Short Trip - Itch Game of the Week

When it’s the little things that take centre stage

Short Trip is an interactive illustration created by Alexander Perrin. It can be found at the time of writing at this page.

It’s the small details that will truly enchant in Alexander Perrin’s Short Trip. In this game (which self-describes as an illustration) the player drives a streetcar on a straight track through a couple of bus-stops. Eventually they’ll reach the end of the line where they can choose to either close the program or climb back into the streetcar and double back down the track, back towards where to the bottom of the hill where they began. There are no turns to navigate or challenges to solve. The game doesn’t even penalize the player for blasting through scheduled stops, leaving potential transit users standing on the pickup platforms in their wake.

This lack of pressure to complete tasks allows the player to simply bask in the exquisite details of Perrin’s pencilwork illustrations that make up the entirety of the game’s visuals. Everything being hand drawn allowed Perrin to infuse every single corner of the game world with exquisite detail. The placement of every tree, every rock or every building is paced perfectly to entrance. It’s a style not often found in games and it’s very eye-catching. But it’s not just the visuals that are executed in perfect detail, it’s also the sound design. The way the brakes creek as the streetcar slides downhill, the way the unseen birds chirp in distance, the way the bell rings out from the streetcar all hammer home the game’s perfect atmosphere. Every single last detail in Short Trip works together to build an atmosphere that feel incredibly genuine.

And the neat thing about Short Trip is that the precision of its’ small details means the player can’t help but start to fill in details themselves in their mind’s eye. It’s hard not to imagine waving out the window as you steam past the cat-man minding the lighthouse, or seeing that cat a stone’s throw from the platform as a mother eagerly waiting to see her kids arrive back from school, or even what the food in the market would smell like when mixed with the aroma of the grease of the streetcar’s wheel.

This one-two punch of the present detail and the imagined detail is what makes Short Trip so deliciously tangible.

Short Trip was the game of the week for September 25th, 2017.