4/3/16 - Never Alone

"Never Alone" tells the story of Nuna and her fox well by means of 2D platforming combined with informational videos about Inuit culture. The videos are helpful in detailing why the game is like it is, for instance why you can weather fierce blizzards with your caribou clothing. Some would find that videos to be distracting from the game play, so the option to not watch the videos until after you've played is there. This choice of how you get information from the game is effective because more people can enjoy it on both an education and purely game play orientated level.

A major theme in the game is building a sense of community and companionship, represented through Nuna's interaction with the fox and even the spirits of nature. This relationship with the village is embedded narrative because it is "pre-generated narrative content that exists prior to a player's interaction with the game." But does this means the entire game has an embedded narrative, or is there an emergent narrative?

Perhaps throwing the bola counts as a form of emergent narrative in that one can throw the bola as many times as you choose. There's also moments where the game breaks and the keys lag or don't work as they should which creates a narrative of Nuna making a poor decision. 

In short I found this game pretty cool educationally but the coding wasn't fantastic. Many things went wrong that made the game not awfully playable which led me to eventually stopping. But hey, in that there's a story of a girl that is lost forever. But is she truly lost when she has her wolf companion?