Review
Herdling review: a magical journey that lacks highlights
by Philipp Rüegg
Keeper review: the best trip of the year
17.10.2025
Translation: Patrik Stainbrook
Keeper takes you on a magical journey with a walking lighthouse and its fluttering friend. One thing’s for sure: it’ll stay with you for a long time to come.
Microsoft’s takeover doesn’t seem to have affected Double Fine’s creativity so far. The studio behind Psychonauts, Brütal Legend and Costume Quest is famous for its unusual ideas. Its latest creation is called Keeper. In it, you play a walking lighthouse that embarks on a short but memorable journey with a dodo-like bird creature.
Let there be legs!
The game begins with just that bird, getting drawn to the light of an abandoned lighthouse while fleeing a vicious, magical storm. It tumbles onto the roof, and just when it gets up, the lighthouse topples over. But instead of staying down, the building suddenly grows legs and starts to traipse around clumsily. The game has no text or dialogue. You steer the lighthouse through mostly linear, but increasingly surreal, even psychedelic worlds.
You can focus light from the lighthouse at the touch of a button to solve short puzzles. Early on, you have to scare away little purple monsters so they don’t attack you. You make a plant bloom, which then frees an overgrown entrance like a burning fuse. Later on, puzzles become more complex, but never too complicated. In a town inhabited by small, cuddly mechanical creatures, you need to find three followers to open a gate.
Signposts with the moon, sunrise and sun indicate where you can find them. On the way, you’ll discover some lanterns with each of the respective symbols. By shining a light on them, day becomes night or night becomes morning. Sometimes blocked paths are suddenly clear, sometimes your bird friend, always by your side, becomes a ghost. In that form, it can fly through bars. If you turn it back after, it’ll use its weight to activate a mechanism opening another gate.
Puzzles usually work by combining your light and bird, where the latter moves levers and brings you things. Still, your interactions with the strange environment always remain varied. The world, the creatures and the vegetation are just so wonderfully weird. It wasn’t the puzzles that lured me through the five-hour adventure: it was the journey itself.
Every single frame a painting
The game begins in a picturesque coastal region. A little later, you find yourself in a gloomy parallel world with huge Cthulhu-like monsters staggering around in the background. Then the world becomes bright and colourful, and you stumble into something that looks like cotton candy. It makes you practically weightless, and you can jump as if you were on the moon. Every area looks like a work of art, painted by someone who ate too many psychedelic mushrooms during its creation. I’m not surprised to learn that painters such as Max Ernst and Salvador Dali, but also films such as Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind served as inspiration.
Hardly anything makes sense in this game, and yet you’ll almost always know what to do. In a cosy inland sea world, you free E.T.-like one-eyed creatures swimming around in rubber rings. Then, with the help of your fluttering friend, you place a ball of light in a machine that activates a glistening beam. This removes blue slime from a huge spinal column. Your E.T. friends then dive underneath it, inflate like construction foam and turn it into a ramp you can jump over. Pretty normal, huh?
Double Fine has already shown an eye for unusual designs in earlier games such as Psychonauts 2 and RAD. But what you get to see in Keeper puts everything in its shadow. It’s probably the most beautiful game I’ve ever played. At first I still joked around a bit. This game runs worse than Battlefield 6 without DLSS upscaling. Little did I know then that a graphical masterpiece awaited me.
The game also has a few surprises in store in terms of gameplay, but I don’t want to give them away. This much for now: the lighthouse undergoes some interesting transformations.
My only criticism concerns the music, which doesn’t always hit the right notes. Some of the electronic strumming reminds me of royalty-free tracks I occasionally use for my own podcasts. Often, there’s no music at all. Those scenes only use background noises, which actually enhances the ingenious design.
Keeper will be available on 17 October for PC, Xbox Series X/S and Game Pass. I tested the PC version, provided to me by Double Fine.
In a nutshell
A dreamlike gaming experience
Good ol’ Double Fine. Keeper is a game like no other. In gameplay terms, it isn’t particularly complex, but still scores points thanks to a world bursting with creativity. Even without a photo mode, I managed to end up with some of the prettiest screenshots I’ve ever captured onto my hard disk.
Keeper plays like a dream come to life: a walking lighthouse embarking on a fantastical journey with its bird friend is wonderfully unique. Add a pinch of friendship and melancholy, and you have a wondrous adventure that’ll keep you satisfied for a long time to come.
Pro
- Incredibly beautiful graphics
- Fantastical world
- Consistent story
- Novel setting
Contra
- Sometimes a bit generic sound-wise
Philipp Rüegg
Senior Editor
Philipp.Rueegg@digitecgalaxus.chAs a child, I wasn't allowed to have any consoles. It was only with the arrival of the family's 486 PC that the magical world of gaming opened up to me. Today, I'm overcompensating accordingly. Only a lack of time and money prevents me from trying out every game there is and decorating my shelf with rare retro consoles.
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