A Short Hike

A Short Hike was released for Nintendo Switch about three weeks ago, and my only regret is that I waited so long to download it.

You play as an anthropomorphic bird named Claire who’s spending the weekend on holiday visiting her Aunt May in Hawk Peak Provincial Park, and your goal is to climb to the top of the mountain so that you can get reception on your phone. Since you’re a bird, you can jump down and glide whenever and wherever you feel the need. You can also fly for short periods of time, and you can collect Golden Feather upgrades to extend your flying time. There’s no combat, no danger, and no puzzles to solve. Although you’re free to go anywhere you like, the main climbing trail is clearly marked. If you get lost, you can just jump down and glide to an earlier point on the trail. It’s all very relaxing, and the soundtrack is adaptive, meaning that the music changes depending on the altitude and weather.

Because the game is so overtly referential, I don’t think it’s lazy to call it a cross between Animal Crossing and Night in the Woods. Some of the (completely optional) mechanics, such as fishing and digging up X marks on the ground, are pure Animal Crossing, as are the character designs. The dialogue never gets grim or dark, but it’s a little weirder and less performatively wholesome than Animal Crossing. The writing is unobtrusive but clever, and Claire has a lot in common with Mae from Night in the Woods.

Meanwhile, the exploration elements are very Legend of Zelda, and the game looks a lot like Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks, from the cell shading to the head-to-body proportions to the 3D modeling of the landscape. There’s an option to increase the frame rate and make the graphics less pixelated, but the Nintendo DS style visual atmosphere is lovely even if you don’t harbor any particular nostalgia for that era of gaming.

If you go straight up and down the mountain, the game takes maybe half an hour to play, but you can easily spend another half hour going off on side trails and having conversations with the various people you meet during your climb. I imagine that you could spend even more time with the game if you wanted to find every Golden Feather and record every species of fish in your journal, but the game’s menu screen isn’t set up in a way that makes you feel compelled to do so.

I've read a few reviews that criticized A Short Hike for being too, well, short, but I don't think that's a problem. I am no stranger to the task of collecting all 900 forest sprite poos or evolving all 900+ species of battle monsters or getting all of my fantasy fighters to Level 99, but I also love being surprised and delighted by short, self-contained, and immensely satisfying small-studio games.

I’m not sure how I feel about Nintendo asking $20 for this game, which is a bit expensive for its category, but honestly that seems like a reasonable price to pay for the experience of a solid hour of uninterrupted joy.

Fancy Dutch

Folk Magic: The Hex Signs of Pennsylvania
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hex-signs-of-pennsylvania

The artistic tradition of decorating barns with folk symbols began as early as the late 1700s and became even more popular as paint became less and less expensive. The original barn stars were found mostly in Berks County, and also in Lancaster, Montgomery, and Bucks counties, and pre-20th century examples can still be found there today. One of the earliest known examples, located two miles north of Lenhartsville, Pennsylvania, dates back to 1819, though the paint has faded and it’s only left the "ghost" of the design etched in the barn wood.

I think I started noticing people putting up mass-produced decals of stars on their suburban houses in around 2005 or so, and when I moved to Pennsylvania I naively assumed that the stars I saw painted on barns driving west toward upstate New Jersey were homegrown versions of whatever that business was about, which I took to be a post-9/11 patriotic reference to the stars on the American flag.

I generally do my best to stay away from rural areas, so I didn't pay that much attention, but it turns out that what's going on is a lot more interesting. I enjoyed reading this article, and I got a good hearty chuckle out of the expression "Fancy Dutch," as in: "Barn stars and hex signs are rather used by the more secular 'Fancy Dutch' community of Pennsylvania Germans, which exists alongside the Amish and Mennonites."

I've been reading a manga called ねこと私とドイッチュランド (Meine Katze und ich in Deutschland), which collects a series of autobiographical comic essays written and drawn by a Japanese woman who recently moved to Germany. I think that, perhaps because Japanese people don't feel the weight of historical baggage regarding Germany in the same way that many Europeans and Americans do, the artist is completely earnest and sincere in her uncomplicated love and fascination with German culture. I'm not used to hearing people talk about "German culture" as such, and I'm beginning to realize that a lot of what passes for "generic white people culture" in the United States, from apple pie to chocolate Easter bunnies, is actually distinctly German.

There are a lot of things that most Americans don't learn about in school regarding their own culture and history, and this infamously includes the culture and history of oppressed and marginalized groups. There's clearly a lot to be said about this that I'm in no position to say, but I think it's ironic that the political pressure to create and commodify a monolithic ontological category of Whiteness has resulted in the occlusion of the specific cultures and histories of multiple groups of white people as well.