Never Alone Review
Never Alone is not a normal game, and the response that it may illicit from you might not be normal either. It is a pretty sketchy platformer that has been presented in the most unique and brilliant fashion imaginable. It's a game that wants to be a game far less than it wants to be a weapon built for education, and somehow the package ends up succeeding on both of those fronts. Never Alone is not a perfect thing, but it's a thing that any discerning person - and any discerning person with an interest in the evolution of videogame design especially - simply needs to play.
It's a project that has been created in collaboration with members of an indigenous Alaskan community, and the plot is a very straightforward, very fantastical fable that mainly involves a little girl overcoming obstacles and escaping (or defeating) a series of threatening enemies. In between these gameplay interludes are some very well-produced documentary clips about the aforementioned Alaskan community, how they live, what they believe in and so on.
It's a set-up that really shouldn't work. Cutscenes are skipped more often than they're ever watched, but these little mini-documentaries are so brief, so informative and the footage so well shot, that you end up looking forward to unlocking them. The juxtaposition between gaming and watching probably wouldn't work at all in an action game, but here, the gameplay's slow (and very straightforward) pacing means that jumping straight from the game into a clip is never jarring.
The game itself clearly owes a debt to Limbo, but there are no devious or taxing puzzles here. This is a game that can be enjoyed by almost anyone, although when the gameplay develops into something a little more complex in the final third, animation glitches suddenly become prevalent and a general sketchiness starts to seep in. Nothing too drastic - and certainly nothing game-breaking - happens in the final stretch, but it brings the experience down a notch or two.
This obviously isn't a game for the Call of Duty crowd, but it's a thoughtful and perceptive little thing that is unlike anything else that's out there currently. It's only around four or five hours long, but there's an admirable lack of filler and the fact that almost anybody can play it from start to finish is another feather in its cap. The current £10-£12 asking price is a small one to pay for something that's both truly new and truly unusual.
8/10
Review By Chet Roivas
