Doublefine’s Keeper might have essentially the most endearing videogame double-act since Banjo and Kazooie

It’s been some time since Tim Schafer’s achieved press briefings, he admits. The top of Double High quality, a studio finest identified for the Psychonauts sequence, is making an attempt to elucidate Keeper, a puzzle journey sport the place you’re, actually, a sentient, strolling lighthouse. Double High quality is now one in every of a number of studios purchased up by Microsoft and the crew apparently took the chance to lean into all of the sources out there and, he mentioned, “make one thing bizarre.”

It’s undoubtedly that. The colours and environment of Keeper have at the least the contact of Psychonauts DNA. Keeper places gamers answerable for the aforementioned lighthouse, woke up (and joined) by a curious, often aggressive, fowl named Twig. Curiously, the lighthouse presently has no title.

Double High quality’s artwork director, Lee Petty got here up with the idea for the sport, apparently impressed by his time spent mountaineering throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. That is mirrored in lots of methods, whether or not its the rolling hills and landscapes that the anthropomorphised lighthouse roams, or the truth that there’s not a single phrase of dialogue. The interactions between the fowl and constructing, which appear to pepper each cutscenes and gameplay, are like Pixar shorts.

The environments have a drippy surrealist fashion to them to, and the dearth of a map, well being bar or any HUD in any respect means you’re not distracted as you discover and remedy puzzles.

In some early gameplay footage, I noticed how the lighthouse’s most important type of interplay comes from its mild beam. Not solely does this enable you hunt down pathways and objects, but it surely will also be targeted on the numerous skittering creatures. Typically this causes creatures to flee, whereas different occasions they’ll supply up magical orbs willingly and unwillingly, which open up later areas or convey towering creatures (constructions?) to life. In Double High quality style, issues look bizarre, too, with melted mountain peaks with greater than a dost of Dali.

You do not have to assault every part, both. Throughout three completely different gameplay demos, I watched every kind of creatures conceal, run, and simply exist on this world the place humanity has lengthy since disappeared. Oh there’s briefly an enormous flying whale too.

Utilizing the lighthouse’s beam on sure issues will depart an twinkling spark behind, that means that Twig the fowl can work together with it. Throughout a later section, the lighthouse can manipulate time, turning its fowl companion again into an egg whereas a constructing repairs itself — and frees up a pathway. Twig stays an egg for some time till later, when the lighthouse can fast-forward time. Skills like this appear location-dependent, somewhat than a Metroidvania assortment of abilities constructed up over the sport. At one other juncture, the lighthouse walks right into a cloud of pink fluffy mist, unlocking the power to leap and float round ranges.

Schafer says the themes of life-changing and metamorphosis will proceed to bubble up throughout Keeper and the lighthouse and fowl duo is clearly central to all of it. It jogs my memory a bit of Banjo Kazooie (the latter was a fowl) but additionally Ico; at one level, the seemingly impervious lighthouse loses its footing, however Twig willfully tries to pull their associate to security. Did Twig even assist? Possibly not, however the sentiment was there.

Keeper will launch on Xbox Sequence S|X and PC on October seventeenth, together with Xbox Sport Move.