Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna)

I’m never playing a game with a fox in it ever again. First, Seasons After Fall, now this. It’s too much.

Never Alone follows the story of Nuna as she travels through 8 chapters of puzzle-platforming with an Arctic Fox friend. It’s all going really well until some large ugly man wants to get his hands Nuna’s Bolas. That’s right. Anyway, during one of these run ins, he snaps the fox’s neck. Yep. Another dead fox. Thanks for that. Anyway, after the fox ‘dies,’ it becomes a weird boy ghost thing that’s dressed as a fox. This was the point I lost all interest in the story as it became far too bizarre and I didn’t get it.

Gameplay wise, it’s a puzzle platformer where you have to use the fox/ghost boy to make some spirits appear which are then used for platforms for Nuna and Fox to get through the levels. This took me a little while to figure out when trying to rope swing across on one rope, when actually I needed two. I died a lot trying to figure this out.

In terms of the platforming, it’s not the cleanest. There were several points where it was difficult to make jumps to certain areas and it didn’t feel like it was by design. An example of this was towards the end of the game where you are climbing up through some kind of cave but one of the jumps is only possible to make at a very precise moment that doesn’t come around a lot. Very frustrating to say the least.

Looks wise, it’s very pretty even though it’s cartoon graphics and the music is very in-keeping with the setting of the game. That doesn’t stop the backdrop and fox death from causing minor depression though.

Achievements – 1,175 Points – 19 Achievements

There’s not a lot to the achievement list here. 9 out of 15 are awarded for playing through the main story where the remaining 6 are for picking up all of the cultural insights throughout the game. Most of the these are on the main path the game follows, but a couple are tricky to get to and require a bit of lateral thinking.

Downloadable Content

After completing the main game, there’s the Foxtales DLC which sees the return of the fox as a fox and not as a boy ghost which is exactly what I wanted. In addition to having the fox back, there are another 4 achievements. 3 are main storyline related and the other one is for finding yet more cultural insights. In doesn’t take long to complete and it’s fairly cheap.

Never Alone is a fairly straightforward completion that will take 4 to 5 hours to run through including the DLC. The platforming elements are frustrating for the most part but there is a lot of history to learn from the cultural insights. It’s not a very rewarding completion but a completion nonetheless and hopefully the first of many on the road to UHH recovery.