats, piano, synth, etc. that’s played in an order throughout the game that is all about something that you don’t understand until you’ve beaten the game. And that’s Claire and the emotional baggage she carries throughout the game as you climb up her personal mountain. Music adds so much to video games, especially ones like this, that people often don’t think about or fully comprehend. And it’s important that the music is done right and it fits the settings and encourages players to be immersed in their experience. Just imagine if the game had no music, or... [rock music] But seriously, I can surely say that the music for A Short Hike does exactly the former, it’s simple yet effective in doing what it needs to do while adding and strengthening the narrative and setting. And while this video isn’t a review for the soundtrack, five dollars nets you the game’s music that comes in long and short versions so that you can listen to either the commercial releases intended for listening audiences or experience the full amount of effort that went into the music.
A Short Hike is a game that tells you everything you need to know right in the title. However it’s a game that’s simultaneously about a short hike while also not being about the hike at all. This is one of those, “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey,” kind of games because the way that it’s structured ensures there will be distractions among every step of the way. Whether that’s being asked to find an item, collect a certain amount of feathers, even just being exposed to the beautiful scenery of the game and wanting to see more. A Short Hike is about taking your time to explore and climb a beautiful, lively environment full of inhabitants that might just remind you of certain games you’ve played in the past with retrograde graphics comparable to the DS days. Barring external factors such as pricing, length, distribution platforms, etc. If I had to give a review score for this game, it would easily be, at the lowest, an 8/10. It doesn’t overstay its welcome, and if you’re willing to put $8 down for the game I’d highly recommend purchasing it through Steam or Itch.io.
