Never Alone Review

Never Alone, or Kisima Innitchuna in the Iñupiat language, is a puzzle platformer created by the Alaskan Iñupiat studio Upper One Games, the first video game studio in the United States to be owned by indigenous people, and co-produced by E-Line Media. These two publishers are working to create a line of “world games” that leverage the power of video games to share, celebrate and extend culture. 

Upper One Games’ first project speaks directly to the legends and culture central to its Iñupiat owners and programmers with a story pieced together from the oral tradition of the Iñupiat elders. Combined with engaging platforming and co-operative gameplay, Never Alone is not only a fun game, but the nostalgia it induces in even a cultural outsider constitutes it as a work of art. The story of the game is foreign, but at the same time universal, and by combining oral storytelling with the interactivity of gaming, manages to completely absorb the player into its world.

While the gameplay is not perfect, the sheer scope and majesty of this project captures the imagination, and acts as a poignant commentary on how games can be used to empower, inform, as well as entertain.

Story

In Never Alone players control a young Iñupiat girl named Nuna and her arctic fox companion who must work together across an icy landscape to find the source of the endless blizzard plaguing Nuna’s people and put an end to it, all the while avoiding the wicked Man Slayer who torched Nuna’s village to the ground. The scenarios and the characters in the game come straight from Iñupiat legends, and combined with excellent videos from the Iñupiat community elaborating on their stories and their way of life, this game is truly a unique cultural product.

Players will really feel the bond between Nuna and the fox, who depend on one another to survive and develop a unique friendship as they combine their different skills to progress through the story. The story is driven through a narrative spoken in the Iñupiat language by an Iñupiat elder with English subtitles, which is totally engrossing and truly captures the nuances of the oral storytelling tradition, with commentary and interjections interspersed throughout the tale by the narrator. 

Though Never Alone is short, weighing in at approximately 3 hours plus an additional 30-40 minutes of cultural videos, it is a remarkable product that, like your favourite movie, you’ll want to experience more than once in order to fully grasp the remarkable scope of what Upper One Games and the forty-plus Iñupiat people interviewed for Never Alone have achieved.

Gameplay

At its core, Never Alone is a puzzle platformer that requires the player to make use of both Nuna’s and the fox’s abilities in order to progress through the story. The game can be played solo with one player switching between Nuna and the fox, or through local co-op with two players who can control each character separately. The two characters compliment each other as the Fox can climb slippery cliffs to lower ropes for Nuna and summon spirit animal platforms for her to ride, while Nuna can drag objects and use her bola to remove obstacles. Meanwhile the blizzard rages on, and you need to brace yourself against the winds, or jump at the right moment to use the wind to your advantage.

The platforming is crafted intelligently, with enough challenge and inherent danger to keep players on their toes throughout the adventure. There are a few fun sequences where you need to run from danger, while using Nuna’s and the fox’s abilities quickly to ensure that you aren’t trapped between a rock and a hard place. You collect the insight videos from the Iñupiat community by finding owls in the game, some of whom are hidden secrets that you need to go slightly off the path to find, but for the most part this game is a linear one. If you’re looking for combat, however, this is not a game for you; there are dangers here, but they are in the elements that are constantly testing you.

One issue playing the game solo, however, was that Nuna and the fox did not always follow each other intelligently, sometimes moving to awkward places causing you to have to switch characters just to manually move them closer to the primary character you’re controlling. This happened a lot during the swimming sequences, which was a minor frustration. However, sometimes during the platforming sequences the fox would move away from a spirit platform that Nuna was riding, causing it to disappear and Nuna to fall to her death. Very occasionally I also ran into some clipping issues where the character being controlled would disappear inside a cliff and also “fall” to their death. These are minor issues, and though they did unfortunately remove me somewhat from the immersion I felt in the story, the narrative is so engrossing that it more than made up for these minor glitches.

Graphics and Sound

This 2D/3D puzzle platformer is absolutely gorgeous. From the icy landscapes and stilted villages, to the ever dangerous freezing ocean, the environments are well crafted and are as dangerous as they are pretty. The wind and snow that constantly buffets you adds a real sense of danger to each scene, reminding the player just how stark these environments are and how the odds are stacked against your survival. The character models are well animated, breathing life into the barren ice and tundra, and are based off of artwork from actual Iñupiat artists. In particular the spirits you encounter truly capture the imagination and make you feel in tune with the legacy of the Iñupiat people.

As for the sound, Upper One Games chose to eschew dramatic music for the already touched upon spoken narrative. The music that is here is subtle, but it’s the story, the wind, the snow, and the roar of the polar bear that dominate the soundscape, once again reminding the player how hardy you have to be to survive in such a harsh environment, while the comfort of the narrative provides warmth and reassurance.

Verdict

Upper One Games and E-Line studios have created a remarkable game that allows the player to get a glimpse into another world, one forged from thousands of years of tradition and survival in harsh climates. Though the gameplay is not perfect, the story and the companionship between Nuna and the fox are truly worthy of your attention, and while the game is short, the challenge in the platforming will keep you on your toes and make the sense of danger in the narrative palpable. This project has shown how powerful the medium of games can be when combined with the now less prominent art of oral storytelling, and has defined an entirely new genre of “world games” in which old and new media find harmony and allow a culture’s stories to come alive for a new generation.

Enjoy a gallery of Never Alone’s wonderful concept designs created by Iñupiat artists below: