Thoughts on: Keeper

Just a couple of months ago I was talking about Herdling and mentioned how these types of atmospheric journey action adventure games are surprisingly easy to fail. They usually have very little in terms of “challenge” or problem solving, so they need to either do something interesting with their mechanics, or at least know how to be short and beautiful enough to be a fun distraction. Where Sword of the Sea has extremely fun movement tech, Herdling has the herding mechanic, Keeper has basically nothing. But it is, thankfully, short and beautiful enough to at least be alright.

Keeper is the latest title from Double Fine Productions who have a mixed track record with titles when it comes to the end result quality. But at least usually their ideas are crazy enough to  make the products interesting. Very few of their titles ended up being genuinely memorable, unfortunately, but the novelty of, say, hacking everything in Hack ‘n’ Slash is something you would remember. Keeper, however, does not really have any curious ideas or mechanics in its arsenal. It is a rather by the numbers pretty game about a journey with some light puzzle solving that you can usually do on auto-pilot, but with a genuinely awesome looking visual style. There is technically a story, though specifics of it seem to be told more via achievement descriptions, rather than the game itself, as the game is entirely wordless. Which is most certainly not a bad thing, just that whatever is happening isn’t particularly interesting either.

To make up for the lack of interesting mechanics and movement, the game reinvents itself a few times, which is a neat touch. And those reinventions do make movement a little less boring, but still not by much and everything still mostly happens on auto-pilot with the game constantly reminding you what to do, unless you explicitly forbid it via options. Which I did, and after that in a few moments I was left confused about what to do, because what you had to do was inconsistent in terms of buttons with what happened before… Gotta love these cinematic contextual button games… Though, other than that the whole experience is quite polished and made to flow with as little interruptions as possible.

The end result, however, feels exactly that – a very well polished beautiful experience product, that barely leaves a mark on your memory. It’s well made by a team of experienced people, has wonderful engine implementation and some very unique visuals. And it wouldn’t work as well if it wasn’t interactive. But also, I doubt I will remember this game even exists in a month, whereas I still like to think about Sword of the Sea, Abzû or Journey from time to time.