After we consider the character of a lighthouse (as we regularly do), phrases like stoicism, isolation, and purposefulness might come to thoughts. However have you ever ever discovered them endearing, quirky, and even charming? Keeper, an atmospheric puzzle-platformer from developer Double High quality, cleverly reimagines forgettable coastal constructions and recasts them as lovable sentient scouts touring via the dwelling world. Mixing a kaleidoscopic artwork fashion with nostalgic journey recreation mechanics, Keeper hides an emotional story beneath its visible splendor, delivering a brain-tickling journey that caught with me far past the credit.
After getting separated from his flock whereas dodging a flood of evil bat-like creatures, a seabird named Twig is drawn to a dormant lighthouse on the outskirts of a legendary island. Stagnant and lonely, an sudden customer awakens the sleeping lighthouse, which emits a heat mild that drives away the hordes of evil. The story of The Keeper is constructed across the soul-stirring relationship that develops between this unlikely duo as they battle the island’s eerie an infection, navigate its unusual biome, and try to climb its possessed, claw-like peak. Regardless of not having a single line of dialogue in The Keeper’s practically six-hour working time, I discovered myself utterly immersed of their plight. This can be a testomony to how dynamic the 2 of them felt.
It additionally helps that Keeper is likely one of the most visually fascinating video games I’ve ever performed. The island’s topography is undulating and disorganized like an ant farm, and its towering peaks one way or the other sit on the fringe of most frames, teasing its proximity. Each nook of its surreal, painterly world hides deep, expansive wells intersected by rugged coral, forgotten cave constructions, and vibrant, winding vines, like particulars from a Discover WALL-E ebook. Keeper’s use of mounted digicam angles is especially impressed, evoking the cinematic really feel as soon as cultivated by video games like Grim Fandango and Silent Hill.
The Keeper would not explicitly clarify the lore behind its legendary, post-apocalyptic setting, as an alternative counting on visible cues like crumpled homes and rewilded cityscapes to create a way of hazard and scale. It is also good to have the environments you roam seamlessly mix collectively, with orchestration and shade palette modifications asserting new areas and checkpoints extra continuously than loading screens. This HUD-less method immerses you within the Keeper’s spectacular panorama, rising your funding within the duo and inspiring you to play together with your powers and uncover the lore sprinkled all through.
In relation to interacting with the world, the lighthouse’s energy is comparatively restricted, however it’s used correctly. You may hearth beams of sunshine and rush via obstacles to knock them down, have your chicken pals pull vines, and function levers to open doorways. At first, the trail ahead may be very easy and entails utilizing mild to develop vines to create bridges and scaring creatures to drop vital objects wanted to advance. Nevertheless, Keeper step by step will increase its problem, introducing a wholesome mixture of logic and platforming puzzles, requiring you to weave in some interactions to advance. One such puzzle concerned discovering and pulling a sequence of hidden levers to create a path via a speeding waterfall. To smell out the liver, you needed to fly via house, use beams to blow up imprecise brain-like nodes, decrease platforms, and develop patches of alien vegetation.
Nevertheless, not all reactions that may be elicited serve a gameplay-specific objective. You too can wield these powers to affect the Seussian wildlife round you, utilizing mild to alter the colour of timber or make them tremble with life. Elsewhere, as you stroll, curious creatures react with lovely animations alongside the sides of the trail. It could possibly’t be overstated that just about each screenshot in Keeper effortlessly seems to be like a murals.
Whereas the essential abilities stay largely the identical all through the story, the world modifications to maintain it contemporary. For instance, your humble torch can ultimately activate unusual monuments that twist time forwards and backwards, quickly turning twigs into ghosts that may fly via partitions and spin gears or spin eggs that crush strain plates β who says you may’t train outdated buildings new methods?
If this all sounds a bit far-fetched, and it’s, all of it one way or the other is sensible within the context of the Keeper’s fascinating world. Certainly, every new mechanic is thoughtfully built-in into each the story and the general world-building, and it helps that Keeper sprinkles in delicate tutorials via a number of can’t-miss interactions at the beginning of every new space. Much like Cyan World’s groundbreaking puzzle recreation Myst, Double High quality cleverly teaches you find out how to resolve the puzzles forward with out over-explaining them. This lets you keep momentum with out utterly breaking free from the bigger story.
Nonetheless, there is not any must rush to the highest of the mountain. Half the enjoyable of being a keeper is the journey, and there are many spectacular sights alongside the best way. Every degree is its personal microcosm that screams persona. You may go to dreamy pollen fields crammed with cotton sweet bushes and cliff faces that appear like random paint splatters, and the cleverly named Horloge, an architecturally Greek steampunk metropolis. These areas are sometimes disorienting, with brushstroke element and scratchy textures reinforcing their natural, handcrafted aesthetic. They’re additional enhanced by composer David Earle’s beautiful soundtrack, whose glittering, dreamlike preparations strike a gentle steadiness between serenity and eeriness, casting a way of unease over the world.
However that is not all. Every space is dwelling to its personal creatures, from towering multi-eyed whales to legged rocks to slender cylindrical dragons that appear like woven quilts. All this strangeness made me really feel like the child within the aquarium who used a lighthouse flashlight to “knock on the glass” to get a response. Even with their eerie designs, the creatures all match into the Keeper’s world as if that they had advanced over centuries to outlive. This theme permeates each nook and cranny of this existential story.
The theme is just not very complicated, however it’s important to learn between the strains to grasp it. As a Lonely Lighthouse, concepts of evolution and isolation are touched upon, however importantly, the interpretation of every dialogue-free cutscene and puzzle is actually influenced by your individual expertise in a manner that feels intentional. For me, The Keeper struck me as an exploration of friendship, adaptation, and the unparalleled energy of self-belief in a world struggling to face beneath oppressive forces. Perhaps it means one thing completely different to you. Very similar to the method of taking a look at a portray, I generally longed for a extra concrete reply to that query, however this story leaves the door open to discovering that means in each the artist’s intentions and my very own.
I’ve all the time considered Double High quality because the Willy Wonka of recreation builders, and Keeper seems like a main instance of why. It is a strolling, speaking journey recreation that is fairly straightforward to digest, but it surely additionally has a way of experimentation and whimsy that is exhausting to suit into one field. get caught someplace in between ‘ 3 course dinner chewing gum‘and Remy’s Scrumptious Restaurant FlashbackKeeper glad my senses and left me room to ponder its world as an impartial creation and a mirror of my very own.