A Short Hike is leaving Game Pass at the end of July. Thankfully, that still leaves you plenty of time to play (and replay) this indie spin on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
The Wait For A Successor To Breath Of The Wild
In the wake of Breath of the Wild's launch in 2017, fans waited with bated breath, eagerly anticipating the flood of games that would take inspiration from the totemic open-world adventure. In practice, it took a little while to get the ball rolling. Games aren't made overnight, which meant that aside from small and easy-to-implement features — like Assassin's Creed Odyssey allowing players to turn off objective prompts by enabling Exploration Mode — it took a few years for true BOTW-inspired games to arrive.
A Short Hike was one of the first, hitting PC in 2019. That quick turnaround was possible because developer Adam Robinson-Yu kept the scope small. You can finish the game in an hour or two and see everything it has to offer in under five. Robinson-Yu managed to get a Breath of the Wild successor out before industry giants like Ubisoft because he understood that you didn't need BOTW-esque scope to capture its indelible gameplay loop.
"I really like playing other games that let you explore! I think a pretty obvious inspiration is Breath of the Wild, a game that I really adored," Robinson-Yu told Game Developer. "I think that when a game provides a lot of different paths to take, it kind of creates this magical feeling - that every path you haven't explored yet provides the promise of something new to discover. Every time you go off the beaten path and discover something interesting, it makes you wonder what else you've missed!"
A Short Hike Has A Smaller Scale, But A Similar Vibe
A Short Hike definitely captures that feeling, and at roughly one-trillionth the size of the big open-world game that inspired it. Instead of an epic quest to defeat Ganon, A Short Hike is the story of an anthropomorphic bird named Claire who wants to get to the top of a small mountain so she can get cell service. The stakes are personally important to Claire, but she isn't deciding the fate of the world like Link.
To get there, she needs to find a certain number of gold feathers, each of which adds an additional double jump. You can find them in any order as you wander the island, chatting up the animals, completing optional objectives like finding a bunch of shells for a demanding guy on the beach, and searching out every hidden secret. You can't go straight to the conclusion like you can in Breath of the Wild, but you're free to tackle everything before that choke point in whatever order you choose.
A Short Hike understands that it's basically impossible to recapture the feeling of playing Breath of the Wild for the first time. Ubisoft's 2020 open-world game, Immortals Fenyx Rising, attempted to give players a game that looked like Breath of the Wild and played like Breath of the Wild at the scale of Breath of the Wild, and it coming that close only made it clear how far away it was.
Immortals Fenyx Rising was jokily narrated by Prometheus and Zeus which created a very different vibe from Breath of the Wild's frequent silence.
The games that have successfully built on BOTW's innovations tend to take a more oblique path, rather than attempting to directly replicate it. Elden Ring feels like Breath of the Wild, but it's significantly darker in tone, harder, and more combat-focused, while remaining completely faithful to FromSoftware's design ethos. Immortality feels like Breath of the Wild, but it's an FMV game where you trawl through mysterious, recovered film footage. Baldur's Gate 3 feels like Breath of the Wild, despite being an isometric RPG. Freedom to do what you want in the order that you want is key; the rest is incidental.
So if you want a short, inspired burst of Breath of the Wild, you can't do much better than A Short Hike. At about 90 minutes in length, it's the perfect game to take a chance on with Game Pass. Just hurry and try it before it double jumps out of your reach.
