For this week's look into gameplay and narrative, I looked at Never Alone.
Never Alone readily takes up the the 'string of pearls' method - gameplay, followed by a 'pearl' of story, followed by another 'string' of gameplay, and so forth. This approach to narrative in games can be a difficult one, as you need to balance out the two so that the player both has enough time to interact and play, thus keeping them interested, but also not so much that the story 'pearls' get spaced so far apart that the story is forgotten by the time you reach the next cutscene (some of the Silent Hill games, in particular, have been terrible at this - not because the story was too far apart, but because frquently you could spend hours upon hours, running back and forth, searching for a tiny piece to solve one tiny puzzle - and you'd normally encounter many of these puzzles between each narrative segment. Or wind up with having to open and search rooms A through to M, or something of the like. However, this isn't about the Silent Hill series).
Never Alone was relatively good at balancing the two - after each puzzle, you'd receive a short segment of the story, making the narrative segments much like a carrot on a stick - you progress through the puzzles, following the narrative segments dangled in front of you. The approach worked well with the occasional lines of narration that would sometimes be prompted as you completed a part of the puzzle, reminding you that there is a story there too.
Never Alone made each narrative segment feel like a reward, and having each scene be rather short, kept it from becoming too much like it was straying too far from the gameplay.
Playing it myself, I personally didn't find the story engaged me too greatly, but that would likely be down to personal preference. I found the gameplay, and the puzzle solving to be more what encouraged me to continue with my progression through the story, and the narrative segments to be more of a pleasant break, but definitely not quite enthralling enough that I'd want to rush ahead and seek the next piece of the story.
It did keep me interested, and overall I definitely enjoy the game, but in this instance, specifically, I found the gameplay to be more my motivation than the actual narrative.
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