Keeper Review – A sparkling environmental fantasy of pure imagination | games

TThe Keeper’s world looms from the screen like a psilocybin-tinted dream. Here is a tangled mass of bright blue, hot pink, and luminous alien monsters, where evolution seems to happen at the speed of light. The beauty of this large world is amplified by how it is presented: like an 80s fantasy film filled with magically hand-crafted practical effects. Keeper is the latest title from Double Fine, the maker of the triple-A platformer Psychonauts 2, the Kickstarter sensation Broken Age, and many other iconic games. It’s an action-packed adventure resplendent with the lumps and bumps of life’s imperfections, as if 3D modelers had sculpted the place from papier-mâché rather than using computer software.

Stranger than the setting is the protagonist: you play as a lighthouse, appreciating this brilliant environmental fantasy by shining its beacon around the environment. Long shadows extend behind bright objects, making the outlines of massive plants and small creatures more visible. Casting light is how you interact with the world: it often causes plants to grow before your eyes, and sometimes to be fed by unusual inhabitants. As you move through this environment—serene lakes and sunny valleys filled with spiky cacti—you’ll find joy in just looking, absorbing the strangeness, and then bringing it to greater life.

This appears to be your role in Keeper: Lighthouse as a life giver. Quickly, she makes a companion: a bird named Twig, whose beak is made of driftwood. It becomes a double act: At various points, you send your feathered friend to turn the crank (in this far-off extraterrestrial future shot, organic and mechanical elements have merged, like a Steampunk scene on Henry David Thoreau). But these puzzles don’t match the bold ingenuity of the visual design, nor do they particularly resonate with the game’s celebration of biology. At first, you’re just rotating the analog stick, making one gear line up with the other.

Too often, puzzles feel like an obstacle to exploration rather than an enabler. But, slowly, Keeper begins to rely on the surreality of his world to generate surprises. At some point, a candyfloss-like substance sticks to your lighthouse, rendering it weightless. Instead of wobbling awkwardly, you suddenly jump gracefully, and stay suspended in the air for several seconds, excited by the ability to fly.

After that, Keeper finds an evolutionary groove. The lighthouse transforms into a boat with delightful fish features: what fun to swing and twirl in the azure blue waters. The game then takes a darker and more abstract turn when it becomes a red-hot metal disc, carving through gnarled bushes like a primal Sonic the Hedgehog.

Keeper speaks most clearly through its massive imagery, while describing itself as “a story told without words.” But the latter is not entirely true. At various points, button prompts flash on the screen: for example, press X to click. By clarifying exactly what the player must do, the mystery of the world is diminished.

This problem is repeated at the end of the game, but from a different angle. Without spoiling exactly what’s going on, the player seems to be presented with the entirety of existence itself, both wonderful and incomprehensible. How do we interact with this transcendent depth? Unfortunately, with another shape-based puzzle involving color-changing crystals and a black hole. That’s Keeper in a nutshell, a game that lacks the interactive vocabulary needed to embrace the weirdness it depicts with such sparkling, vivid imagination.