If “Journey” has to be a thing, “Never Alone” should be too.

Brandon Jordan
Jul 10, 2017 · 4 min read

First of all, I mean no shade to great indie games like “Journey” or “Inside” or to that class of experience. I love those games. But a confluence of nerd happenings have brought a slept-on game up to my attention, and it’s long overdue.

The background is that I’m a QPOC and a terrible nerd, so I went to Denver Comic Con on July 1 and sat in on a panel called “Redface, Spirit Animals and the Noble Savage: How to Tackle Native and Indigenous Stereotypes.” 100 percent in right away. It was five Native American nerds, “Indiginerds,” talking about their experiences as creators and as consumers and what common stereotypes about them mean in both contexts. The panelists were Lee Francis IV, Renee Nejo, Johnathan Nelson, Aaron Cuffe and Jon Proudstar. They all create art and should all be checked out for the books, games and comics they make that are true to their native realities (Native Realities being the publishing company of which Francis and Cuffee are CEO and CCO respectively because that’s a super apt name.)

At the same time and since then, the Steam Summer Sale has been beating down on the video game-playing world like a worse sun. It’s practically coercive how good some of these deals are. One of the games going for real cheap as of this writing is “Never Alone ( Kisima Inŋitchuŋa)” from the Anchorage-based Upper-One Games. It’s a 2014 game about the experience of Indigenous Alaskan people by way of a puzzle platformer adaptation of a folk story called “Kunuuksaayuka” where a curious young girl goes on a journey, with the help of an arctic fox, to find the source of a blizzard that’s been keeping her village from hunting. It’s like a lot of folk tales but also unlike the stories a lot of us would be familiar with because the vast majority of us have no exposure to Inupiaq culture. We don’t know anything about themes from their culture or the long-standing memes they grow up with. But that gap in understanding is where the game does its best work because it’s an Inupiaq story that’s been packaged for non-Inupiaq people and for future generations of Inupiaq people who are already not growing up the same way their parents and grandparents did. The develpers close that gap by presenting traditional Truths as features and mechanics in the game and letting the player unlock bite-sized documentaries where elders talk about their lived experiences and local Indigenerds approach the same topics from an academic angle to explan why something is historically how it is.

There’s one segment named “No More Thick Ice” that’s exploding with cultural memory. The title comes from one of the games translators and cultural ambassadors, Ronald Aniqsuaq Brower Sr., explaining how he experienced climate change through his lifetime. When he was a child, they would walk out over ice 25 feet thick to go whaling, but 50 years have passed, and he says they have to whale on ice that’s now only 18 inches. He says that, even when he was nine, ice that had never moved was already calving and floating around in the sea where it never had been in the community’s memory. Ronald repeats what he knew from the spoken experience of his elders as fact, something that oral traditions rely on.

This also comes out in the way that everyone who speaks about what they do under the Aurora Borealis which is 1. whistle at it and 2. always keep their hoods up. This is because the Northern Lights are children who didn’t survive childhood, and they’re out playing. They aren’t malicious or anything. They just want to play, but they can’t get too close because if they see an exposed head, they’ll cut it off and play football with it. That’s just the story, and the Inupiaq experience of this gorgeous solar wind phenomenon is underpinned by the stories they’ve been telling for generations.

“Never Alone” is a game that attempts to encapsulate the Alaskan Inupiaq experience in the way that oral stories do, but it also lets players experience one for themselves. That’s an amazing capability considering that, according to the University of Alaska Fairbanks, there are about 13,500 Alaskan Inupiaq people only about 3,000 of whom speak the language, as of 2007. The university also lists the population in Greenland where there were 46,400 at the time with only 400 non-speakers. They’re not vanishing in the way Indigenous people are often portrayed, but aspects of their life are because of factors like climate change.

“Never Alone” acts like a time capsule that contains truths about the life of Indigenous Alaskan people that’s an accessible experience for anybody, and it deserves to be experienced and learned from.

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