I am a big fan of platformers, especially simplistic ones that rely on a good story rather than super complicated control schemes. My favorite game of all time is called "Inside" and is a 2-d platformer that only used 2 buttons throughout the entire game. Therefore when Never Alone was revealed to me, I was excited for another story-rich simplistic game.

The fact that this game involves real history of the Alaskan Iñupiaq people is admirable and you can tell that the designers were very careful to be respectful in the creation of this story. They involved real lore and throughout the game you "unlock" videos and even interviews of the people and creatures of their land in order to learn something while you play, which I thought was a nice touch. The artwork is lovely and the scenery in the game is crisp and nicely done.

You control a little girl named Nuna, who very early on in the game runs into an unusually friendly wild-fox. You control both Nuna and the fox by switching between them and as you would expect each character has certain abilities that the other can not perform. The puzzles are for the most part very simple and rarely frustrating. The landscape is desolate and chilly but that was the idea since it does take place in Alaska during a rather harsh storm.

Now, despite all those pluses which I applaud the developers for, the game is extremely repetitive and the controls are pretty bad. There are certain puzzles where you have to have Nuna at one point really low, and the fox needs to get somewhere up high - this isn't difficult but as soon as you swap to the other character the built in AI takes over and immediately has them run towards one another, removing them from the perch they need to be standing on and sometimes making them fall to their deaths.

The fox is also capable of invoking spirit platforms (only the fox can do this) but as soon as he walks away from them a bit, the platforms disappear. If the AI is left to it's own devices, this is precisely what ends up happeneing. The fox moves away from a platform that Nuna is in the process of climbing and then the platform disappears. The only solution I could find to this AI bug was to plug in a second controller and force the fox to stay in place by mimicking a player 2.

This is a massive and unforgivable flaw in the gameplay. Did they even test this? It isn't a terribly long game so I can't imagine they did.

The controls are also pretty bad. A lot of the game involves running away from something that is trying to harm you like a polar bear or some giant other thing and if you time your jump just slightly away from the edge of the ice you are not going to make it. I have found it is actually much easier in these scenes to control the fox and let the computer make Nuna jump because the fox can jump further.

This might just be because I am not a great player, i don't know. However, this doesn't change the fact that being chased by something outside on the ice is 1/3 of the game. There isn't enough variety in it.

If you are going to play this game with 2 people the entire way through - buy it. Because it is really is beautiful and the music is wonderful and the true-story lore is very interesting. However, when you have a puzzle portion of a game that REQUIRES the two characters to be able to access certain points to complete it, i think it should be relatively high up on the programmers' list of priorities to make sure that the built-in AI functions in a way where this is actually possible without rigging the system by plugging in another controller. I live alone with my dog, and she is terrible at using the xbox controller because her paws are too small and she doesn't have thumbs.

5 / 10

i'm sorry but when a game is all but unplayable, it doesn't matter how pretty it is