One thing I wasn’t prepared for in 2025 was becoming emotionally invested in a sentient lighthouse. I should have guessed with Double Fine at the helm. A studio that doesn’t fit into any bracket of the industry, always trying new things and playing outside the confines of normality. Keeper is about as abstract as it gets. On the surface you control a lighthouse through various biomes, but dig a little deeper and there’s a story of friendship, of finding your purpose, and I was forever enamoured by its gorgeous world.
After a bird called Twig manages to escape a strange flock of creatures, they stumble across a seemingly broken and rundown lighthouse. Suddenly, the lighthouse comes to life, grows legs, and begins to stumble quite literally across an empty wasteland. What starts off as a bizarre idea that should never work, Keeper begins to take you through multiple environments littered with clues about its past. Dilapidated buildings and animal bones; obscure flora and unique creatures; huge mountain ranges and lush grasslands; everything is mysterious.
Soon after you find your bearings, Keeper starts to open up your purpose. Your light can shine brighter to remove vines or flora blocking your way. It can also awaken mysterious rocks that begin creating pathways across great chasms. Twig can also be instructed to pull on threads of plant life to reveal necessary items and pathways. The ability to dash also becomes available, allowing natural barricades to be broken as the lighthouse runs through them. These are the fundamentals, yet it becomes so much more over time.
The world in which you find yourself in is worthy of the Louvre. Each environment brings with it a new sense of wonder. Whether the intricate and varied neon in the plants underground, the epic landscapes and their sense of scope, or the surreal beings that are simply living their lives, Keeper is easily one of the most beautiful games of 2025. Like an interactive art gallery, its wonder warms your heart. It expands and evolves, much like Twig and the lighthouse. It’s a puzzle-platformer at the centre, but Double Fine explore ideas in creative ways.
Keeper has no lines of dialogue, seldom text except for sporadic control pop-ups, and no HUD. It wants you to be immersed in its story; to find the subtleties of what it’s trying to tell you without bombarding you with exposition every five seconds. While never communicating through words, the relationship between Twig and the lighthouse is heart-warming and special. Failure comes from not solving a puzzle straight away, but it’s never particularly difficult. The challenge is exactly what it needs to be.
As new biomes are found, so too are new creatures. They can be interacted with by shining your light at them. Some responses are really sweet, and it is in these moments you realise how much love has been poured into Keeper. While the theme of friendship is a big one, so is nurturing and bringing life. In the busy lives we all lead, it’s easy to forget what matters. The world around us is filed with beauty and quiet moments of calm. We just forget to look further than the screens on our phones or the images on our television screens.
People may take something different from Keeper depending on how it’s interpreted. That’s the cleverness of Double Fine. They love to explore the human condition in different ways. Here, you travel through an unknown land trying to rid it of a strange substance that threatens its survival. You’re rewarded in removing this encroaching darkness, returning the land back to a thriving ecology. What’s more, you’re doing so with a friend. Learning about one another and understanding what really matters when you’re left staring into your soul.
Maybe I’m looking a little too deeply into Keeper. I have a tendency to find meaning in every game I play, but it feels intentional. There’s definitely an underlying purpose in the storytelling. Regardless of what it is trying to say, it still offers some clever environmental puzzles that get more interesting as the game goes on. I never stopped being amazed by its world, and I fell in love with both characters as they explore every nook and cranny of a world void of humans. It may be slow for some, but for me it wasn’t just a game, it was a chance to look deeper into existence.
