Never Alone - 9/20 hours

I finished the game again, this time collecting all the cultural insights. This makes Never Alone the third game I've managed to get 100% of the achievements for (the other two are Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes and . . . sigh, Hatoful Boyfriend). The second time through wasn't much different than the first. The death of the fox was still a gut punch. It was still beautiful, and there were still areas where the controls betrayed me (though in fairness to the game, it was a lot easier the second time through, even if the Manslayer chases continued to be total bullshit).

Overall, my impression of this game is positive. Even separated from its educational goals (at which it succeeds admirably - I am definitely interested in learning more about the Inupiat), it is a wonderful fantasy starring a pair of charming characters; a simple story, beautifully told, around the framework of an adequate platformer. I would unreservedly recommend it to anyone who was on the fence about whether to pick it up.

That said, I don't exactly relish the thought of playing it two and a half more times just to prove a point. I mean, yes, it would be about a million times more pleasant than toughing my way through Ship Simulator Extremes, but I'm not sure it would make for especially scintillating reading. I can already tell you what my 15 and 20 hour posts would be - Never Alone continues to have a delightful visual style, the bulk of the gameplay continues to be serviceable, Manslayer continues to be a pain in the ass, the death of the fox is still sad.

Not that it's not worth doing, exactly (I did honestly and seriously contemplate playing Portal ten times in a row), it's just that the purpose of this blog is not for me to do silly endurance challenges, it's for me to get the most out of my games, and I feel that with Never Alone, I did.

Yet I can't have that gap in my completed list. It'll bug the hell out of me. So, I'm going to do what I did with Portal and Portal 2, and bundle this game together with a couple of similar games, and treat them collectively as one 20-hour project. Specifically, I'm going to lump Never Alone in with Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons, and Braid. Why? Because they are all critically acclaimed puzzle platformers that come in short of 20 hours per playthrough, so it just seems logical to me that, as long as I'm bending my blog's mission statement, I might as well play to a theme (that this forestalls two other gaps in my completed list is no small concern as well).