Never Alone, Upper One Games’ critically divisive puzzle-platformer about an Alaskan Native girl named Nuna and her fox companion, was given away as part of April’s PlayStation Plus offering for the PlayStation 4, but now the game is making its way to new — or, rather, old — platforms: the PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation Vita, and it’s getting some fresh DLC to go with it.
“One of our hopes for Never Alone is that the game introduces Alaska Native culture to audiences that may not have been exposed to it before,” says Brian Alspach of publisher E-Line Games. “To that end, our team has started work on bringing Never Alone to two additional PlayStation platforms: PS3 and PS Vita.” Currently, in addition to the PS4, the game is available on PC, Mac, Xbox One, and Wii U.
The Vita and PS3 versions of Never Alone are expected this fall, but new DLC arrives much sooner. Never Alone: Foxtales, a three-level story based on the tale of “The Two Coastal Brothers,” arrives July 28, and takes place in the “nautical” environment of Northwest Alaska, which means “things aren’t always as uniformly snowy as in the original game,” according to Alspach.
Developer Upper One Games is the “first U.S. based indigenous-owned game company,” and its name refers to Alaska’s status as the sole state located north of the “Lower 48.” Never Alone was created in collaboration with “nearly 40 Alaska Native elders, storytellers, and community members” to ensure an authentic experience representative of the Alaskan culture and indigenous people. It also includes more than 30 minutes of interview footage with the Alaskan community, where they “share stories and wisdom about their culture values, and the amazing Arctic world encountered by players.” We called Never Alone “one of the few examples of a non-European or East Asian culture’s stories being explored in gaming.”
