Game Club Discussion: A Short Hike

[elf]

Now that we've had time to play (...and possibly, time to forget why we played and lose track of time because of NaNoWriMo), let's talk!

This month's megabundle game was/is (for another week) A Short Hike (itch.io version), "a little exploration game about hiking up a mountain."

Here are some potential questions to discuss, but you're not required to answer any of them. Feel free to make up your own questions and answer those, or just talk about what caught your attention.

1. What did you think this game was going to be, before you played it? What was surprising about it? 2. How far did you get in the game? Do you want to play more? 3. What was the central focus of the game, and what was on the sidelines? How did the sidelined parts support or detract from the central focus? 4. What kind of worldbuilding does it have? What questions about the setting were left unanswered? 5. Did you particularly like or dislike any of the characters? 6. What parts were most frustrating? What parts were most fun? 7. Did you use a keyboard, a controller, or both? How do you think that affected the game?

Comments

[elf]

Hurray for goals! I'm glad you tried it and enjoyed it.

There are so damn many fun indie games, and it's not even that the mainstream gamer news ignore them because they're not the AAA games (...sometimes that's the reason), but there are just too many to cover.

Hope you join us for more games! A lot of them are likely to be short; I expect the longest ones will be visual novels. (There are so many VNs at itch.io. So many. And it's hard to tell from the descriptions which ones are actually complete.) Since I'm picking games for a broad group of people with different interests, I'm going to hedge on the side of shorter, simpler games - at least in the sense of, "does not take an hour of prep & setup before you get started; game itself is not intended to occupy all your spare time for a month or more."

So for people who don't play many video games, they'll hopefully be pleasant; for people who do, they'll hopefully be a nice break from their normal habits without eating too much of their gaming time.