Interactive Narrative Wk2: Never Alone

3. Does your chosen game(s) make user input feel meaningful in terms of story direction and progression? Why or why not?

This week's game is 'Kisima Inŋitchuŋa' also known as Never Alone - a puzzle-platformer by Upper One Games. In this game you play as two characters: the Iñupiaq girl Nuna with her newly found companion, the Arctic fox, going through many different obstacles and chases in a very  hazardous winter environment. In this blog post we will question whether or not user input has any meaningful impact towards story direction and progression.

The gist of the game is fairly simple for Never Alone. You control either of the two characters - Nuna and the fox to traverse the many different chapters of the game. You can only play one of them at a time if played by yourself, but co-operative gameplay can be implemented locally via PC or Xbox. Both characters can run through the levels and jump the platforms, but each one have their own unique game-play qualities that would require you to switch between them. 

The core game-play goes quite well with the progression of the story. The idea of escaping and avoiding all danger works effectively in a platformer where you're running and jumping from one point to another, with that very imminent danger looming behind you. But having to use both the characters to overcome specific obstacles within the game reinforces this idea that Nuna, the protagonist of this game, would not make it through any of this without the help and guidance of the Arctic fox, hence the name 'Never Alone'. This game-play lends to the cultural insights of the game where these spirits guide and prevent mankind from dying and works wonders in furthering the depth of the puzzles within the game.

The controls of this game, however, make the game-play frustrating for some players. Playing this game alone forces you into a somewhat start-and-stop progression throughout the game, in which I would feel as if playing this with a friend would make the progression a lot smoother and that this sense of co-operation would become more prominent if the other character were in another player's hands.

While the narrator does offer some insight during the game-play's fantastic scrimshaw cut-scenes, the biggest issue I have with this game is that the abundance of context is placed within these videos that you can access, essentially just being parts of a documentary. Although it is educational and good insight to the culture of these indigenous Alaskan people, having to consume the interesting information through videos that may as well be DVD extras undoubtedly breaks away from the immersion the player could be experiencing with the game-play at the time. None of these ideas are incorporated into the game mechanics and are just there purely for aesthetics. 

While the foundations of the game-play's co-operative aspect does drive the progression throughout the puzzles, there are drastic faults in the default maneuverability of the game with the single-player pacing as well as the AI, not to mention ideas seemingly wasted in documentary-style videos thrown into the game as fodder for additional insight.