Taking control of a lighthouse wasn’t on my video game bingo card for 2025, but that’s the thrust of Keeper, a puzzle adventure game from Double Fine Productions, with an emphasis on strange style and atmosphere over mind-warping challenges and obstacles.

Inspired by Creative Director Lee Petty’s musings during the COVID-19 pandemic, Keeper imagines a post-human island where metamorphosis has run riot with unusual lifeforms now occupying structures and environments, all built around a central mountain.

There’s a surrealist feeling here, as if Double Fine reached into the minds of artists Salvador Dali and Max Ernst, while drawing inspiration from some of the odder music videos from Radiohead and Gorillaz; this vibe is only given more weight from music that blends soft uplifting tracks with glitchy, darker tunes that wouldn’t be out place on an album like Kid A.

Petty describes the game style of Keeper as “weird, but chill” and I can’t disagree. There’s a sense of discovery and wonder as the adventure progresses, yet without the angst to constantly press on at speed.

Lighthouse leanings

This journey begins in a suitably bizarre manner: a run-down, dormant lighthouse suddenly erupts with light to rescue a seabird, who you soon discover is called Twig, from a cloud of dark and malevolent bat-like creatures.

Flipping to the player’s control, the lighthouse shakes awake, crumbles to the ground, and then sprouts a quartet of legs to shakily stumble down a rock outcrop and begin a journey to the top of the mountain, with Twig in tow.

And that’s about as much as Keeper reveals in its opening chapters.

There’s no narration, no spoken or written dialogue, or any other text to give voice to the characters or setting. Rather, the world react to the lighthouse and Twig’s squawks, while an authored camera acts as your guide, being fixed in place from scene to scene, which ensures your attention is directed to important parts of the environment without being overtly obvious.

While I would have liked a bit more movement to better peer at some of the weirder and wonderful details of the island and its inhabitants, this approach works well and meant I never really got lost or turned around in what can be a visually bombastic setting.

Keeper also drip-feeds abilities and ways to interact with the environment, initially starting with the simple move to shine the lighthouse’s light independent of its direction of momentum, which has the satisfying effect of prompting some plants and fungi to bloom and sprout.

This quickly evolved into the ability to focus an intense beam of light onto surfaces, which melts away some obstacles and prompts reactions from onlooking critters. It scratches a very innate human itch to try things, and had me blasting light at all sorts of objects and outcroppings to see how the game would react.

The lighthouse then gains the albeit to dash, helping it traverse obstacles. And as the game progresses, there’ll be new ways to navigate the world; I don’t want to spoil any surprises, but it kept Keeper feeling fresh over some 39 chapters.

In general, the light is the main way the lighthouse can interact with the world, but Twig is not merely here for the ride and effectively serves as the lighthouse’s hands. When a little blue star emits from an object, be it mechanical or natural, Twig can be sent to interact with it, which switches the player into using a button, key, or joystick to have the seabird peck, pull, or turn the object.

It’s the combination of the lightbeam and Twig that holds the key to most of the Keeper’s puzzles. Starting off as simple one-stage puzzles, such as shining a light on an organic growth to get it to react, then sending Twig out to pull it out of the way, building to ones with multiple stages and interactions at once.

One of the more complex puzzles involved jumping between three points in time, in a rather creative and satisfying way to bring back life to a machine; oddly enough, it reminded me of the brilliant Effect and Cause mission in Titanfall 2.

None of these puzzles were particularly challenging. And I only had a couple of moments of head-scratching where the tight camera angles meant I missed a path to an object or interaction I needed to complete a puzzle.

There was one area where I had to get past a blocked tunnel, where I could see the solution, having followed previous interactions, but the game’s logic wasn’t playing out here. With mounting frustration, I’d hit my head, and indeed the lighthouse’s, against it multiple times, thinking I needed to perfectly time a suite of moments to blow away the blockage. Instead, I simply had to first take another path, which, given the camera angle and the color palette of the area, seemed more part of a wall than a navigable route.

Ultimately, I was expecting more complexity to some of these puzzles, so I would overthink potential solutions, rather than poke around in a few more corners, which, to Keeper’s credit, is exactly what I was supposed to do.

While I lack the patience to ponder really tricky puzzles, I do wish there were a little more challenge to the ones Keeper throws up.

Some are so simple that they almost feel like busywork, such as needing to rotate a thumbstick to crank a wheel rather than just pressing a button and having it done. Keeper just about keeps to the right side of this, but there are times when interactions can feel there just for the sake of it, rather than leading to interesting discoveries.

The world is enough

The absence of brain-wracking puzzles, or indeed any failstate for Keeper, is intentional, with Double Fine wanting the journey through the world to be front and center.

And what a world it is.

You start out crunching through a ruined and near-fully obscured seaside town – you can just make out a tarmac road now lost to eons of passing time – to traversing seaside paths, caves, forests, mini archipelagos, and towns and structures that wouldn’t look out of place in a Zelda game.

Adopting a cartoon-like aesthetic that reminds me of Disney Pixar movies, these areas are all gorgeous and richly detailed despite using the soft, painterly-esque textures. There’s a vibrant color palette here, too, which just begs Keeper to be played on an OLED display, such as those you’ll find on some of the best 4K TVs.

