Arctic Awakening Review

As someone who loved Firewatch's atmosphere and the snowy wilderness of The Long Dark, GoldFire Studios’ Arctic Awakening pulled me in with a first glance. Then, its intense opening gripped me like a thrilling novel would; I watched Kai abandon his plane, which was on a catastrophic descent during a storm. What seemed like a routine supply drop to an Alaskan town had immediately been ruined by something tearing Kai’s plane in half, causing his co-pilot, Donovan, to disappear during the chaos. Kai isn’t alone, however, as his court-mandated therapy bot, Alfie, survives the crash alongside him, a curious companion that raises many questions about our protagonist’s personal life. The mysteries and high stakes are exactly why I love first-person narrative adventures like these.

With no combat and light puzzle opportunities, your experience in Arctic Awakening is primarily built upon atmosphere, immersion, exploration, and dialogue. While your crash site feels quite woodsy at first, it doesn’t take long for the environment to embody a sci-fi feel, as you discover abandoned, technologically advanced structures. At times, I forgot that we hadn’t landed on a new planet altogether. The juxtaposition of the wilderness and sci-fi buildings properly conveys how disorientating this place must be for Kai.

While each new outdoor location is quite linear, the paths frequently split, giving you two options for how to proceed, making your long walks a bit more choice-driven. Indoors, you get to explore lived-in rooms and messy offices, intriguing spaces that look like they once held bustling life, which makes the lack of people even more eerie.

Interaction with the world is simple, as you’re mostly scanning your hand to open doors, asking Alfie to download data, or collecting keycards. When you are able to pick up and keep items, it’s mostly collectables (cute mugs and dinosaur plush toys) or resources (food and drink). If you don’t like walking around simply to uncover more of the story, then this exploration might feel a bit too pared back. For me, there were times the interactable items became repetitive, especially as I got into later chapters, leaving me wishing that the game had been more focused and intentional with fleshing out its world. Instead of giving me countless microscopes to pick and throw, why not give me more interesting items to inspect?

There is a hunger/thirst system that impacts Kai’s movement, as he can slow down and experience distorted vision when he’s low on fuel. Eating and drinking from the various water bottles and food packs you find is necessary throughout, a mechanic I would’ve liked more if it didn’t frequently break my game. Kai’s hand often became stuck holding the food/drink items, preventing me from interacting with anything else in the world; this halted my progress completely. Though I appreciate the “Restart Scene” button the developer included, I didn’t like the amount of time I’d lose while just trying to keep this stranded man fed.

The inclusion of a mindfulness mechanic was perhaps my favourite element of Arctic Awakening, as whenever there’s a pile of stones nearby, you can have Kai take a moment to breathe in and out, improving his mental wellness. I thought it was a nice touch when I first encountered it, and I decided to do the breathing exercises from my desk, too. Unlike the eating/drinking mechanic, it worked seamlessly throughout my playthrough. My only criticism is that it didn’t seem properly integrated with the story or Kai’s character arc, as these moments of mindfulness go unmentioned throughout the game and don’t have an effect on Kai’s generally poor disposition. Both the hunger and breathing mechanics seemed shoe-horned in to give the experience more interactivity, but they ultimately felt like separate puzzle pieces jammed together.

Arctic Awakening’s story is too weak to carry the rest of the experience. Kai’s five-chapter journey is riddled with unrealistic dialogue, poorly crafted relationships with other characters, flat voice acting, and heavy end-game choices that don’t earn the emotional response they tried to create. It doesn’t quite capture the natural progression of two characters growing to trust and care for one another like Firewatch, and the moments it tries to draw Kai and Alfie together feel forced.

Additionally, the script was quite repetitive, such as too many mentions about Alfie “finally being useful” all the way to the fifth chapter. It was also frustrating that when the game gave you dialogue options to choose from, the seemingly “nicer” responses were snippy. In a game where your choices can supposedly shape your relationships, it seemed that no matter what, Kai was meant to be rude and easily irritated toward his only companion. Any character growth would always quickly be undone, making it difficult to root for him.

There’s also an attempt to tie the central mystery of this Alaskan wilderness into Kai’s personal journey, but again, the game doesn’t intertwine the two plot points well. The realisations Kai has at the end of the game simply feel unnatural and sudden. While I think the narrative has potential, it needs more space, time, and focus to refine the story it’s trying to tell.

Arctic Awakening is a game I wanted to love, so I was disappointed that it felt more like a messy attempt at an interesting story and a drag overall to play. Even with the chapters being two hours long, I spent a good while trying to progress, since technical issues would set me back, from Kai being unable to interact with items to the game freezing up and crashing. In episode three, the sound disappeared completely, requiring multiple reboots to get it back. The last chapter was also the worst performance-wise, with frequent stuttering.

If you enjoy narrative-driven adventures and first-person walking sims, I think you’ll be left wanting if you play Arctic Awakening. The cute drone companion isn’t enough to look past the poorly told story and technical issues.