Switchback is out.

SWITCHBACK IS OUT. It is on the App Store right now, on iPhone and on iPad, and I have refreshed the page about forty times since the email came in. Android and Steam — we will see what happens. I would love to. Let me get through this week first.

If you have three seconds and no interest in the rest of this post: open the App Store and search Switchback: A Cozy Hiking Game. It is free. That is the whole ask. Everything below is me explaining what you would be downloading.

So what is Switchback?

It is a cozy hiking sim and a park management game. You get a piece of wilderness and you turn it into somewhere people want to spend a Saturday.

You build the park. You lay the trails. You put in the activities your hikees came for. You give them the views — and they give you the money. That is the loop, and it is a nice one, because unlike most tycoon games the thing you are selling is a nice day outside. Nobody leaves your park angry because the queue was too long. They leave because the last two miles were uphill and nobody warned them.

The word "cozy" is doing real work here. There is no fail state waiting to eat your park. Nothing is on fire. There is no clock in the corner counting down to a quarterly review. You can put a bench somewhere and just look at it for a while. Highly recommended, actually.

Every hikee shows up with a plan

This is the part I am proudest of. Every hikee who walks through your gate arrives with two things: an intent and an ability.

Intent is what they came for. Ability is what they can actually handle. They are not always the same number, and that gap is the whole game.

• Someone wants a long, punishing, all-day ridge hike with a view that makes the knees worth it. Give them the grade. Give them the payoff.
• A family wants a short jaunt to the nearest waterfall, a picnic, and a night at camp. If the only route to that waterfall is your ridge trail, you have made a family very unhappy and it is entirely your fault.
• Somebody is just here to fish. They want water, they want a spot to stand, they want to be left alone. That is a completely valid way to use a national park and Switchback treats it like one.

So you are not just building trails. You are building routes — easy loops, moderate out-and-backs, one absolute monster for the people who want it — and then reading the crowd to see who you are actually getting. Trail difficulty is a real number in this game and your hikees are checking it.

Trails, and the art of not making them too hard

You draw the path. The terrain fights you. Grade matters, distance matters, and a switchback exists for a reason — the game is named after the single best tool for getting people up a hill without hurting them.

Around the trails go the things that make a park a park: viewpoints where the trees open up, boardwalks over the wet bits, benches at the exact place someone's legs start to complain. Activities to keep a day interesting. Fishing spots. Waterfalls worth walking to.

Camp is where the day pays off

Build a campsite and your hikees will sleep in it. They will build a fire. They will have a genuinely good time, and you can watch them do it, and it is very hard to be in a bad mood while it happens. An overnight is worth more to you than a day trip — but only if the walk in was fair and the camp is worth arriving at.

You are running a park, so: staff, signs, and money

Hire volunteers

Volunteers build your paths and pick up the trash left behind by pesky hikees who could not find a trashcan. (Put in more trashcans. I am not going to tell you how to run your park, but: put in more trashcans.) A park that maintains itself is a park you can walk away from and come back to.

Signage and decoration

Signs are not decoration, or they are not only decoration. Put up signage and your hikees get acquainted with the area, arrive prepared, and hike more responsibly. An informed hikee is a happy hikee and, more importantly, a hikee who does not attempt your hardest trail in flip-flops.

The fee gate

You can gate a path as fee-only. Somebody has to pay for the boardwalk and the trash pickup and the volunteers, and that somebody is the person who really wants to see the good waterfall. Use it well and your park funds its own upkeep. Use it badly and you are the villain of somebody's Saturday.

Then you hike it yourself

Here is the feature I could not stop building. Ride along. Drop into first person and walk the park you just made, at ground level, at hiking speed, as one of the little people you have been managing from above.

It is the honest test. That climb you were so proud of on the map? Walk it. That viewpoint you swore was perfectly placed? Go stand on it. You find out very quickly whether you built a trail or a spreadsheet.

Also: double jump to fly. Jump again to fall. Weeeee!!!! Look, the park is beautiful from above and I am not going to be the guy who makes you take the stairs.

And the hikee you walk it as is yours. Name them, pick the face, the hair, the hat, the shirt, the vest, the neckwear, the boots — then save them and they are waiting the next time. Mine is George. George wears a wide brown hat and a mustard rain shell and he has a mustache, and I will not be taking questions.

What happens next

Android and Steam are the two questions I am getting most and the honest answer is we will see. I want both. Neither is announced. If the iOS launch goes well, that decision gets a lot easier, which is the least subtle thing I will say today.

What is coming: more ground to build on. The Mojave Pack — Joshua trees, red rock, long sunsets — and the Sonora Pack — saguaro country, monsoon skies, desert bloom. Each biome changes the light, the plants and the whole feel of the park, and I have a list of the ones I want after those that is longer than it has any business being.

Beyond that, I am going to do the thing small studios get to do: play it, listen, and fix what actually bugs people. If something in the game annoys you, that is genuinely useful information and there is exactly one person on the other end of the support email, so you will be talking to the guy who wrote the bug.

Thank you, sincerely

If you followed the build on YouTube, TikTok or Instagram and watched me get a trail wrong in public over and over: thank you. That was not nothing.

Three things that help more than you would think, in order:

• Leave a review. On a brand-new listing, a handful of reviews is the difference between existing and not.
• Tell one person. Ideally one person who has said the words "I miss Zoo Tycoon" in your presence.
• Send me a screenshot of your park. info@swanklabsgames.com, or any of the accounts above. I want to see what you build. That is not a marketing line, I just want to see it.

Go build a nice place. Put a bench in it.

— Kristian