A Short Hike, which is an indie adventure game that released in 2020, was greatly inspired by the exploration of Breath of the Wild. With its open world format, players can choose to follow the marked trails as in a linear game, or explore the back country to their leisure as they make their way to the top of the mountain. They can also interact with other hikers, find treasure, and take in the world around them. The creator of A Short Hike, Adam Robinson-Yu credited Breath of the Wild as the inspiration behind the name and open world concept. One of the unique features of A Short Hike is the stamina bar in the form of golden feathers.
Akin to Link’s stamina bar from Breath of the Wild, the golden feathers allow the main character, Claire to jump, glide, and climb cliffs and walls. Each action depletes part of your stamina but unlike Link’s, also grants an additional jump with each feather you obtain throughout the course of the game. Every time you jump, you use up part of your climbing stamina but it doesn’t get you very far as climbing does. As you go further up the mountain, you have to determine how much you can jump before you start climbing to be able to maximize whatever stamina you may have. If you decide to balance your time between spending it in the park helping residents and making your way up to the summit, you won’t really have to worry about running out of energy as much as you would trying to get up the mountain as fast as possible. Getting to the top of the summit isn’t the end of the game. It just allows you to be able to fully explore the mountain without any set goal.
In an interview with Edge Magazine, Robinson-Yu admits he was on the fence about playing Breath of the Wild when it first released.
“Breath of the Wild was a big inspiration for A Short Hike, but before it came out, I was a little bit skeptical. You know, open world games stretch out objectives over long periods of space. Exploration is the key thing I think about during times when I’ve been hiking, or when I was a kid exploring the wilderness. You just want to explore, and you want to see cool things. I feel like some open world games can make it feel like you’re not really exploring, you’re just traveling. A sense of exploration is difficult to create in games. Real life is so rich and interesting. You can find a cool looking rock on the beach and that’s a neat thing in real life. In a video game, you pass over a thousand prefab rocks. There’s only so much that you can do. I want to reward players for exploring.”
A Short Hike is currently available on multiple console systems including the Nintendo Switch eShop.
