Keeper

Keeper isn’t a mechanically deep game or a complicated thing to play. Instead, Double Fine wants you to just vibe out with it for like three hours. Enjoy all the pretty colors, the weird shit, and hopefully, by the end, feel something. And to Keeper’s credit, by the time credits rolled, I did indeed feel something. It’s wild to think that a story about a lighthouse and a bird with no dialogue could make me tear up a bit at the very end, but that’s exactly what happened. I didn’t expect it, but the conclusion was a wonderful way to end this epic journey.

And Keeper is nothing if not a game of miracles. (Even the idea of Xbox funding an extravagant, slow-paced walking simulator that plays like a small indie game is a miracle in and of itself.) From the first moment legs sprout from the lighthouse to a more transformative step of its evolution later on, Double Fine crafts a contemplative adventure about how anything feels possible in nature given enough time. Maybe, tens of thousands of years from now when humans have been wiped out by a climate crisis of their own creation, the lighthouses will rise from the sea. With no boats to guide, they will wander the world in search of purpose alongside robots and roaches.

I put Keeper in the same category as experiences like Gris or Inside, where playing them is just a means to an end, and that end is moving through an imaginative, bizarre, and constantly changing space. The clever puzzles and strange forms of movement are just ways for me to feel more a part of the world. By the end of the game, which lasts just long enough to not overstay its welcome, it was almost hard to imagine I ever thought a walking lighthouse was weird at all. Almost.