Keeper review

Keeper cannot be accused of chasing trends. It does not have hyper-realistic graphics; there is no craft; there is no battle pass; there aren’t even any people. It’s a game about a lighthouse and a bird climbing a mountain that ends in about six hours.

But the whole six hours are great. Leave it to Double Fine, the creator who took Psychonauts 2 to the level of psychedelic album art, to create an entire experience that feels like exploring a surrealist painting: a journey through a foggy, alien-looking planet glowing in pinks, greens, and oranges, featuring a sentient lighthouse with spider legs. Keeper is an adventure no one else could experience, and one of Double Fine’s best.

Light in the darkness

Keeper’s post-apocalyptic world is brighter and more colorful than the festering ruins found in other games, but it’s not without its melancholy. I came across statues of mechanical gods that rewarded me with Steam achievements, explaining how past civilizations tried to protect the world from a plague that eventually swallowed it whole. These little historical touches helped contextualize the broken state of the world, but I appreciated that Keeper never leaves the present. The failures of the past are like dust in the wind, because you do everything a newborn lighthouse can do to open the door for novel life to blossom.

The story of the lighthouse and the bird starts slowly and gains momentum until the last moments. Like a deep breath, it slowly builds, holds for a moment, and then releases in a final burst. It’s a wordless game that’s best played in as few sessions as possible to take full advantage of its finely tuned pace.

It all starts off basic as you move a rickety lighthouse through abandoned dead ends and bioluminescent tunnels. Keeper’s camera perspective is a third-person perspective in the truest sense of the word: observing from a distance, letting objects block your view and changing the angle frequently, as if you were a photojournalist capturing wildlife. Most of what you do is move forward in anticipation of what might happen next, staring at the passing neon corals and gnarled trees.

Sometimes there are doors that need opening and gaps that need to be crossed. At this point, Keeper introduces the type of delightful puzzles and platforming found in previous Double Fine games. I was impressed by how easily Keeper transitioned into these sections without losing momentum, reminding me that the studio had spent 25 years perfecting its particular brand of games.

A look at the past

From the very beginning, it was clear that humanity was long extinct and that the world was now inhabited by strange hybrid creatures: birds with beaks made of driftwood and crabs with shells made of rusted metal debris. On your way to meet one of the many little creatures that need your support, you may see the ruins of skyscrapers on the hills, and the effect is charming despite the circumstances. Double Fine had me rooting for a group of little guys trying to survive in this world, simply by the way they followed me around or waved as I passed by.

In a city of clock creatures with dials for faces, I was tasked with manipulating time by using the lighthouse’s ability to make objects grow or change by focusing a spotlight on them. Shining the lithe of a shining sun or moon moves time forward and backward, causing your bird friend to turn back into an egg or a ghost. His egg form is useful for weighing down pressure plates, and his spirit form can fly through walls.

The environment also changes as you turn time back and forth. Thick black tendrils block your path until you travel back to a time when they didn’t. There was a pile of broken gears on the floor, but in the past they were connected together and ready to open the passage.

It’s a basic puzzle mechanic, but the expressive animations support develop the relationship between the two characters over time. In later areas, you can send the bird to collect the levers it needs, or shine a lithe to protect it when it flips the switch.

It’s also fun to watch plants grow or creatures run away when you shine the lithe on them. Keeper is addictive because your curiosity is constantly rewarded as you unlock shortcuts or find hidden rooms, and the puzzles only add to the fun of uncovering the mystery.

While I never found a puzzle in Keeper that couldn’t be solved by digging around until all the pieces fit, I savored each one, looking for little clues about what the planet was like before it fell. A puzzle as basic as moving a ball to the right place revealed the craftsmanship of a lost civilization as I followed a metal tube I had mistaken for decoration to the beginning of the area.

As I started delving deeper into each level, I realized how masterfully each scene drew my attention to critical points of interest. In the end, I was able to tell you my own take on what happened, based solely on my interpretation of what I found while playing, which is impressive for a game with no spoken dialogue or discarded notes to read.

Shines brightly

I would have been satisfied if Keeper stayed humble and played like an interactive art gallery until the very end, and instead it broke into a full sprint about halfway through. By the end, I was racing through caves on looping tracks like Sonic, ditching the four-legged lighthouse for a novel form that steers almost like a skateboard as you gain momentum on the halfpipe and launch yourself into the air.

Keeper creates what could easily be considered a half-baked novelty thrown into a snail-paced adventure game. Instead, these inventive obstacle courses are an stimulating break from what came before, as you race up ramps and smash barricades in search of a route that will open the door to the next room. Much like an RPG where you’ve leveled up enough to take on everything, the final sections in Keeper leave you feeling unstoppable as you head towards the finale. In these sections, Double Fine pushes the strange beauty of Keeper’s broken world even further into the surreal as you dive through wormholes where colors blend into each other.

Keeper is full of surprises despite its relatively compact length. On paper it’s deceptively basic, but in reality playing it I was constantly amazed by how carefully crafted each moment is, whether it’s a wide shot as you walk through a obscure underground area with the wriggling tentacles of a giant beast far in the background, or a bouncy arena filled with pink balls that look like cotton candy.

Keeper is a perfect example of how smaller, focused vision can still be blinding, without the need for ray tracing, roguelike elements, or a battle pass. I don’t know how a game like Keeper exists in a time when Microsoft, the owner of Double Fine, has been quick to scrap games and shut down studios that don’t fit whatever profit-maximizing strategy it currently employs, but I’m very, very elated that it does. Double Fine games are always gems, but Keeper is one of the brightest ever.