Never Alone is a side-scrolling puzzle-platformer developed by Upper One Games on a traditional Iñupiaq tale recorded by Robert Nasruk Cleveland in his collection Stories of the Black River People. The game was developed in cooperation with the Cook Inlet Tribal Council (Alaska), and the production drew on the talents of 40 tribal members.
The game tells the story of a young Iñupiat girl named Nuna who travels across the terrain of extreme northern Alaska with an arctic fox to learn what has befallen her family after her village was attacked and destroyed by The Terrible One. In the course of the game, the player is required to swap between Nuna and the fox to escape polar bears, to outsmart little people, traverse the tundra during a blizzard, defeat the Terrible One, and steal the Ice Giant’s axe.
Although that sounds like a lot of action, Never Alone‘s gameplay is not the most interesting thing about it. Although the designers set the challenges to become progressively harder, the basic skills are consistent and do not build as much as happens in other games. The reason this game is worthy of the awards it collected when released in 2014 and the reason it is worthy of study is that the game incorporates traditional storytelling and short i-documentary clips that are unlocked as the player progresses.
The story elements appear in the game as cinematics or cutscenes; the animation style changes from the Disney-style animation used for the player-controlled segments to a sepia-toned native art style. The narration is in the Iñupiat language with subtitles in the player-selected language. The i-documentary “insights” are released where they can add depth and understanding to the cultural elements as the player encounters them. The insights also tie the cultural elements to the present. As one tribal elder says in the first insight, the Iñupiat are a living people and a living culture. Although the technology has changed, the essential struggle for survival remains, a point that comes home in the story of a young man about being stranded on an ice floe while out hunting with his father as a boy.
So often when my students and critics think about educational games, they jump to imagining fully immersive VR or AR games that put the experience at the center of the game. Never Alone provides a story-forward model that not only can give the players a chance to engage with the life-challenges the Iñupiat face but the opportunity to learn their stories, history, and values as well as hear their language.