There is something to be said about the rise in the practice of minimalist storytelling in video games. It certainly feels like many developers aim to create a sense of wonder and intrigue that will draw the audience into being invested in the story’s unfolding events without resorting to exposition at every turn. When paired with the right tone, atmosphere, and gameplay, this can be an extremely effective tool.
Keeper, the latest game from the acclaimed developers at Double Fine, attempts to adopt this minimalist style by creating one of the most beautiful game worlds I’ve seen in quite a while. However, it fails to find an emotional core that makes you care about what is happening inside it, despite its beauty. A significant part of this is due to its extremely short runtime, with the game taking less than five hours to complete. The dull gameplay and puzzle design that fill most of that time don’t help either, only improving in the final hour and a half when the story finally kicks into gear. In the end, it’s hard to see Keeper as anything more than a gorgeous tech demo rather than a fully realized game.
Keeping Watch
When I first started my adventure through the world of Keeper, I was immediately invested. Honestly, it’s hard not to be with how absolutely gorgeous every location is. The creative director of Keeper, Lee Petty, primarily has worked as an art director on Double Fine’s titles, and it shows. This might be one of the best, if not the best, looking games I’ve played all year. Every location and character oozes with creativity and charm that brings them all to life. You can tell a ton of work and care went into creating this world, which makes it all the more baffling that, after only a couple of hours, I found myself growing increasingly bored and uninterested. I don’t know if I’ve ever wanted to love a game so much only to be let down so hard by it.
You play the game as an unnamed lighthouse that one day awakens, grows legs, and befriends a passing bird named Twig. After becoming accustomed to its new mobility, the lighthouse begins to walk around and discovers that it can rejuvenate dead plants with its light and dissolve some corrupted material that is overtaking sections of the world. In addition, you can send Twig to turn cranks and pick up objects in the environment.
While this gameplay loop sounds great, I found Keeper’s pacing agonizingly slow. You’ll spend nearly half the game’s runtime slowly wandering as the lighthouse shines its light on objects and works with Twig to turn cranks. The puzzle design is so simple and repetitive that I found myself just begging for the game to throw some sort of curveball at me. Thankfully, the game tries to mix things up in the latter half, but despite the promise of a major shift in gameplay, it largely reuses the same mechanics in a different context.
Keeper just didn’t do enough to compel me to actually become invested in the game after the initial impressions of its beauty fade. The storytelling suffers from being too ambiguous, providing barely any infromation to grasp the narrative or form any emotional connection to it. The game attempts to build a relationship between Twig and the lighthouse, but its short runtime makes that bond feel forced, leaving little room for their friendship to really feel convincing.
These faults trickle down to the lore and worldbuilding Keeper can provide. All the lore and background information I gained, outside of a few murals I stumbled upon, came from the game’s achievements. If you thoroughly explore each area, you will eventually discover hidden alcoves where shining your light on a flower reconstructs a broken statue. Finding these unlocks achievements that provide only a sentence or two of lore about the world. I can understand the minimalist approach Double Fine attempted, but I found it an odd design choice that makes it that much harder to become invested in the game’s story.
The Need for More
Despite these gripes, the game does pick up in the last hour, however. Without getting into spoilers, the final stretch of Keeper completely changes up its gameplay in a way that feels fresh and genuinely fun to play. It was disappointing to see how brief this section was in comparison to the rest of the game, as it was the first time I found the gameplay to truly feel engaging. This leads to my main criticism of the game: it feels too much like an experimental release, something I fear players might simply call a “tech demo.” It’s difficult to explain without getting into spoiler territory, but this critique mostly revolves around the gameplay additions near the end.
The aforementioned shake-up to gameplay was surprising and exciting, as I did not see it coming. Double Fine completely flips the formula on its head, or so it seemed. Despite offering a vastly different experience, the gameplay loop was ultimately the same, and I found that quite disappointing. Continuously, the game introduces unique ideas, but it fails to capitalize on them or pull the player in when it matters. As a result, Keeper comes across as a distinctive yet unrefined project, with many pieces resembling early concepts born from Double Fine’s brainstorming sessions.
This design philosophy with Keeper is what makes it feel like an experiment rather than a full experience. It feels as though Double Fine had a couple of ideas for a few games and decided to experiment with them, and Keeper is what came out of it. If the lighthouse segment of the game were more fleshed out and the team added more puzzles and lore for the world, it could have been its own unique and fun experience. Similarly, if the boat section were just a part of a bigger gameplay cycle where you sailed the world and explored islands, it would be far more engaging than including the repetitive light-shining mechanic as a way to link the areas. At the very least, this base gives me some hope that Double Fine will take the good parts of Keeper and find a way to implement them in a more interesting and fully realized game.
A Mixed, Disappointing Outing
It pains me so much that I didn’t enjoy Keeper as much as I wanted to. I love Double Fine as a studio, as I think the team is one of the most creative and interesting developers working today. You can tell a tremendous amount of care went into the visuals and that the development team loved creating this world, but there’s just not much beneath all that beauty.
With a runtime of under five hours, it may also be challenging for some to justify the $30 price tag. Even with all that said, I really want Double Fine to return to this world and give it the game it deserves. There’s so much potential here, and if the team builds on it by telling a new story within this world and its inhabitants, it could become something truly special. I would love to see a full-scale RPG in this setting, even though I know that is a pipedream.
In the end, Keeper is an imaginative and beautiful bore of a game. I won’t say it’s bad, as Double Fine is too talented a studio to make a truly bad game, but the team misses the mark with Keeper. I find it to be a project that should have either been expanded on or reworked into something that takes advantage of its beautiful world and the creative minds behind it.
Disclaimer: Xbox and Double Fine provided a PC (Steam) copy of Keeper for review purposes.
