Arctic Awakening is an upcoming first-person narrative adventure game set to be released later this year, and a demo is currently available as part of LudoNarraCon. Set in the year 2062 after an unspecified disaster, you play a man named Kai who is flying in rations to a town in Alaska when a sudden storm causes you to crash in the frozen wilderness. Separated from your co-pilot during the crash, you have only an AI drone for company as you search for a way to survive and find him again.
The story premise is interesting, especially due to its near-future setting and references to a disaster that occurred. While it doesn’t go into detail about what happened, it’s clear enough that it was pretty bad. There are also hints about the main character’s own story, as the drone accompanying him is required to do so by court order and makes frequent references to his family and behaviors that might be beneficial for him. I was unsure about the Arctic setting at first, since the opening section is set during a snowstorm that makes it difficult to see, but I later grew to appreciate the snow-covered setting.
Several dialogue choices pop up during the demo, although at this point it’s not clear what effect they have. I didn’t notice any changes beyond different dialogue in response, but the full game is supposed to have choices that affect your relationships with other characters. Since I was playing with a mouse and keyboard, it felt a little awkward at first that I couldn’t click the dialogue choice I wanted, but I got used to it after a while.
As you look around, you find items that you can pick up. When you pick up an item, you then can either keep it or throw it away. Some items are necessary for solving puzzles, but it’s not clear if there’s a purpose to keeping other items or not. For example, keeping or discarding the family photo seems like it could factor into the story, but I didn’t see any indication of that in the demo. After the crash, your first goal is to find a way to survive in the frigid wasteland. Survival is a key part of the character’s struggle, but it’s all story-based. You just need to find the items or perform the task the game wants you to.
Unfortunately, my experience with the demo ran into quite a few bugs and glitches. On my first venture into the demo, I reached the early game objective to collect firewood and decided to explore instead. I set out across the snow and discovered that you have quite a bit of freedom to explore. At the same time, I started glitching through the snow instead of walking over it, which was fine on its own for a preview, but then I somehow trapped myself between a cliff and a stack of rocks and couldn’t get out.
So I restarted the demo, tried out some different dialogue options, and decided to focus on following the story path this time around. However, my interaction points were slightly off and attempting to enter the fallen plane’s cockpit resulted in me sitting on air behind it instead. During my third try at the demo, this problem had gone away, so I successfully started a fire and continued through some interesting story developments until I was told to scare away a bear. I grabbed a flaming branch and ran around aimlessly for a while since I couldn’t actually see or hear the bear, which stalled me until I realized my actual problem was that the name of the item I was holding was covering up an action prompt. I tried the button I’d used for previous actions and scared away the bear. However, there was another problem I’d been hoping wouldn’t become an issue, which was that the ability to climb onto certain obstacles or jump across gaps wasn’t working in this playthrough. When I set out to explore the next in-game morning, I promptly fell into a crevasse since I had no prompt to jump across it and was unable to get out.
I made one last attempt to play the demo, but this time my character got stuck in place, unable to move away from the last object I’d interacted with. The Arctic Awakening demo gave me a reason to be interested in its world, but either I have exceptionally bad luck, or it will need some major bug-fixing efforts before the full game launches.
