Keeper's Lead Designer Encourages Players to Welcome the Quirkiness of a Hiking Lighthouse

Usually, when a bird stumbles upon an abandoned lighthouse, it might land, relax briefly, make a deposit, and fly away. Not so in Keeper, an upcoming over-the-shoulder adventure puzzle game developed by Double Fine Productions; in this world, the lighthouse grows tiny limbs, forms a friendship with the bird, and sets off on an ambitious hike.

While a latest sneak peek at the gaming convention answered a few questions, it also sparked a curiosity to learn more about this absurdist lighthouse-meets-bird story. Therefore, we connected with Lee Petty, the creative director behind Keeper, to shed light on his team's vibrant creation.

A Unique Adventure Gameplay

While fundamentally designed as an exploration title, Petty states that Keeper aims to deliver a distinctive gameplay through a blend of dreamlike visual style, enigmatic setting, accessible puzzles, and, most notably, the lack of words. He refers to the game a “palate cleanser,” a brief adventure different from any title gamers have experienced before.

“Keeper communicates less than a standard game,” he notes. “It was important for us to let the player unwind and not worry about messing up; just pause to try and embrace the unusual aspects.”

Consequently, Keeper isn’t just a sequence of challenges, nor is its exploration highly objective-driven. Set in a post-civilization realm without humans, players traverse the world as a living lighthouse accompanied by a bird companion named Twig, but there is no death, there are no skill trees, and there is no need to farm for items.

Puzzle Design and World Integration

“When we began to design the puzzles, we wanted to craft puzzles that felt very woven into the world and the characters there. In a typical adventure game, you might encounter a obstacle first,” Petty clarifies. “You're like, oh, I can't get in this door, and you usually grasp that, because there are people there explaining so with dialogue.”

“But in our game, we wanted to really create this feeling of an unusual, evocative world and not reveal precisely what it's about. Our puzzles work a bit uniquely, so you often sort of wander into them without knowing what you need to be doing.”

Handmade Aesthetics and Limited Controls

To impart the game a “handmade” atmosphere, Keeper steers clear of using numerous iterations of the same concept. “We do that to a degree, as it's not like each element is created only one time and discarded,” Petty explains, “but there is a lot of unique setup. Every short distance away, you see something very different from the rest of the game.”

In response about sustaining gamer’s attention in the absence of failure and defined objectives, Petty is adamant: “I think we captivate the player's attention through the unexpected. Players aren’t entirely sure what's will occur around each corner.”

This thoughtfully designed method is additionally noticeable in Keeper’s restricted set of interactions. To find your way through its surrealist world, you don’t need more than a few buttons, as the lighthouse’s main way of interacting with the world is through its beacon, which has a default mode and a focused mode. For example, you can direct it at plants to make them grow, beam toward a creature to make it squint, and use it to reveal secrets and tackle puzzles.

Partner Dynamics and Gameplay Variety

Twig, the lighthouse’s trusty bird friend, is usually perched on the lighthouse, from where it will occasionally fly off to show the path forward or activate secrets. In addition to these automatic movements, the lighthouse can also command the bird to do things like raising objects, pulling levers, or — maybe the most interesting one — attaching itself to creatures.

The latter is a prime illustration of how Keeper’s streamlined design to the control system still offers a broad range of interactive features. The various environments, items, and creatures open the way to unique interactions, and especially metamorphosis.

“For example, there's a moment where a sort of rosy dust, which resembles fairy floss, gets attached to the lighthouse, making it lighter. For that portion of the game, the lighthouse can jump, hover, and move around,” Petty says. “A breath of fresh air from being anchored to the ground. So we aim to change the rhythm up in a many various ways.”

Narrative Without Words

But exploring and fiddling with their surroundings is not the sole task bestowed upon the lighthouse and its bird; they must also express a story of friendship, bonding, and surmounting obstacles as a team as they travel toward a magnificent mountain peak. To make matters more complicated, they must do so without using words — and without the type of expressions and emotional cues a human character could have used.

Although Petty assures that gamers will experience greater emotion than one would expect from a lighthouse, it’s the bird, specifically, who is instrumental in expressing emotions. “When they're riding along on the lighthouse, players have a whole button dedicated to just emoting with the bird, and often it will reflect the emotional tenor of that area,” he states.

“For instance, when you get in a kind of unsettling or darker area, the bird will crouch and curl around the top of the lighthouse. And if you press the emote button, rather than a playful chirp or guiding you, it'll sort of glance about and hide.”

Threats and Benevolent Inhabitants

By “gloomy zone,” Petty is talking about the menace that stems from something called the “Wither,” a hostile ecosystem. As the lighthouse and Twig proceed on their journey, they encounter more and more of this purple, vitriolic substance, which may occasionally appear as of thorns, vines, and bugs. “It's what Twig is flying away from,” Petty explains.

In contrast to the Wither, the majority of creatures in Keeper are in fact friendly. When Twig expresses at one of the odd critters, for example, it might emote back and perhaps produce an ambient noise — without of words, audio cues and music are an additional tool used to tell Keeper’s story.

Story Closure and Influences

This method of non-verbal storytelling raises the question if Keeper’s narrative concludes in a ambiguous ending, but Petty reassures that there will be a balance. “It's not a complete mystery, but because it's wordless, it's naturally subject to interpretation. We purposely want to allow space for that because that's my favorite thing about art; the conversations that happen once people play something,” he notes, “But we include specific narrative arcs and closure.”

A quick look at Keeper’s snowy mountaintops, elaborate cave systems, and unusual rock formations will tell you that the outdoors formed one of the main inspirations for this human-less adventure. As Petty tells, the scenery is not only based on any old place: “I reside in California and there's a lot of amazing mountains in this region,” he says. “Near where I live, there's an old Mercury mine that was abandoned like a hundred years ago, and it has been converted into hiking trails; that's one of my major inspirations. It's nothing super remarkable, but what adds intrigue is the numerous hills, and as you're climbing up, you occasionally discover old pieces of machinery that you're not even sure what they were for.”

“They sort of look like weird monuments, just resting among nature, with nature taking back the space. When I reflect at the game and the artifacts of humanity in there, I can see the clear connection to me trekking around all that stuff.”

Metaphorical Significance and Final Thoughts

Although Petty humorously refers to the lighthouse main character