Keeper is strange. This may seem unsurprising given that it’s the latest game from developer Double Fine, which has for years carried itself with a distinct oddball identity, but Keeper is unusual even by the studio’s standards. It doesn’t fit cleanly into a traditional genre, and at some points feels more like a prestige art project. But this is also Double Fine at its most uncompromising, and the experience is better for it.
The closest analog for Keeper is 2012’s Journey–the two games share a wordless approach to narrative, an emphasis on movement that is at times slow and deliberate and at others joyfully fluid and fast, and even the seeming objective of making your way to a distant mountaintop. But that comparison feels reductive, because whereas Journey is a straightforward parable, Keeper keeps evolving, reinventing itself and its themes, and going to unexpected places. While you can quickly size up and understand the basic contours of Journey’s world, the world of Keeper feels more alien, and the natural order of it isn’t always clear.
Let’s back up. Keeper begins when a lighthouse shines its light to save a bird from an encroaching swarm of parasitic darkness. The lighthouse itself topples, snapping into pieces, but then reforms itself and grows a tripod of spindly, wobbly legs. You play through these awkward first steps, frequently face-planting–does a lighthouse have a face?–as you learn how to move around the world.
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As the lighthouse gets more accustomed to movement, you walk toward your goal with the bird you saved perched atop your roof. A mountain in the distance seems to call to you, so you start going in that direction. At this point, it’s what you might call a shambling simulator. Your steps feel heavy. Your key mechanic, aside from movement, is shining your light on things, or sometimes focusing it more intensely, or occasionally dispatching your bird friend toward interactable objects.
So right from the start, Keeper is a game that rewards patience and taking it on its own terms. The majority of the experience is moving from place to place and solving mostly simple puzzles. It frequently acts like a tone poem. There is no death or failure, and you spend a significant amount of time just taking in the landscapes and watching the strange creatures that occupy the world as they scuttle around you. Whatever force animated the lighthouse seems to have filled the whole world with life, and there’s an emphasis on finding the beauty in ugly things. The world is full of trash, decay, and irregular shapes like coral, but it’s also brimming with activity. The animation of both the lighthouse and the bird are particular standouts, imbuing both of them with personality and heart.
The camera is strictly controlled, leaving your right stick free to dictate where your light is pointing. But this serves another purpose: Keeper carefully frames every shot like a tightly directed film, and the result is spectacular. This is easily Double Fine’s best-looking game to date, and almost every moment looks like it could be printed and hung on a wall. This is aided by a beautiful but subtle oil-painting effect.
Believe me when I say that there are visual moments in this game that are unlike anything I’ve ever seen in video games. I’m not even sure I could describe some of them.
Roughly halfway through the game, Keeper makes the first of multiple major shifts. Without spoiling the specifics, I will say that at this point, the camera briefly gets much less tightly controlled and you have more freedom to explore, which comes at the slight expense of it becoming harder to tell exactly what you should do and where to go. I found myself needing to poke around much more in this section, or backtracking to areas I had already been.
But before you know it, Keeper reinvents itself yet again. Each time it does this, the new reality feels sensible, and what you’ve been doing up to that point contextualizes it and serves as the foundation for what’s new. I may have felt briefly lost in the middle section, but the core mechanics of how to move and what to do with my abilities always felt understandable. That itself is impressive. And it all feeds into the themes of Keeper, about the tension between man-made things and the natural world and how they adapt to each other.
As it continues to change and evolve, Keeper goes to places I never would have expected— both mechanically and, especially, visually. Believe me when I say that there are visual moments in this game that are unlike anything I’ve ever seen in video games. I’m not even sure I could describe some of them. You just have to see them for yourself.
Coming in the current moment, as Microsoft struggles with its Xbox business and has just hiked the price of Game Pass, makes Keeper feel awkwardly timed. I generally steer clear of talking about commerce or business considerations in reviews, preferring to focus on the nature of the work itself. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that Keeper feels like a remnant of an earlier time in Game Pass, when this was the best-case argument for the subscription service: A creative studio was given the freedom and backing to make something remarkably weird and self-assured, without compromises. Keeper feels like a passion project, personal and precious, even with the might of an entire studio and mega-publisher behind it. It made me wonder if we’re going to continue to see games like this coming from Microsoft. I hope so.
Keeper is Double Fine at its most confident: a visual feast, a tone poem, an exploration of movement mechanics, a fable about the world and what we owe to it. It’s recognizable as an evolution of the studio’s earlier works while also feeling fresh and inventive. Double Fine games have always been dense with artistry, but it’s Keeper–a game without words–that feels most like it’s letting the artistry speak for itself.
