Early into Keeper, an electric feeling crept over me that I recognized as the shock of the new. The studio Double Fine specializes in offbeat video games whose gallery of characters includes psychic explorers, working ghosts and a jet-propelled head. But none of its past creations left me so happily unmoored, struggling at times to digest what I saw happening onscreen: the bizarre creatures, botanical puzzles, whimsical painterly shapes and riotous colors.
All of which is to say, Keeper blew my mind.
The game opens with a flock of birds streaking through an autumnally colored sky. Hot on their feathers is an alien purplish mass that sends one bird off course and then pursues it. Full of panic, the bird, Twig, alights on a decommissioned lighthouse standing on a bluff. Twig lets out a cry as the purplish mass closes in, causing the lighthouse to project a beam that repels the adversary.
The game then hands over control to the player, who must shake the lighthouse from its foundation. Falling to the ground, the lighthouse grows a set of legs, gets up and then stumbles before it begins to walk. Things get much weirder from there.
Casting the lighthouse’s beam causes the world’s flora and fauna to behave differently. Plants flower, vines retract, creatures cower. The lamp can also cause light-activated contraptions to alter time; some devices physically change Twig, who plays a key puzzle-solving role by turning gears and transforming into an egg and a specter.
There are no game over screens, and the tests of dexterity that come later are low pressure. For the most part, pleasure comes from moving through the beautiful areas and grappling with intuitive but incredibly strange puzzles. One of my favorites involves escorting a plant-eating critter with a big round shell on its head from snack to snack until it is sucked up by the tendrils of a plant and rolls inside its tubular body like a pinball. The shell eventually transforms into a tool that helps clear away an organic obstacle.
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