The world of Keeper looms from the screen like a dream coloured by psilocybin. Here is a gnarled landmass of bubblegum blues, powder pinks and strange, luminous beasts, where evolution seems to occur at light speed. This world’s considerable beauty is amplified by how it is rendered: like a 1980s fantasy movie filled with charmingly handmade practical effects. Keeper is the latest title from Double Fine, maker of trippy platformer Psychonauts 2, Kickstarter sensation Broken Age and many other idiosyncratic titles. It is 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 rather than using computer software.
Even stranger than the setting is the protagonist: you play as a lighthouse, coming to appreciate this gleaming ecological fantasia by shining its beacon about the environment. Long shadows stretch behind illuminated objects, making the outlines of spectacularly supersized plants and tiny critters all the more pronounced. The casting of light is how you interact with the world: it often causes vegetation to grow before your eyes, and sometimes unusual inhabitants will feast upon it. As you lumber through this environment – calm lagoons and sun-baked canyons filled with prickly cacti – there is joy to be found in simply looking, taking the weirdness in, and then bringing it to even greater life.
Puzzle solving … Keeper. Photograph: Xbox Game Studios
That seems to be your role in Keeper: lighthouse as life giver. Quickly, you gain a companion: a bird called Twig, whose beak is made from driftwood. You become a double act: at various points, you send your feathered friend to turn a crank (in this far-future take on planet Earth, the organic and mechanical have fused, like a steampunk take on Henry David Thoreau). But these puzzles are no match for the daring ingenuity of the visual design, nor do they especially resonate with the game’s celebration of biology. Early on, you are merely swivelling the analogue stick, making the one cog line up with another.
Too often, puzzles feel like a roadblock to exploration rather than an enabler. But, slowly, Keeper begins to lean into the surrealism of its world to generate surprises. At one point, a candy floss-like substance gets stuck to your lighthouse, causing it to become weightless. Rather than wobbling awkwardly, suddenly you’re leaping with grace, suspended in the air for many seconds, exuberant at the ability to take flight.
Thereafter, Keeper finds an evolutionary groove. The lighthouse transforms into a boat of delightfully piscine characteristics: what pleasure there is swishing and whirling about in azure blue water. The game then takes a darker, more abstract turn as you become a red-hot disc of metal, carving through knotted undergrowth like a primordial Sonic the Hedgehog.
A surreal setting … Keeper. Photograph: Xbox Game Studios
Keeper speaks clearest through its tremendous images, while billing itself as a “story told without words”. But the latter isn’t quite right. At various points, button prompts flash up on screen: for example, press X to “peck”. In spelling out exactly what the player should be doing, the world’s ambiguity is diminished.
This problem recurs at the game’s conclusion, albeit from a different angle. Without spoiling exactly what happens, the player seems to be presented with the magnificent and incomprehensible totality of existence itself. How do we interact with such transcendent profundity? Sadly, with another rote shape-based puzzle involving kaleidoscopic crystals and a black hole. That is Keeper in a nutshell, a game that lacks the interactive vocabulary to wholly embrace the weirdness it depicts with such sparkling, vivid imagination.
