Don’t you ever wish that games were a bit, you know, weirder?
In the oversaturated market, shooters are ten a penny, but sometimes you just want to play as a sentient lighthouse with spider legs, roaming around a deserted land with your green seagull pal perching on top.
Good thing, then, that Double Fine is here to provide just that. The quirky San Francisco studio’s latest game, Keeper, is remarkably calm and meditative for something that could just as easily have been made into a horror film.
This game is simple to pick up and easy to play. Set in an unspecified, colour-saturated, slightly dystopian world (a world that feels remarkably similar in design to that of Clair Obscur; the dev team have cited Dali as an inspiration), a lighthouse uproots itself from its lonely perch by the sea and sets out on an adventure.
Why said lighthouse wants to do this is never really explained, but that’s by the by. With its faithful seagull companion Twig, the world it encounters veers between stunningly beautiful and treacherously ominous, including the ruins of old buildings and civilisations, as well as sweeping natural vistas.
The game itself is a simple puzzler. The unnamed lighthouse is equipped with a simple light beam that can be focussed into something stronger, with which it can interact with the environment: creating bridges out of plants, for instance, or scaring away creepy crawlies. Occasionally, Twig will be called upon to do things like pick up items or operate crankshafts.
The puzzles often play second fiddle to the art, though. As the light beam sweeps around, luminescent mushrooms grow out of tunnel walls and trees change colour. The gorgeous, ruined world changes from lush fields covered in trees, to ominous, waterlogged tunnels and – creepiest of all – a lighthouse graveyard. Seems like these guys have a habit of getting up and walking around.
There are creatures here, too, though none seem especially interested in interacting: weird, spider-legged ones, tiny sentient carrots and living rocks. The lighthouse has a delightfully creepy scuttle, and while the camera angles can be a bit of a pain – they’re fixed, and can’t be moved around with the joystick, which makes navigating at times troublesome (there is no minimap; the point of the journey is the um, journeying) – they don’t detract too much from the overall experience.
It’s all very soothing, which is kind of the point. There is no way to die here, and no way to lose; all the puzzles are easy to solve and it only takes 8-10 hours to complete. It’s a nice, gentle, easy game, conducted with barely any backing music – mostly just Twig’s chirrups. Just like Stray, there are no words, but that all feeds into the general ambiance of it. The developers called Keeper “weird but chill”; that seems about right to me.
Available on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, Steam and Cloud
