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.

Seasons After Fall

Continuing my hammering of my Xbox One backlog of unplayed games comes Seasons After Fall, a game I added to my wish list, purchased in sale and I have no idea why I did it. Thus has led me to my April spending hiatus where I am refusing to buy any new games, even if they are selling Alien Breed Episode 2 on the marketplace for £0.84.

I actually had an interesting experience with Seasons After Fall. I confess to not really getting the story. You start as some kind of energy-based entity and float to the surface from some underground place. You are guided by yet another obtrusive narrator, although she is a lot less pretentious than the narrator from Hue, and it becomes apparent that the narrator character needs you to wake up some guardians of the forest to break her out of some kind of prison thing. In order to do this, your energy entity possesses a fox who will be completing all of the jumping and puzzling sections of the game.

This is where it got personal. I become quite attached to the fox. Because he is a cute fox who can jump really high and stuff. The narrator uses to fox to try and use the guardian’s energy to escape her prison. In doing so… spoilers… the fox dies. And she doesn’t care. I was all like, what the fuck have you done to my fox! Bitch!

The quest then changes to restore the guardian’s power and stop the narrator from being such a cunt. I’ll call her what I like, she killed my fox.

It’s been a long time since a game has generated an emotive response from me and this came as a relief as I felt I was becoming dead inside. It’s made worse as very time you go back to the starting area, now as ghost-fox, the dead fox is just lying there. Dead.

Gameplay wise, it’s a middle of the road puzzle platformer. You have use buttons to change the season from Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter to do different things in the environment – almost like Hue but with a different skin. The puzzles themselves vary from supremely easy, to slap a dick in your face ridiculous in terms of difficulty. Some of them expect you to be a mind reader where as others just require you to jump on a button.

I found the narrator to have a really annoying voice for the first half of the game but this was my only annoyance in terms of the sound effects. Graphically, it looks good for a 2D environment, doesn’t take any risks and is very cleanly executed.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 21 Achievements

There’s not really a lot to do in terms of achievements and it’s a somewhat forgiving list. You will get 14 of 21 achievements for following the story from start to finish.

There is also another achievement available during the post-game bit for running left into a giant fox but this is connected to another 4 collectible achievements. You have to sleep in four shrines in the four seasonal areas which trigger additional cutscenes to provide some background to the story (not that it made anything clearer for me). Once you’ve done these four, you can do the giant fox bit. The best part about this is that it’s not a missable achievement. You can revisit every area of the game right up to the end.

The last two are the harder ones. There is one for standing still in a specific spot for two minutes to hear some birds but it’s not overly clear where you need to be for this and I never would have found it without a guide. And then there’s the big one for making all of the flowers bloom. You just have to run over them to make them bloom and there are four in every area where there are flowers. These are clearly marked per section so you can check off where you need to go to find any you missed.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Seasons After Fall is an okay puzzle platformer with an emotive storyline – I’m still a bit choked up about the fox. It’s a straight forward completion that can be done in under six hours with the use of a guide.