Is this game balanced?
Critical Play: Short Hike
For this last critical play, I am picking the indie game Short Hike designed by Adam Gryu and published by Whippoorwill Limited in 2019. This game features a 2.5D world and at the core of aesthetics appears to be an Animal Crossing knockoff mated with a platformer (escapism + challenge). Short Hike is set on a vacation island, where visitor (Claire) comes to see her extended family and discover her cell phone has no reception. Being a true millennial, Claire resolves to go on a short hike to the highest point on the island (the “Hawk Peak”) to regain her cell service and her digital dignity. The catch is that the namesake hike is neither short nor easy, and actually is an obstacle course. Claire is an anthropomorphic bird with a very limited ability to fly and climb (she is actually more like a heavy glider), so the full hike is initially unapproachable for her.
With that setup, the player can choose between “doing nothing” in the Animal Crossing style: chatting with other animals, walking and swimming around the beaches, collecting shells, fishing — or focus on picking the obstacle course skills vital to fulfill plot objective. This game is a single-player, with the environment designed in a sandbox way where Claire can never hurt herself.
For this critical play we will focus on the planning decisions that Adam Gryu had to make. Most obviously, the game auto-balances the player’s skill against the level difficulty. Unlike the “classical” platformers, Short Hike does not have levels on separate screens and smoothly maps the path towards Hawk Peak to progressively challenging terrain. In the very beginning of the game, Claire has zero ability to fly or climb and cannot even find the trailhead. To get on track, the player needs to get familiar with the island and start collecting the crucial flight resources (“golden feathers”) that enable Claire to gain her vertical mobility. With feathers, Claire can start jumping, gliding in the general direction of thermal contrails, and climbing against the vertical walls that get higher as she goes further.
However, once the player collects enough feathers to venture further on the hiking path, he discovers that Claire’s feathers are freezing at higher altitudes, forcing Claire to pick speed and engage in parkour between heating stations, vertical obstacles and hot pools.
As a result, the game cannot be won with “brute force” (by means of collecting more golden feathers), and player must learn the ropes of gliding and jumping with limited resources. This paces the rate of the game: while in theory, the main objective (Hawk Peak) could be attained in a couple of hours, in reality the player quickly reaches the limits of his dexterity in controlling Claire and goes back and forth between wandering the island, playing mini-games, and attempting the new ascents. Very conveniently, the path towards the summit is mostly vertical, so if Claire slips and falls she usually just ends up on the beach.
It is also interesting to notice that while there is some balance between the effort the player can put into collecting items, and the investment into speed and precision of Claire’s jumps, the game is heavily skewed to the latter. In other words, developing quick reflexes is the dominant strategy in Short Hike. Reportedly, a skilled player can slowly but surely make all the way to the top with just a few golden feathers, while someone richly endowed with feathers can easily sprint the beginning of the trail but freeze on the way to the summit. Therefore, Short Hike is sharply divided between the larger and more relaxed “low levels” and the movement-intense but small “high levels”.
Down below, the balance between the different items and skills that Claire commands is far more pronounced. The game features feathers and coins as two main currency units. Both can be found, dug out, collected on side quests, or won in the competitions. Either way to acquire feathers is sufficient to equip Claire to make the hike section below the treeline, so the player can choose to not play mini-games, or may never discover digging and still do just fine. The game currencies are also (to some degree) exchangeable, and feature a steep cost curve. The first feathers can be bought from the Visitor’s Center for coins, but later in the game the price goes up. Once all opportunities to buy or find feathers easily are exhausted, more feathers have to be won in the progressively harder-to-reach places and and competitions.
Another interesting strategy-balancing feature is evident from the game’s help system. Unlike Animal Crossing where animals can only talk on a very limited number of topics (like side quests or consumer products), Short Hike features functional humor and strategy-hinting dialogs. A typical encounter with an island dweller results in either a short laugh, or a story that cues Claire on things she can do to gain more resources. Sometimes these hints can even break the 3rd wall — such as when animals explain Claire how to use her gamepad (which is really funny when framed as a dialogue).
There are also some weird items in game that seemingly serve little purpose but are somewhat unique. In the great tradition of quests, Claire can carry unlimited number of gear items in her pockets — including multiple hatchets, buckets of water, running shoes and sticks. Each one of these items has some application on the island, but the game would remain perfectly playable even without them. For instance, hatchets allow for opening the underground shortcuts between island parts, and buckets permit Claire to water the flowers capable of turning into trampolines and catapulting her into the air. Additionally, the game features some Animal-Crossing-inspired pastimes like fishing and shell collecting which also double as alternative strategies to relax and gain resources (fish can be sold for money and shells can be exchanged for feathers in side quests).
In conclusion, we should say that although Short Hike is a non-competitive single player game with no violence and a clear penchant for escapist fun, it still has a lot of balancing baked into its core. Some of those decisions are typical for the genre, others are copied from Animal Crossing, and some are unique to this indie platformer.
