Once in awhile, a game comes along that provides you with an adventure that you didn’t necessarily want, but needed. It isn’t so much a breath of fresh air, nor a change-of-pace, but a time machine. There’s nothing quite like being transported back to a feeling – in this case, the sense of wonder that permeates one’s younger mind when a virtual world expands your horizons.

A Short Hike took me to a place I had forgotten I even had inside of me.

There’s just too much, you see. Of everything. Every ruined city, every shootout on a rooftop, every duel on a bridge, every villain with a god complex, they’re added to a running internal tally that numbs you. How can an experience feel new when you’ve done different shades of it over hundreds (if not thousands) of hours before? How can you feel anything at all when you’ve been there, shot/killed/vanquished that?

You let it all go. You fly.

To do that, you have to be a bit of a gaming archaeologist. Adam Robinson-Yu has done something unique here, something completely foreign to modern game design. He lets go. You see, no matter how “open” the next great AAA open-world game is, you’re on a leash. There’s a big bad to be dealt with, a world to save, a score to settle. Sure, you could choose to not bother with saving Hyrule, but Breath of the Wild is obviously built around you doing so. That ethos is absent in A Short Hike. It has no pretensions of grandeur, no narrative axe to grind. It asks nothing of you.

When you’re used to every game bestowing you with the title of Chosen One^TM (“only you can go punch god in the face in a sexy pair of underwear”) nothing ends up feeling like a gift. There is no expectation, only the freedom to go where you want and do as you please. Maybe you’d like to spend half an hour playing a bastardized tennis game with a beach ball. Maybe you want to go searching for a tortoise’s red headband. Or maybe you want to look for feathers, which help you glide ever further around the sort of mountain getaway you wished your parents would’ve taken you to 30 years ago.

It isn’t all walking-simulator action, of course. There’s some very clever mechanical depth to A Short Hike, and those little flourishes are pretty much entirely hidden. The game won’t tell you a shortcut, but its raw simplicity ensures you’ll find them, anyways. Maybe it’s that sense of discovery – both in exploration and player input – that put such a big, dumb grin on my face.

Or perhaps it is the indie-Windwaker (indie-Waker?) aesthetic that looks so gorgeous in motion. Even a cynic like me can’t help but dig into this charming world. The beaches aren’t postcard-beautiful, nor are the mountains necessarily Rocky IV montage-worthy, but they are so well crafted that all you’ll want to do is explore them. I can’t even bother nitpicking graphical imperfections. The age marks on an old friend aren’t blemishes; they’re just part of your friend.

I could go on and on, but you’ll be bored by a reciting of locales and characters. Nor can I imagine it’s worth more time explaining the place inside that this game took me, as it’s not a journey you can tag along for. You’ll just have to take a short hike yourself.