Never Alone is based on a story told by Alaskan natives, the Iñupiat. Some of the animated cut-scenes are stylised in the way they carve their stories, with the narration delivered in their language. All the elements within the game are described in documentary-style videos that you unlock as you progress through the game.
When you first load up the game, you instantly have 2 videos unlocked to watch. After attempting to watch them, I got a blank screen with no sound. After peeking on the Steam forums, it turns out you have to install a codec which actually comes with the game, but for some reason, the developers didn't include it in the installer.
After the actual game begun, I died after 3 seconds. At that point, I started worrying that the game would be marred by poor design/implementation...and it really is. The situation I died in was the following: I'm told to move to run from the polar bear, so I do. A gap in the ground ahead appears and an on-screen prompt tells you to jump. I judge the character's movement speed and time my jump. However, in the previous second, my character decides to slow down and shield their face from the wind and so I jump straight down the hole. This type of thing happens a lot through the game so I died an awful lot. Even more so than the first couple of worlds of Super Meat Boy.
You switch between two characters. One is a young girl and the other is a snow fox who helps save the her from a polar bear attack. She leaves her village with the aim of discovering the source of the extreme snowstorm.
The girl has fairly sluggish movement and a limited jump but can push blocks and throw her bola which can destroy certain blocks of ice. The fox is fast, has a high jump, has a climbing ability and can wall jump. There's also spirits which appear and can be moved by the fox to form moving platforms/elevators for the girl. These abilities form the games' platforming mechanics and involve switching between the two characters to make progress together.
The snowstorm gets stronger at regular intervals which can slow you down or be utilised to gain a long-distance jump. These jumps are required to reach certain platforms. Checkpoints occur very frequently so you are usually placed moments before your death.
When you are not controlling a character, they will be automatically controlled by the computer, unless it's basically a puzzle section, then they will wait. It's not really clear what constitutes a puzzle section so there's awkward moments where you expect your character to catch up to you but they decide to stay-put instead.
I found every aspect of the game really awkward. Quite often, cliffs will be positioned at a height equal to the apex of your jump so require a perfectly timed jump. There's plenty of times where the spirits will appear far too late for you to notice them, so you may just leap to your death. On-screen prompts appear to tell you how to interact with new game-play elements, but again, these appear far too late. The spirit's movement is painfully slow and will often follow a set path; which is invisible or hard to see/predict.
I was really looking forward to playing this game. The art-style looked great and the concept seemed like a cool idea. However, it just isn't fun at all. On the plus side, the game clocks up around 3 hours if you watch the documentary videos; so it's very short.
There's also DLC available for the game; Fox Tales. I'm not sure if the developers aimed to make the gameplay far worse than the main game, but I'm sure it was only possible by swapping the running sections for sailing in a boat, or swapping the puzzles for underwater sections. They managed to do both these things. I managed around 20 minutes of it before I couldn't possibly bring myself to carry on.