Keeper: The Xbox Game About a Walking Lighthouse
▼ Summary
– Keeper is a strange game where you play as a sentient, walking lighthouse that befriends a bird to combat darkness in a fantastical realm.
– The game starts with simple, linear puzzles where you move awkwardly and use your lighthouse light to interact with the environment.
– As you progress, the puzzles become more complex, introducing abilities like time manipulation and expanding into new gameplay styles like jumping and swimming.
– The vibrant, imaginative world is central to the experience, filled with unique creatures and environments that evolve as you explore.
– Keeper is comparable to atmospheric games like Gris or Inside, focusing on immersive world-building and emotional engagement over traditional gameplay.
Keeper, the latest creation from Double Fine Productions, offers a truly unique adventure where players control a sentient, ambulatory lighthouse on a mission to dispel darkness from a fantastical realm. It doesn’t take long for the initial absurdity of piloting a spidery-legged building to fade, replaced by a sense of wonder as you befriend a charming bird and explore a world that blends the silent narrative of Wall-E with the atmospheric platforming of Limbo, all drenched in a vibrant, psychedelic color palette. The game quickly establishes that its peculiar premise is merely the beginning of an increasingly strange and captivating journey.
Your adventure begins simply. For reasons left unexplained, your lighthouse character suddenly grows legs and starts lumbering across the landscape. Movement is awkward at first, and your abilities are limited to walking and directing your powerful spotlight. After a clumsy start that might involve accidentally flattening a few small structures, you encounter a large bird who instantly becomes your loyal companion. With little else to do, you press onward, drawn deeper into a bizarre and troubled world clearly in need of intervention.
Initially, Keeper presents itself as a fairly straightforward puzzle game. You follow predetermined paths, eliminating any chance of getting lost, and encounter simple obstacles. Solving these early puzzles typically involves using your lighthouse beam to activate magical switches or neutralize environmental hazards. The gradual introduction of mechanics is welcome, as the control scheme requires some adjustment; unlike many contemporary titles, Keeper employs a fixed camera, with the right analog stick dedicated to rotating the light atop your structure.
The experience steadily becomes more complex. Despite having a limited set of actions, the puzzles grow surprisingly intricate. You’ll command your avian friend to retrieve objects and trigger distant mechanisms, and you’ll even learn to manipulate the flow of time itself. The game expertly wrings substantial depth from its simple mechanics. Then, without warning, Keeper transforms into something entirely different, not just once but several times. To preserve the surprise of these delightful shifts, it’s best not to detail them, but suffice to say you will eventually gain the ability to jump, swim, and by the finale, the gameplay evokes the fluidity of a skateboarding title. The world itself expands in tandem, offering larger, more open areas to investigate.
Ultimately, the world is the soul of Keeper. The puzzles serve as engaging activities that facilitate your immersion in this extraordinary setting. It’s a brilliantly colorful and lively place, populated by an array of fascinating creatures, from colossal tree-like beings to adorable, bus-sized baby turtles. Your journey will lead you through a clockwork town inhabited by wheeled robots and into caverns that throb with a grotesque, organic energy. Even though you are a piece of architecture, the game masterfully makes you feel integrated into this universe, as if your presence is actively improving it. You’ll also accumulate a host of endearing allies who remain by your side to assist when challenges arise.
Keeper belongs to the same category of experiences as Gris or Inside, where the act of playing is a vehicle for traversing an imaginative, bizarre, and ever-evolving space. The clever puzzles and unconventional movement systems are simply tools to deepen your connection to the world. By the time the credits roll, after a perfectly paced runtime that avoids overstaying its welcome, the concept of a walking lighthouse feels almost mundane. Almost.
Keeper launches on October 17 for Xbox and PC.
(Source: The Verge)
