E3 2014 - Never Alone Hands-on Preview

The hands-on demo area at E3’s Xbox booth is loud, but playing Never Alone is the best kind of gaming experience: where everything else fades away, and you’re left completely absorbed in the world of the game. The story, one of the team tells me, is based on a traditional tale of the Iñupiat (one of the native tribes of Alaska) and it feels like something out of a storybook.

An opening cinematic mimicking Iñupiaq bone carvings tells of a village at the top of the world that is hit by a blizzard, only for another one to strike as soon as the first dies down. Curious and determined, a young girl sets out to discover the source of the weather threatening her home. Along the way she befriends an arctic fox, who becomes her travelling companion.

Bone carvings then give way to a soft-focus art style that can’t help but remind me of The Polar Express. The demo then skips ahead to a section partway through the game, where the pair explore an abandoned village. Never Alone is a puzzle platformer at heart, but one where players must use both characters—the girl and the fox—to cross obstacles on their journey. The first portion is deceptively simple; a succinct tutorial teaches me the controls as I practice some basic running and jumping.

Of course, at the first set of structures things only become trickier—I’m faced with a platform the girl may jump on to, but that is too high up for her furry companion. Instead, the fox must scrabble its way up the side of the next structure and wait for the girl to leap over—simple enough, although the fox’s climbing relies on pressing the button in the right rhythm, which has never been my strong suit. Soon, traversing the abandoned village is as much a matter of planning as figuring out where to jump. The fox is able to climb onto higher structures, using its weight to lower them for the girl to jump onto. Conversely, the girl is able to move a crate with a hanging platform attached over to the fox, who then jumps on as it slides over to the other side of a divide.

The idea behind a two-character game is rooted in the Iñupiaq value of interdependence. As the team member explains, no one survives in the arctic alone, the tribe’s traditions are full of stories of animals and humans and spirits aiding one another. While not always immediately apparent, it seems that nearly every aspect of the game is similarly rooted in Iñupiaq culture. The abandoned village I’m exploring, for example, is based on King Island, an Iñupiaq community that was abandoned in the 20th century under pressures from the US government. In Never Alone, the village has been taken over by the Little People, recurring figures in Iñupiaq stories who are neither good nor bad—they’re just as likely to steal your food as they are to help you find your way, the team explains.

Finally, my duo reaches the top of the village, where we can see the Northern Lights and the blizzard is in full force. Here, I encounter my first real danger, the Sky People. Inhabiting the Northern Lights, the Sky People sometimes swoop down to earth to snatch up unwary travellers, which is exactly what I have to fear from them as I hop across crevasses. The girl stumbles, and one of the Sky People grabs her, carrying her flailing away into the night as the fox curls up sadly, distraught and abandoned. As the checkpoint reloads, my helpful guide explains that the Sky People were one of the trickiest obstacles for the team to design. While something of a bogeyman to keep children from wandering off at night, the Sky People aren’t seen as evil, and are just as likely to help as harm someone. They were actually redesigned several times in Never Alone to make sure they were in keeping with the way the Iñupiaq saw them.

This time around I slip past the Sky People, who are ghostly green figures that move in a circular fashion around some of the ledges, and climb to the top edge of the screen, finishing the demo.

Never Alone has the potential to be a unique entry in what can feel like an over-crowded genre, which is high praise for a studio’s inaugural project. What I had the chance to play was an alpha build, complete with the occasional glitches that come with it, but it was easy to see that the game’s basis was robust and showed a clear understanding of the possibilities of a puzzle platformer. The twenty minute demo I played was too short to see more than a small section of one of the game’s chapters, but the level design I experienced felt varied, providing the right level of challenge to keep gameplay interesting. Due out this Fall for  Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC, Never Alone has the promise of being one of the more unusual entries into the platformer genre, and something to keep an eye on.