Arctic Awakening Review: An Interesting Sci-Fi Hindered by Glitches

Ever since playing Firewatch in 2016, I’ve been rather fascinated by the modern evolution of the adventure game. Idiots call these games “walking simulators”, but that’s always been a rather reductive way to look at the genre. These games simply prioritise telling an interesting story and weaving in gameplay elements with that. If the gameplay doesn’t suit the narrative, it doesn’t need to be there.

Arctic Awakening might fit this bill of modern adventure games that take clear inspiration from gems like Firewatch and What Remains of Edith Finch; narrative gems that thrive off your interactivity with the environment and dialogue with seen or unseen characters. If you're a fan of those games, chances are you're probably interested in this too.

In Arctic Awakening you play as Kai, a survivor of a plane crash that goes down in the Arctic following a mysterious storm. Along with your court-mandated robot therapist, Alfie, you must survive in the wilderness all while searching for your lost co-pilot, as well as solving a mystery surrounding the area you’ve crashed in.

As a game that lies heavily on the narrative side, a lot of your time is spent communicating with Alfie or Donovan, your lost co-pilot, (the latter via a radio), and speech choices determine the direction and outcomes of your various conversations. If you’d rather play Kai as a more straight-edge bloke, dialogue choices can reflect that. However, there are also options to play him more jovially, less confident, or even silent altogether. While the narrative isn’t necessarily shaped by every single option you take, your interpretation of Kai and the outcome of his relationships with Alfie and Donovan are affected by them.

GoldFire Studios

And this extends to the overarching mystery of Arctic Awakening. Without giving too much away, Kai and Alfie essentially discover that there is a larger mystery in this wilderness than they initially realised. And over the course of the five episodes, it gradually becomes less a story about survival, and more about understanding the true nature of what this means.

Survival is a core aspect of the gameplay. Kai needs to eat food to stay alive and meditate to keep his mind healthy. The game keeps track of his hunger and mental wellbeing, and prompts you to eat or rest when these thresholds get low. You can find food to keep his hunger afloat, while appropriately-placed rock cairns will keep his mental health levelled.

However, it doesn’t quite go beyond that. If you’re looking for deep survival mechanics with brutal difficulty, you might be more inclined to check out games like The Long Dark or Don’t Starve. There isn’t an intricate crafting system or anything like that. Arctic Awakening’s core focus is on the narrative, and that’s fine really for what it is. It’s not as if games like Firewatch or Gone Home needed additional mechanics like this to tell the story they wanted to tell.

But while I was initially vibing quite well with watching Arctic Awakening’s story unfold, I found the actual experience of playing it to be often frustrating. For starters, I would quite frequently run into bugs that prevented progression throughout each chapter.

GoldFire Studios

Multiple times per each chapter, I’d hit a block in my progression where level triggers simply refused to activate. Maybe a certain door was meant to unlock or a piece of dialogue was supposed to activate that would allow me to continue on with the level, but they wouldn’t. It meant that I would frequently wander around the game’s rather large map looking for a solution, only to realise after 20 minutes that I actually only needed to reload the checkpoint and have it work normally.

This meant I was wasting my time a lot while playing Arctic Awakening, and it often got to the point where it would frustrate me and disrupt the momentum of my playthrough. There were even a few times where reloading a checkpoint wouldn’t fix the issue, and I’d instead have to wait on a patch from GoldFire Studios to fix it for me so I could progress.

Maybe I just got unlucky, and other players won’t have the same issues as me. I ought to say that GoldFire has been a delight in fixing these issues throughout the review period. I’ve seen the review build get updated multiple times per day, presumably fixing bugs and errors that have cropped up during this final stretch. I hate to mark a game down for issues that might not even exist in the final release, but they did disrupt my experience of playing the game and it's difficult to put that aside when assessing the game as a whole.

When Arctic Awakening wasn’t bugged, however, there were also moments where it felt like the game had some trouble signposting what you’re supposed to do or where you’re meant to go.

GoldFire Studios

I’d figure that since the majority of the game is spent with Alfie, an AI assistant, he’d frequently be offering tips or help if I were to get stuck. A little “have you tried doing this?” or “maybe we should go that way?” dialogue would have gone a long way. Unfortunately, Alfie’s dynamic dialogue feels few and far between when it comes to pointing you in the right direction, and it meant that when I did get stuck, I’d just have to try and guess what I needed to do next.

It’s this which also prevents Alfie from growing on you over the course of the game. When I think back to video game companions that are universally loved; Ellie from The Last of Us, Elizabeth from BioShock Infinite, the Companion Cube from Portal… these companions are beloved because of their dynamic interactions during gameplay, in addition to their importance within the narrative.

But while Alfie’s dialogue and writing is rather strong within Arctic Awakening’s narrative, I couldn’t help but feel like my attachment to him would have been much stronger if he’d been less reluctant to help me on my journey, or if there were more opportunities to interact with him throughout the game’s 10-hour playtime.

Considering Arctic Awakening also has this underlying theme about robotics and AI—subject matter that is very topical and important to discuss at the moment—it feels like your interactions and opinion of Alfie should be part of this. While these themes are certainly discussed throughout the game, becoming interwoven with the other parts of the narrative, it doesn’t really feel like the game goes far enough with exploring them.

The episodic format also fell a bit flat for me. Arctic Awakening’s story is split across five smaller chapters, which total around 2 hours each (if you don’t run into any of the aforementioned bugs or progression blockers). My issue with this kind of structure is that the game has a message upfront that tells you your choices matter, but since every chapter needs to begin and end in the same place, it doesn’t really feel like your choices actually matter until the finale.

And even then, it suffers from “Life is Strange syndrome”, where the only real choice that matters is the final one, which is then only given a single cutscene to really deliver on that decision. Therefore the non-linearity becomes more of an illusion. And since GoldFire has opted to release the entire game at once, it feels like an odd design choice to make your game episodic when it doesn’t necessarily benefit from it.

It’s always frustrating marking a game down due to very simple, but easily fixable flaws. Arctic Awakening has been receiving frequent patches during the review period, so it’s entirely likely that a lot of these bugs have been squashed. Nevertheless, this was still my experience of the game after playing through to completion. I enjoyed the narrative, and quite liked seeing the mystery unravel over the course of the story. I just found it to be a frustrating experience on the technical side.

Pros: Engaging story, excellent voice acting, great art style

Cons: Very glitchy, confusing level design, awkward pacing

For fans of: Firewatch, What Remains of Edith Finch, The Long Dark

6/10: Good

Arctic Awakening is set to release on 18th September on PC (version tested), PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. A review code was provided by the publisher. Read a guide to our review scores here.