Never Alone combines traditional folklore, stories, settings, and characters handed down over many generations by Alaska Native people whose roots and heritage date back millennia.

Featuring imagery and themes drawn directly from Iñupiat and other Alaska Native cultures, Never Alone features striking visuals, emphasizes the sensibilities and perspective of these indigenous Arctic people and requires players to work cooperatively to succeed in challenging and harsh environments.

Never Alone: Foxtales features three new levels, inspired by another of these amazing stories. Working on Foxtales has given our team a chance to build on the elements of the original game that players really responded to with more complex and varied puzzles, new abilities for each of the characters and new environments.

Foxtales is based on the story of ‘The Two Coastal Brothers,’ as told by Willie Panik Goodwin, Sr. The interdependence between the two brothers in this traditional tale was really compelling because in many ways it reflected the interdependence between Nuna and Fox. One brother is an excellent hunter and fighter. The other is a strong swimmer. To defeat the main antagonist, they must work together, each of their unique talents supporting the other and ultimately proving crucial to their success.

This idea of interdependence is not only an important theme in many Alaska Native tales, it also creates opportunities for fun gameplay. Players of the original game responded best to puzzles that required them to use the special abilities of the two player-controlled characters in unexpected ways. Upper One Games / E-Line Media created more interesting and varied puzzles in Foxtales by embracing this approach, casting Nuna and Fox (the main characters of the original game) as the two characters from the traditional story and giving each character new abilities. Nuna, for example, can row and steer an umiaq (a sealskin canoe) and Fox can interact with spirits to change the flow of underwater currents.

As all this talk about canoes and currents implies, Foxtales is set in a different (and decidedly more nautical) environment than the original game: the waters and coasts of Northwest Alaska. At the risk of stating the obvious, Alaska is a pretty big place and is home to a diverse set of terrain and environments. Those environments also change with the seasons, so things aren’t as uniformly snowy as in the original game (which did involve finding the source of an endless blizzard, after all).

Early in our design process the decision was made to set Foxtales not only in a different location but also in a different season: the Arctic spring. This not only let the developers include new game mechanics, but also develop art and level designs that depict the beauty of Alaskan environments that couldn’t have appeared in the original game – like an arctic prairie with the first blooms of spring peaking through the snowpack, the rapids and waterfalls of a river fed by melting snow or the subterranean lair of an unexpected new villain.

Upper One Games / E-Line Media is also working on bringing Never Alone to two additional PlayStation platforms: PS3 and PS Vita.

Never Alone: Foxtales will be available as DLC for the original game on PS4 through PlayStation Store on July 28th, 2015.