Most impressively, these impressions came without ever making it feel like I was taking a history class. Short videos called cultural insights unlock as players progress, featuring people from the Cook Inlet community talking about what it was like to grow up in the region's unforgiving cold. Anecdotes about whale hunting, long stretches of near-total darkness and other facts of Alaskan native life let players hear about the realities—and not myths—of life in that part of the world. The cultural insights—combined with the lively, silent animation and the ink-scrawled scrimshaw cutscenes—serve as evidence that this game isn't just a slice of cultural tourism and has genuine research and participation in its bones.

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There's some heartbreak in the story, too. At first, I was thinking about having my three-year-old daughter watch as I played but quickly decided that some of the scenes could scare her. All kids are different, of course, but be mindful that very young children might get frightened by some character designs and events in the game if you're thinking of exposing them to it. It should also be noted that, while you'll have to defeat enemies in the game, you're never killing them via direct violence.

As charming as it is, Never Alone still harbors some flaws. There are spots where it seems like the game could've used an extra layer of fine tuning and polish. Moments where partner AI wasn't really helpful, collision detection doesn't work as it should or controls seem a bit finicky popped up during my time with the game. None of it was game-breaking but I did notice it when it happened.

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More problematic is the sharp difficulty spike at the end of Never Alone. It's frustrating, not only because it makes the game more exacting and frantic than it had been previously. Never Alone's last chunk is a series of puzzles where you need to frequently switch between Nuna and Fox to get the girl where she needs to go, often with an ever-looming threat right behind you acting as a timer. Nothing in the game's previous levels serves as training for these quick-response sections, so you wind up dying and re-trying a lot. Some of that frustration should ease if it's possible to get a co-op partner to play these sections.

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Never Alone is short, capable of being completed in a few hours. But its brevity makes it feel like a future favorite fairy tale that you'll revisit again and again. Something that you'll have friends over to watch and play together. Those scrimshaw cutscenes are even more beautiful than the 3D animations in their own way, because they bring a relatively isolated tradition into the present. Never Alone's message is about the connection between the community and the individual, how the ties that bind people together allow seemingly impossible tasks. If you've ever wondered how people live in painfully frigid environments like Alaska, playing Kisima Ingitchuna will tell you, in the very voice of the community where it happens.