The world of Keeper looms from the display 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 gentle velocity. This world’s appreciable magnificence is amplified by how it’s rendered: like a Nineteen Eighties fantasy film crammed with charmingly handmade sensible results. Keeper is the newest title from Double High quality, maker of trippy platformer Psychonauts 2, Kickstarter sensation Damaged Age and lots 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 somewhat than utilizing laptop 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 surroundings. 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 usually causes vegetation to develop earlier than your eyes, and typically uncommon inhabitants will feast upon it. As you lumber by means of this surroundings – calm lagoons and sun-baked canyons crammed with prickly cacti – there’s pleasure to be present in merely wanting, taking the weirdness in, after which bringing it to even larger life.
That appears to be your function in Keeper: lighthouse as life giver. Shortly, you acquire a companion: a chook known as Twig, whose beak is constructed from driftwood. You turn out to be a double act: at numerous factors, you ship your feathered pal 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’re merely swivelling the analogue stick, making the one cog line up with one other.
Too usually, puzzles really feel like a roadblock to exploration somewhat 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 turn out to be weightless. Slightly than wobbling awkwardly, all of a sudden you’re leaping with grace, suspended within the air for a lot of seconds, exuberant on the capability 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 turn out to be a red-hot disc of steel, carving by means of knotted undergrowth like a primordial Sonic the Hedgehog.
Keeper speaks clearest by means of its great photos, whereas billing itself as a “story advised with out phrases”. However the latter isn’t fairly proper. At numerous factors, button prompts flash up on display: for instance, press X to “peck”. In spelling out precisely what the participant must be doing, the world’s ambiguity is diminished.
This drawback recurs on the recreation’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 recreation that lacks the interactive vocabulary to wholly embrace the weirdness it depicts with such glowing, vivid creativeness.
