The world of Keeper looms from the display screen like a dream colored by psilocybin. Here’s a gnarled landmass of bubblegum blues, powder pinks and unusual, luminous beasts, the place evolution appears to happen at mild pace. This world’s appreciable magnificence is amplified by how it’s rendered: like a Nineteen Eighties fantasy film full of charmingly handmade sensible results. Keeper is the most recent title from Double Effective, maker of trippy platformer Psychonauts 2, Kickstarter sensation Damaged Age and plenty of different idiosyncratic titles. It’s an action-adventure resplendent with the lumps and bumps of life’s imperfections, as if its 3D modellers had sculpted the setting from papier-mache relatively than utilizing pc software program.
Even stranger than the setting is the protagonist: you play as a lighthouse, coming to understand this gleaming ecological fantasia by shining its beacon concerning the atmosphere. Lengthy shadows stretch behind illuminated objects, making the outlines of spectacularly supersized vegetation and tiny critters all of the extra pronounced. The casting of sunshine is the way you work together with the world: it typically causes vegetation to develop earlier than your eyes, and generally uncommon inhabitants will feast upon it. As you lumber by this atmosphere – calm lagoons and sun-baked canyons full of prickly cacti – there’s pleasure to be present in merely wanting, taking the weirdness in, after which bringing it to even better life.
That appears to be your function in Keeper: lighthouse as life giver. Rapidly, you achieve a companion: a hen referred to as Twig, whose beak is produced from driftwood. You change into a double act: at varied factors, you ship your feathered buddy to show a crank (on this far-future tackle planet Earth, the natural and mechanical have fused, like a steampunk tackle Henry David Thoreau). However these puzzles are not any match for the daring ingenuity of the visible design, nor do they particularly resonate with the sport’s celebration of biology. Early on, you might be merely swivelling the analogue stick, making the one cog line up with one other.
Too typically, puzzles really feel like a roadblock to exploration relatively than an enabler. However, slowly, Keeper begins to lean into the surrealism of its world to generate surprises. At one level, a sweet floss-like substance will get caught to your lighthouse, inflicting it to change into weightless. Relatively than wobbling awkwardly, immediately you’re leaping with grace, suspended within the air for a lot of seconds, exuberant on the means to take flight.
Thereafter, Keeper finds an evolutionary groove. The lighthouse transforms into a ship of delightfully piscine traits: what pleasure there’s swishing and whirling about in azure blue water. The sport then takes a darker, extra summary flip as you change into a red-hot disc of steel, carving by knotted undergrowth like a primordial Sonic the Hedgehog.
Keeper speaks clearest by its great pictures, whereas billing itself as a “story advised with out phrases”. However the latter isn’t fairly proper. At varied factors, button prompts flash up on display screen: for instance, press X to “peck”. In spelling out precisely what the participant must be doing, the world’s ambiguity is diminished.
This downside recurs on the sport’s conclusion, albeit from a special angle. With out spoiling precisely what occurs, the participant appears to be offered with the magnificent and incomprehensible totality of existence itself. How will we work together with such transcendent profundity? Sadly, with one other rote shape-based puzzle involving kaleidoscopic crystals and a black gap. That’s Keeper in a nutshell, a sport that lacks the interactive vocabulary to wholly embrace the weirdness it depicts with such glowing, vivid creativeness.