Naturally, light plays a big part here, with the beam of the lighthouse cutting through right shadows and intermingling with volumetric fog. But it’s the way the light triggers a reaction from the flora and fauna that makes the environment feel alive.

There’s nearly always some creature on screen, be it Twig quietly chirping as the lighthouse enters a foreboding cave, to flocks of birds soaring across a blue sky, jellyfish floating in technicolour plateau, and hulkling beshelled creatures walking, flying, or swimming in the background.

Animation is also top-notch, from the scuttling of tiny creatures to Twig’s wonderfully expressive movements. I can’t help but be impressed at how Double Fine manages to inject so much character into the lighthouse, blending its scuttling insectoid legs with the jaunty wobble of its broken body and metal roof, which serves as at pseudo hat that shields the light-holding structure, itself able to convey a surprising amount of emotion in cutscenes.

Add in some detailed soundwork that even has the quiet clicks of gears moving as the lighthouse ‘looks’ around, and deft use of cinematic camera angles, and Keeper presents a an absorbing world I could just sit and stare at; there are some platforms and outcrops in the journey that exist solely for this with the camera pulling back and giving you a surreal landscape to drink in.

Surreal feel, Pixar plot

Keeper’s artistic presentation and aesthetic wear the theme of metamorphosis very much on its sleeve. The idea of how nature could evolve without human interference, then taken to a surreal level, isn’t subtle but is certainly eye-catching.

Yet for all the weirdness Double Fine touts, including one set piece where it felt like pseudo-70s psychedelia was being forced into my eyes, I found the core narrative of Keeper to be fairly normal. The story of an unexpected journey to reach a destination with a newfound companion, while avoiding an unknowable malevolent force and encountering strange but companionable characters on the way, could be picked from a Disney movie.

While there were some really fun and captivating set pieces across Keeper’s adventure, I could see the direction of the story and its beats from miles away. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as Keeper is more about the vibe of the world than an unfurling plot.

However, with inspiration from Dali and mycelial networks, I was hoping for a story that embraces bizarreness below the surface or had a more thought-provoking story than one that could be boiled down to being a buddy adventure.

There are some neat storytelling flairs, such as having details and context layered in achievement text; for example, you only find out that the antagonistic force that’s threatening the island is called The Wither via the first achievement and chapter titles – the latter you’ll only see in the chapter select menu.

But these don’t really go deep enough for my liking, and I was left wanting to know more about the island, the societies that inhabit it, and The Wither.

It could be argued that any deeper elements of the story are open for interpretation, but I don’t think there’s enough environmental storytelling here for that to play out. I’m all for games being considered art, but I don’t think they work as vehicles for abstract interpretation in the same way as paintings.

None of this would matter if Keeper lent more into its puzzles and systems of interaction to present more of a challenge and depth to its world. Take Astro’s Playroom as a prime example: it hardly has a plot, but it throws up a bounty of puzzles and system-led interactions all wrapped up in an oddball world.

But Keeper eschews the puzzles for a more absorbing adventure, yet I feel it needs more of a story to hold that up.

A great example of this can be seen in 2012’s Journey, which tells its emotional story through its environment, music, and exploration, without the need for any text or puzzles.

None of this is to say Keeper fails at what it set out to do, especially as I enjoyed my time with it and happily jumped back into chapters to drink in its visual splendour.

Were this a decade ago, I’d have happily applauded a Pixar-style narrative and aesthetic in an adventure game.

But it’s 2025, and my expectations from artistically focused games are higher than what Keeper delivers.

Ultimately, with all the turmoil at Xbox right now, I’m pleased to see Double Fine have the chance to create something esoteric and original, rather than a remaster of an existing game. And for that reason and more, Keeper is worth experiencing over a weekend to immerse yourself in its art, world, and creativity.

Should you play Keeper?

Play it if…

Don’t play it if…

Accessibility

Keeper has a selection of accessibility options that you can adjust to suit your needs. UI text size can be adjusted, and screen narration is also on offer. There’s also the option to adjust how frequently prompts pop up. There’s a standard option to tweak different volume settings, such as turning down the music but keeping the main sound up. At launch, Keeper will feature 26 interface languages.

Most importantly, there are fully remappable controls and the ability to accept alternative inputs, along with the standard options to tune aim sensitivity and vibration feedback.

Keeper can have a lot going on screen at once, which can be a challenge for people like me with somewhat compromised sight. There’s not much that can be done here, but the pacing of the game means you have time to take in the details and spot areas of interest at your leisure.

How I reviewed Keeper

I played Keeper to completion, over around seven hours, which involved poking around in corners for secret paths and achievements. As a fairly linear game, there aren’t any extra modes or features to tap into, with Keeper all being about its main story experience.

I reviewed Keeper on an Xbox Series X connected to an LG C1 OLED TV running in its gaming mode, playing with a standard Xbox Wireless Controller. There are no performance or graphics settings to choose from, and I simply ran Keeper on my setup as it came, with no adjustments, and got a rather smooth experience.

On the audio side, I played Keeper using a Bang & Olufsen Beoplay Portal Xbox headset for the course of the game, which worked well with the soundscape and music the game pumped out.

First reviewed October 2025