A Short Hike

Short, sweet, atmospheric, relaxing, and cute! I've been a gamer for over 30 years, and this is one of the games that made me the happiest. It's not difficult, it's not challenging, but a relaxing, feel-good game is exactly what I needed. If you're feeling down and want to spend a relaxing evening, pick up this game, and you will not regret it.

Although the controls can be too difficult for young kids, the story and characters are very suitable for a family playing together.

A Short Hike seems to force the player to relax, and enjoy exploring nature, by introducing tasks for completionists which are either easy to complete, or unnecessary in order to advance the game. After a while of scouring the landscape for more useless coins, you'll get infected by the slow pace of the park, and allow yourself to simply enjoy the moment. For a completionist, this is a 2.5 hour experience, max. Gladly, achievements weren't available where I played this, otherwise they would have ruined the experience. Not that A Short Hike is amazing, but it serves as a distraction from my usual type of gaming. The characters and dialogue are nice enough that you actively seek out people to talk to, but dialogue quickly repeats itself, and the map is so small, there aren't that many people to converse with. There is a main objective of climbing the highest peak in the park, but once you allow yourself to relax, it becomes unimportant. Frankly, reaching it only serves to give you a new perspective on your day of frolicking. It uses a cheap and crude method to add depth to the game, yet it works. It makes this game into an enjoyable experience, played for an hour or two, possibly bought for a buck or two, but it offers very little to keep you playing, and has too many problems. The first problem being the art - it's gorgeous, yet seems to be viewed through a filter that extremely pixelates everything, making it hard to stare at the screen for long. It also distorts perspective, making it hard to know how close you are to an object when flying around. The finicky camera doesn't help either. It turns flying into a not-so relaxing experience, especially since if you let go of an arrow key, you take a nose-dive to the ground. You can fish, but catching a fish takes a few seconds, and isn't very rewarding. The map being small, and you being able to fly, also means you see everything there is to see early on, killing the pace of the game. Innovation ends too quickly.

For a little perspective, I've been playing video games for fifty years on various consoles but the last twenty-five years mainly on my PC. Mostly I play with keyboard/mouse rather than a controller. I see a lot of reviews loving the graphics for "A Short Hike" and I thought for sure once I got into it I'd like them too but I truly am not digging the "art style" at all. On top of that I find the keyboard control to be clunky at best. On the up-side it did install and run perfectly on Manjaro so I give the devs props for that.

There is so much to explore in this game, and that should be your mindset - don't rush to the end as quickly as possible, but talk to everyone, hear their stories, help your friends, heal their self-confidence. The graphics are very pretty (although I prefer my pixels to be a bit smaller than the default setting), as is the music. I think some more background ambience could help, though. Apart from that, there is nothing to complain really; I "finished" the game in about 3 hours, but there was still much more content to explore afterwards.