In Never Alone you play as a small Inupiaq
girl named Nuna as she sets out from her village one day and finds herself lost
in a terrible blizzard. She stumbles upon a small arctic fox and together the
two set out to return home. Along the way they become swept along in various stories
from the folklore of the Inupiaq people in what is a puzzle/platform game that has a
heavy dose of storytelling and a magical atmosphere not like anything else we’ve
played before. The relationship between the two builds throughout as they
simply can’t survive the environment without one another.
The game is a 2D platformer much in the mould of something
like Limbo. Imagine Limbo with a more natural looking design and the black
replaced with white and you wouldn’t be far off. As the pair of Nuna and the
fox you must work together to make your way across the harsh landscape of Alaska.
Nuna can run and jump and eventually gets access to an ice smashing bolas. The
fox can scramble up walls and also talk to the many natural spirits that
inhabit the world.
Many of the puzzles involve getting the fox into areas where
he can then draw spirits back to help Nuna. Spirits generally take the form of
birds that can be used as platforms or creatures that can be used to climb
walls. The fox can also control trees and fish. It’s a nice mechanic and one
that normally works well. You switch between the two characters with the press
of a button or a second player can be brought in to help out. Together you need
to overcome everything from polar bears and strong winds to breaking ice and
even the odd menacing and magical creature.
Occasionally the computer AI will let you down and your
partner will do something stupid and die but on the whole it didn’t stop our
progress and there isn’t anything here that should cause you too much
frustration in that respect. We also had a few technical issues during our play
through like ice not smashing but there wasn’t anything major enough to ruin
our experience and a simple checkpoint reset always fixed the problem. The fact
checkpoints are fairly generous also helped to keep the frustration low.
It’s hard to talk about the game without giving away much of
its magic and surprises but we will say that you are constantly faced with
something new to play with or overcome. Each chapter is distinctly different from
the last and almost all of them introduce a new mechanic or toy to play with. This
means that the game always remains fresh and is all the better for it. It has a
fairly brief run time at about three and a half hours but it’s an experience that
is far richer than the run time would suggest.
The whole thing is underpinned with some beautiful graphics
and a haunting score and these combined with the howling winds make a perfect setting
for the story and fill the whole game with a unique and wonderful atmosphere.
The narrator of the story also does an incredible job of drawing you in and
making you feel real empathy for a little girl and fox lost in the snow. The
narration is done in the indigenous language which is a very clever choice as
we don’t feel narrating in English would have had anywhere near the same
impact. You can just imagine everyone huddled around a fire in the snow
listening to him tell the tale.
Overall, Never Alone is a wonderful piece of storytelling
tied to a very good platform/puzzle game. It’s an original take on a well-trodden
genre that draws inspiration from a rich culture that many of us will know very
little about. As such, it creates something unique and new for audiences to
enjoy. It creates a world filled with magic and wonder and isn’t that something
we all want in our lives a little more?
Overall 8/10
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