‘Keeper’ Review: All Along the Watchtower

Double Fine’s Keeper suggests a game caused by an acid trip. It’s a dialogue-less adventure that starts with a crumbling lighthouse by a neon sea becoming sentient, sprouting insect legs, and waddling its way down the countryside after a gawky seabird decides to make a nest on its roof. Some hours later, the lighthouse’s disembodied light experiences full-on Terence McKenna-level ego death as it communes with the planet. There are plenty of games with psychedelic visuals but few that feel as thoroughly committed to the bit as Keeper.

There’s a larger fantastical story at play, but the hard details are hidden in the descriptions of the achievements you earn during the game. The goal is simply for the lighthouse and its avian friend to reach their ultimate perch at the top of a looming mountain. Keeper is otherwise not an experience that’s terribly keen on building a sense of escalating difficulty or tension.

Besides walking, the lighthouse can do precisely three things: shine its light, shine a brighter light that affects the environment, and send its bird friend to pull objects. The Keeper paints an impressively crafted world of abstract watercolors—of weird little guys that vaguely resemble sea creatures, of clockwork villages full of clockwork people, of massive turtles carrying fully populated cities on their shells—and the developers at Double Fine are more concerned with you seeing it all than they are with ushering you toward the next plot point.

With only a few exceptions, every obstacle in the lighthouse’s way can be handled just by taking a close look around at your surroundings. From the fixed-camera angles to the frequent self-contained little diorama areas you encounter along the journey, everything about the experience seems tailored toward allowing players to simply soak in the copious, minute, and trippy details of this world, and examine them further to find the solutions to the games puzzles.

That makes for a rather gentle trip, all things considered, though Keeper is occasionally negligent about signposting the next step you’re supposed to take in order to advance. That’s a particular problem with the obstacles where the only thing you pick up from solving a puzzle is too small to see when the bird is nesting on the lighthouse.

The game still gets quite a lot of mileage out of the barebones mechanics at play, and most importantly, it encourages players to treat every square inch of the world as potentially interactive. Shining your light on a bush might reveal the solution to a puzzle, or it might just cause a new plant to grow or the little animal inside to come out and squeak a hello.

Keeper is, ultimately, just a long, linear walk, banking on its meticulously bizarre game world to enthrall players to keep stepping forward, and it’s very much successful at that. It’s time well spent—if you can remember what time even is in an altered state.

This game was reviewed with code provided by Assembly Inc. Slant Magazine stands in solidarity with the ongoing BDS boycott of Microsoft gaming products. No links will be posted which provide additional revenue to Microsoft directly.