Keeper review – an artistic and visually arresting adventure through the mind of Double Fine

Double Fine has put together an astoundingly beautiful and cinematic puzzle game that isn't afraid to surprise and delight you in equal measure.

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Though a relatively short experience, Keeper is the type of adventure only possible in video games. It's a wonderfully inventive and beautiful odyssey centred on an unlikely companionship.

Every frame is a painting in Keeper. Literally. And I’ve no doubt the way the game looks will dominate most of the discussion surrounding it. History has taught me visuals will only ever get you so far; however, this is why I was pleased to discover an equally charming and wildly inventive puzzle adventure underneath Keeper’s surrealist exterior. This so easily could have been a case of a studio hoping to wow players with visuals at the cost of embedding any heart, emotion, or mechanical complexity.

Luckily, doing so isn’t Double Fine’s style, and with Keeper, it’s delivered the whole package. While venturing through mostly linear events and puzzles offers little actual challenge, Keeper is a short and sweet artistic odyssey everyone should play at least once.

Much like its title suggests, Keeper casts you as a lighthouse with some very anthropomorphic qualities. Imbued with life thanks to the help of a sly high-flying bird, Twig, the two of you embark on a dazzling and wonder-filled adventure in the hopes of helping her reach her final destination.

In lesser hands, Keeper could have been exactly that, a game where you play as a quirky lighthouse and its feathered companion while exploring and completing a series of increasingly intricate puzzles and platforming challenges. Believe me when I say that this core concept is merely used as a base that Double Fine finds infinite ways to expand upon. By the time credits rolled, I couldn’t believe the sheer variety and creativity found in what I’d just experienced.

I’m aware that such highfalutin praise is at risk of sounding hyperbolic. Especially for players like me who, even after seeing the way Double Fine marketed this game, expected nothing more than a fun but fleeting cinematic adventure complete with the studio’s quirky sense of storytelling. What starts off as one thing, though, quickly becomes something very different by the end, and it’s this element of surprise that made Keeper even more of a joy to poke and prod through. I’d recommend everyone go in unsullied if they can.

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Getting into the game proper – to the extent I’m able, anyway – and despite the undeniably awkward shape of a Lighthouse’s structure, Keeper handles like a dream. Not two minutes after sprouting a pair of legs and learning how to cast the light of my lamp a full 360 degrees, I was clambering over rock ledges, dashing through gooey barrier obstacles, and commanding Twig where to next perch herself so as to continue through the correct path of the level.

Most areas are largely linear, which helps stave off any chance of getting stuck or struggling to work out where to go or what to engage with next. In a wordless game, hitting a wall like this would have been frustrating, yet this barely ever happened to me once in Keeper. This is despite the inherent busyness of each level’s visuals.

Regardless of whatever I was asked to do next, at every turn, I found myself flabbergasted by how much I came to care about the relationship between this mischievous bird and the faceless lighthouse.

Double Fine, being Double Fine, has found several ingenious workarounds and techniques to make the pair more humanised than a lot of fully voice-acted and mo-capped characters seen in other AAA games. Whether it’s the slight dipping of the lighthouse’s eye-like lamp to symbolise frustration or fear, or the way Twig will peck against it to emphasise urgency. Keeper finds impossible ways to tell a heartfelt story without words or even proper faces, and it’s impressive.

The guiding light

Similarly remarkable is a twist that occurs roughly a third of the way into the game. Something that I wasn’t expecting or prepared for, and so equally don’t want to spoil here in my review. Simply put, Keeper isn’t the game most people probably think it is. At least for the most part. It’s a game much bolder and more ambitious.

All I’ll say is that there’s a lot more to what you’re asked to do than simply directing your light somewhere specific to cause chain reactions, reveal hidden pathways, or guide Twig. Puzzles don’t merely stay boxed into one specific category and have a habit of evolving gradually. Several times while playing Keeper’s later sections, games like Dredge, Metroid Prime, and even 1998’s Kula World (of all things) came to my mind. Without giving anything away, this little lighthouse undergoes quite the transformation.

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Holding all this mechanical invention together, of course, is one of the most gorgeous and unique art styles ever presented in a video game. Heavily inspired by the work of surrealist painters such as Salvador Dali and Max Ernst, playing through Keeper never fails to feel like wandering through a painting in motion, complete with vibrant colours and countless picturesque landscapes.

I particularly like the decision to include smudges and blotches purposely and have them appear in many of the world’s textures and environments. They work to give Keeper a lovely hand-crafted feel, and had me thinking that what I was seeing could easily be rendered in Claymation. You can tell Keeper was directed by an artist first and foremost, as scenes are beautiful at every turn.

Keeper comfortably overcomes any risk of relying too much on its visuals by lending all its elements an artistic (and therefore inventive) eye, rather than just one. I went in with absolutely no expectations other than I know Double Fine makes great games, yet by the end I came away thinking that the studio, even coming off the back of Psychonauts 2, has again found a way to outdo itself – albeit this time on a smaller scale.

Part of the fun in realising why Double Fine’s latest is so special is due to the sheer element of surprise, where you slowly start to work out what style of game it is you’re actually playing. For the most part, Keeper is an amazing puzzle-fuelled adventure with a simple yet heartfelt story to tell, and it pulls out all the stops doing so. In every sense, Keeper is an artistic achievement.

Rating: 5/5