A Short Hike (

2019

)

Alright, seriously guys what's the deal with all these bright, cartoony indie video games that deal with serious issues? I first noticed this trend when I played Celeste [2017], a bright 2D platformer where the main character was wrestling with anxiety and depression while climbing a mountain. Then I played Night in the Woods [2017], a game about the cartoony animal people of Possum Springs, where the main character suffered a nervous breakdown in her first semester of college and the town in economically depressed and slowly crumbling. Now there's A Short Hike, which follows an anthropomorphic bird as she makes her way up a mountain to get cell phone reception. Of course, she needs to get cell phone service so she can call her mom and see if she's okay after her surgery. I just do not get the appeal of making a game that is dealing with adult issues and dressing it up like the target audience is five-year-olds. Were this a one-off occurrence I could chalk it up to the creator's idiosyncrasies, but at this point, it's a bonafide trend, particularly among Canadian game developers (all these games are dripping with that sickly sweet maple syrup touch).

Part of it is, no doubt, the continued infantilization of young adults, teenagers, and oddly enough children themselves. The effect is most obvious with college students and young adults because there the effect is most dramatic. The world, throughout my lifetime, has gone from treating college students as adults to fretting over their safety and hurt feelings to a degree that I find rather worrying. The notion that legal adults at the most prestigious colleges in the world can manage their social relationships is now a cause for a heated debate, and perversely enough it often the students themselves demanding more adult supervision. Yet the evidence of this creeping infantilization can be seen with younger people as well. When my parents were kids, they were expected to manage their own affairs to a much greater extent and a certain amount of mischief and adventures were not only tolerated but encouraged. Tellingly, I remember my mother snapping at me when I mentioned the plot of the movie Stand By Me (1986) was a bit unrealistic. “The movie is fine,” she told me “Your life is the one that's unrealistic.” Kids in my time and after were protected with so much bubble wrap that they could go their whole young lives without any idea of what hardship is and consequently no idea what responsibility is. Granted, this is a phenomenon that is mostly confined to the upper and middle classes, but that doesn't make it any less of a concern. Indeed it's only more troubling because the children that emerge from these affluent cocoons will have a disproportionate influence on the world.

This is a trend that I find cause for some degree of concern. Kids need to grow up, not all at once mind you, but steadily over the course of their formative years. Part of growing up means facing the world in all it's ugly imperfections and brutal inequity and accepting your place within it. You can't do that when the people around you are always hiding just how unfair and cruel the world is from you, nor can you do it when every troubling lesson is wrapped up in a cutesy, non-threatening package. Hopefully, this trend is reaching its apogee, as the first infantilized generation begins to enter into the work-force, and will, in turn, give their kids the tough love that their parents were sure would traumatize them but that their grandparents were equally sure was an important stage in development. If not, I'm worried that before long we'll all wind up like the gigantic, helpless babies in WALL-E (2008).

The marrying of infantile presentation with mature concepts in games like Night in the Woods [2017] and A Short Hike comes across as especially troubling. Invariably they feel either like they are trying to force children into contact with concepts that are too mature for them, or they are worried that their adult audience will not have the emotional fortitude to deal with serious topics unless they are wrapped up in the most blandly inoffensive package. The former is cause for some concern while the latter is just downright pathetic and I'm left wondering whether I should feel insulted or disgusted. There's just something fundamentally wrong about the presentation in games, a wrongness that creeps in and leaves an otherwise inoffensive game with some sickly taint.

That said, despite being a symptom of a cultural shift I find deeply worrying, A Short Hike is not a bad little game when judged on its technical merits. The map walks a fine line between being just big enough to get lost in (at least when you're starting out) but not so big that every side quest or backtrack becomes a tedious commute. The graphics have a charming PSX lo-fi quality to them. When you reach vistas that give you a commanding view of the rest of the map, rather than have pop-in the visuals fade into a crude outline of themselves like you're looking at an old map. I'm just about the hardest person in the world to charm with this art style (indeed, I outright despise the cutsey-pie Canadian school of design that A Short Hike hails from), but even I found myself pleasantly surprised by the game's visuals. The music shifts and changes based on your position on the map. This is pretty nice, but there are some transitional parts of the world where you'll get overlapping soundtracks that sound downright awful. They are the exception rather than the rule, but it happens enough to warrant mention.

The game plays like a scaled-down, combat-free version of Zelda: Breath of the Wild [2017]. From the start of the game, your character can jump and glide but is completely incapable of getting up any of the small cliffs you'll need to climb to reach the top of the mountain. To advance you'll need to complete various challenges and collect Golden Feathers which allow you to jump higher, run faster and climb walls for a set amount of time. The more feather you have, the more you can do all these things. You only need seven feathers (or at least that's what a sign near the top of the mountain says) to finish the game. Since there are a total of 20 feathers on the map, this means that most players will have a unique journey to the top, especially if they are just gonna grab the minimum amount of feathers as I did. It also has the nice effect of gradually opening up the world to the players. The more feathers they find, the more obstacles become trivial until they are soaring everywhere with impunity. So as you progress through the game you go from struggling to get over a couple of pebbles and some twigs to shooting up the entire mountain with ease. The game rewards your exploration with power the makes subsequent exploration easier in a very satisfying central loop.

The controls are way wonkier than any 3D game made after 1999 has any right to be. When playing with my game-pad (a 3rd party Xbox 360 controller) the left analog stick would not move my character, and instead, I had to rely on the D-pad to get her moving. I'm not sure if this is a bug on my end or if this is a deliberate design choice by the developers. If it was a deliberate choice then it's fucking stupid. Was this game secretly developed for the PSX before the dual-shock Analog controller came out? Because otherwise, I can see no reason for this hair-brained control scheme. The game also suffers a bit from its forced isometric perspective, as it's possible in some places to simply lose track of your character as stuff piles up in front of you. There's a reason that Miyamota ditched this style when he was working on the prototype for Super Mario 64 [1996], the whole approach falls apart if your level isn't one big central high point with everything sloping down from there, and even if you have it set up that way there are still all sorts of things that can go wrong. Between the archaic camera and control scheme, I'm not sure that A Short Hike wasn't developed in 1995 and just sitting on a shelf somewhere for the past 25 years.

The game lives up to its title: It's extremely short, taking me just over two hours to reach the top of the mountain and finish up the game's sparse story. That said, that time does not include cracking the game open and experiencing every facet of it. There's another hour or two in there depending on how in-depth you go or how quickly you get bored with the optional challenges. Personally, A Short Hike left me with little desire to 100% it, though the initial short play-through was enjoyable, if somewhat dull, time. Overall I'd have to rate A Short Hike as Not an unpleasant way to spend a rainy Saturday after a stressful week at work out of ten.