Keeper Review (Patreon)

Keeper is a story about a lighthouse and a bird. The bird, after getting separated from its kind, rests on top of a nearby lighthouse. This, naturally, causes the lighthouse to sprout legs and start walking. And so, the two of you are off on a strange and surreal adventure that blends its trippy visuals with a wonderful soundtrack and some relatively light puzzle-solving that helps hold the whole thing together. It’s not an especially long game, but it also knows exactly when to move on from an idea and present you with something new, right up until its conclusion.

The basic controls here are that you’re using the left stick to move and the right stick to aim the lighthouse’s light. You can pull a trigger to focus the light, which causes some objects to react. But even just shining the light around the world is a rewarding experience. Flowers bloom, little creatures scurry away, things of that nature. While focusing and intensifying the light sometimes seems like a violent act, this isn’t a game about combat. At most your light beam might cause some kind of goopy-looking pustule to burst, which in turn might cause a wall to fall down, showing you the way forward. Your bird friend, Twig, also gets into the act by picking things up that you, a lighthouse with no arms, can’t reach, or landing on cranks and levers to help you interact with the world around you.

These puzzles and gameplay things get a little more complicated as time goes on, but typically you’ll get to a new area, see some kind of issue that needs solving—a statue or machine of some kind is sitting in the middle of a town and is clearly missing some medallions, for example—and set out to make things right. The game never tells you directly where to go, instead relying on the look of the environment and an incredibly intelligent use of camera angles and presentation to ensure that you, the player, see the thing you need to see to proceed. For a game without big glowing arrows or any dialogue at all, it turns out to be absolutely excellent at showing you the way forward. I found myself fairly blown away by how subtle and how effective this technique is.

Each area changes things up, whether it’s new puzzles and objects to interact with or new movement techniques or what have you. I’ll avoid getting too specific here because there’s a true wonder to watching this thing unfurl, and the game manages to surprise all the way up to its conclusion. I found myself thinking about things like Fantasia and Ecco the Dolphin at various points in the proceedings.

Keeper is also quite good at knowing when to move on. Each area drills a puzzle style or a concept into you. And right around the time you start thinking “you know, I think I’ve had just about enough of finding these glowing balls and getting them into these sockets,” the area is over, you move on, and you do something else for awhile. If there’s one thing I could point at as room for improvement, it’s that none of these puzzles are ever challenging. On one hand that’s nice, because it’d be easy to make some really confusing, hard-to-suss-out objectives in this world. But I could have done with some more rewarding gameplay.

There’s a real technical prowess on display here. A game that’s at least partially about you pointing lights at stuff is going to need to have good lighting, right? It does. Great-looking water, too. But I think the art itself is probably going to overshadow the technical presentation for most. Along with those different puzzle styles comes vastly different areas with intricate design on little houses, or the ruins of a past civilization, or the strange corruption that seems to be rotting the entire world. As the game goes places, it shows you a lot of really neat, weird things. And it’s showing you all these things through the eyes… well, eye. Light? Anyway, you’re seeing all this from the perspective of a walking lighthouse. That lighthouse is pretty expressive when it needs to be, and along with the bird, the two tell a pretty touching little story.

And that stuff is the point, really. The gameplay on its own is a set of fairly easy low-key puzzles. It certainly keeps you on track, but on its own, you’d certainly be left wanting more. But instead those puzzles act as gateways to new experiences, exciting visuals, and coming one step closer to figuring out what’s going on around here. It’s an exciting journey with a satisfying conclusion.

One final word here about the game’s achievements. The game itself is free from dialogue, though it’ll occasionally give you control guidance at the bottom of the screen. This is how you discover the bird’s name is Twig, for example. The achievement text gives names to some of the other players in this story, which is interesting but also unnecessary. I found that looking that text over detracted from the experience ever so slightly, because my brain was already filling in a lot of gaps and bringing my own meaning to things. Having the game pop an achievement with a tiny bit of lore in its description was somewhat invasive. Perhaps consider disabling your achievement pop-ups, I don’t know. It’s not that big of a deal, but it’s something I noticed and, ya know, felt like I should point out.

4/5