Keeper’s First Extended Gameplay Shows Us an Ever-Changing Adventure

There’s a primal human pleasure in merely discovering out what one thing does. It’s the explanation you’d nonetheless need to push a button that claims “don’t contact”, or marvel what’s behind a locked door. Keeper thrives on that concept, constructing out a recreation of discoveries and experiments round it.

Seeing prolonged gameplay for the primary time at gamescom, Keeper’s key trick – of telling its story in a never-before-seen world, all with out phrases – implies that nearly every little thing you do is much less about finishing an goal you’re informed to comply with, and extra about discovering out what the target is.

Shine Your Gentle

First revealed at Xbox Video games Showcase earlier this 12 months, Keeper is a dreamy, otherworldly journey that places you within the misshapen physique of a immediately sentient strolling lighthouse – however there’s no narrator, nor speaking sidekick to clarify the place you’re, what’s occurring, and what you need to be doing. Working this stuff out is the sport.

“A key tenet of this recreation is the sudden,” Artistic Director Lee Petty tells me. “We needed gamers to have the ability to loosen up a bit, relax a bit, and embrace the sudden. So to that finish, there’s some experimentation, however there’s nothing the participant can do to die on this recreation. They will’t mess up the expertise. We kind of get the participant on board early in order that, when one thing sudden is thrown at them, it’s not a second of panic that they don’t know find out how to get by.”

In three parts taken from early sections, I see how Keeper slowly introduces new concepts in delicate methods. With solely the power to stroll, shine a beacon, and the assistance of a chicken companion referred to as Twig, the participant must work out what they need to be doing by context clues.

“The lighthouse beam has two essential modes,” explains Petty. “It has an unfocused and a centered mode. The unfocused mode is for exploring – as you shine it round, you may see little delicate shimmers or reactions on the planet. Larger transformations happen when the participant focuses that greater, brighter beam on issues, and that’s typically used to resolve puzzles as effectively.

“Twig rides alongside on the lighthouse and may do issues that the lighthouse can’t. The lighthouse doesn’t have arms, solely legs. Twig nonetheless, can straight manipulate issues on the planet. So what the participant can do, for instance, to resolve a puzzle is use a mixture of that mild skill and Twig’s skill to choose up and gather issues.”

I see this early on, because the lighthouse comes throughout a lumpen… factor blocking its path. Beneath the unfocused beam, the creature bristles barely, sufficient to point out you that it’s reacting – and, focusing the beam, it places a claw in entrance of its eyes. This produces a shimmer, which attracts Twig, who flies to seize the claw, and an choice to “tug” seems on the display. Twig pulls on the creature, who flops to 1 facet, revealing a seed that Twig stows away for a future puzzle.

It’s a sequence of purely natural discovery – the sport doesn’t inform you what you’ll want to be doing, and the weirdness of all of it means you don’t are available with a preconceived concept of what you ought to be doing, apart from attempting issues out. And that is repeated all through. I see the lighthouse successfully organising a dance of creatures drawn to its mild to smash by a sheet of ice, a stunning discovery that touching a sure spore-like plant will permit the lighthouse to subvert gravity itself, and even a wild sequence wherein it turns into obvious that the beam can management the move of time on objects it touches in a sure space.

The actual ace within the gap right here is that Keeper’s world is in contrast to some other – its bucolic landscapes inhabited by scuttling, alien-like creatures, bushes with faces, and flora with uncommon results. It implies that, even when you do work out the place to go, or what to have a look at, the results of your interplay stay a shock. Crucially, Double Wonderful by no means need that feeling to go away:

“We needed your entire recreation to have this kind of natural, nearly handmade, bespoke really feel,” Petty provides. “It’s not a recreation of repeating actions as a lot as a recreation of wandering amongst distinctive areas and set items that change.”

In simply quarter-hour of gameplay, I see – by my rely – 11 completely different puzzles (to not point out smaller interactions as you prod and poke on the world round you). It’s clear that the purpose right here is to maintain shocking the participant with what they understand they’re being requested to do. Not all of that is ‘mission-critical’, both – the extra you discover, the extra you’ll discover:

“There’s loads of stuff for the participant to find alongside the expertise,” provides Petty. “A few of these come within the type of environmental storytelling, a few of these issues are within the type of hidden interactions with the assorted creatures, and loads of it’s also simply in regards to the gamers’ interpretation of the video games occasions, and discovering that means within the expertise.”

Crucially, although, that is all achieved with the identical small pool of button presses. It may need been complicated for the builders to seek out so some ways to play with these toys, however they didn’t need the participant to be slowed down by an unwieldy management scheme:

“We needed Keeper to be an expertise that wasn’t particularly troublesome to play,” says Petty. “It’s not a recreation about management, mastery or extremely onerous challenges, as a result of we needed this kind of distinctive, weird-but-chill expertise for gamers to go on. We don’t have a necessity for all these buttons on the controller.

“And we additionally simply have a very massive set of accessibility options the place individuals can map the controls to what they need. If they like to play with keyboard and mouse, or they play on a controller, we assist each of them.”

For a recreation this overtly unusual, it’s a method of easing you in – in all methods, Keeper has been designed as a welcoming expertise, not an alienating one. You’re discovering this world, not being repelled by it – and it appears there’s an important deal to find. What I’ve seen is from its earliest levels, and a literal cliffhanger on the finish of the demo – wherein the lighthouse tumbles into an abyss attributable to a bridge, effectively, ceasing to exist underneath its ft – guarantees that there are much more surprises to return.

Keeper arrives for Xbox Sequence X|S, Xbox on PC, Xbox Cloud, and Steam on October 17, priced at $29.99 USD. Will probably be an Xbox Play Wherever title, and out there day one with Sport Cross.