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Usually, if a bird stumbles upon an deserted lighthouse, it might perch, rest briefly, make a deposit, and fly away. Not so in Keeper, an upcoming over-the-shoulder adventure puzzle game created by the development studio; here, the lighthouse sprouts tiny limbs, becomes BFFs with the bird, and sets off on an ambitious hike.

Although a recent sneak peek at Gamescom clarified a few questions, it also sparked a desire to discover additional details about this surreal lighthouse-meets-bird tale. Therefore, we connected with Lee Petty, the creative director behind Keeper, to shed light on his team's colorful creation.

An Unconventional Adventure Experience

Although at its core built as an exploration title, Petty states that Keeper aims to deliver a distinctive experience through a blend of surreal visual style, enigmatic setting, approachable puzzles, and, importantly, the absence of words. He calls the game a “palate cleanser,” a brief adventure different from anything gamers have experienced before.

“Keeper conveys fewer details than a typical game,” he notes. “It was important for us to let the player relax and not stress about making mistakes; just pause to try and embrace the weirdness.”

As a result, Keeper isn’t just a sequence of challenges, nor is its exploration highly objective-driven. Taking place in a post-civilization world devoid of humans, you will explore the world as a living lighthouse joined by a bird companion named Twig, but you can’t die, there are no skill trees, and you’ll never have to farm for items.

Puzzle Design and Environmental Interaction

“When we set out to design the puzzles, we wanted to craft puzzles that felt very integrated into the world and the inhabitants there. In a standard adventure game, you might encounter a problem first,” Petty explains. “You're like, oh, I can't get through this door, and you typically understand that, because there are characters there explaining so with dialogue.”

“But in our game, we aimed to truly establish this feeling of an peculiar, atmospheric world and not tell you precisely what it's about. Our puzzles work a little differently, so you frequently kind of wander into them without understanding what you need to be doing.”

Artisanal Feel and Minimalist Interactions

To give the game a “crafted” feel, Keeper avoids using many iterations of the same concept. “We do that to some extent, as it's not like everything is created exactly once and discarded,” Petty explains, “but there is a lot of unique setup. Every few steps away, you see something very different from the rest of the game.”

In response about sustaining gamer’s interest without of failure and defined objectives, Petty stands firm: “I believe we engage the player's attention through the surprising. Players aren’t entirely sure what's going to happen around each corner.”

This curated approach is also noticeable in Keeper’s limited set of interactions. To find your way through its surrealist world, players require more than a few buttons, as the lighthouse’s primary way of interacting with the world is through its headlight, 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 react, and use it to reveal secrets and solve puzzles.

Companion Mechanics and Gameplay Variety

Twig, the lighthouse’s trusty bird friend, is usually perched on the lighthouse, from where it will occasionally take flight 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 minimalistic approach to the control system nevertheless provides a broad range of gameplay mechanics. The diverse environments, items, and creatures open the way to distinctive interactions, and particularly metamorphosis.

“For instance, there's a moment where a sort of rosy dust, which resembles fairy floss, gets attached to the lighthouse, making it less heavy. For that portion of the game, the lighthouse can jump, float, and navigate,” Petty says. “A welcome change from being stuck to the ground. So we aim to change the pace up in a lot of different ways.”

Storytelling Without Words

But exploring and interacting with their environment is not the sole task assigned upon the lighthouse and its bird; they must additionally express a story of companionship, companionship, and surmounting obstacles as a team as they journey toward a magnificent mountain peak. To add to the challenge, they must accomplish this without using words — and without the type of expressions and emotional cues a human character might’ve used.

While Petty assures that gamers will experience greater emotion than might expect from a lighthouse, it’s the bird, specifically, who is instrumental in expressing emotions. “When they're riding along on the lighthouse, you actually have a dedicated button assigned for just expressing with the bird, and a lot of times it will mirror the emotional tenor of that area,” he says.

“For instance, when you enter a kind of unsettling or darker area, the bird will crouch and curl around the top of the lighthouse. And if you hit the emote button, rather than a cheerful tweet or directing you, it will kind of glance about and hide.”

Dangers and Friendly Inhabitants

By “darker area,” Petty is talking about the menace that derives from something called the “Wither,” a hostile ecosystem. As the lighthouse and Twig proceed on their journey, they’ll see more and more of this purple, corrosive substance, which may occasionally take the form of brambles, creepers, and bugs. “It's what Twig is flying away from,” Petty explains.

In contrast to the Wither, most creatures in Keeper are actually friendly. When Twig expresses at one of the odd critters, for example, it may respond and possibly produce an ambient noise — without of words, audio cues and music are an additional tool used to narrate Keeper’s story.

Story Closure and Influences

This manner of non-verbal storytelling makes me wonder if Keeper’s narrative ends in a cryptic conclusion, but Petty assures that there will be a balance. “It's not a total mystery, but because it's without dialogue, it's naturally open to interpretation. We did intentionally want to allow some room for that because that's my most loved thing about art; the discussions that happen after people experience something,” he says, “But we include defined narrative arcs and closure.”

One glance at Keeper’s snowy mountaintops, elaborate cave systems, and unusual rock formations will tell you that the outdoors served as one of the primary influences for this human-less tale. As Petty tells, the scenery is not only inspired by ordinary locations: “I reside in California and there's a lot of amazing mountains in this region,” he explains. “Close to where I live, there's an old Mercury mine that was abandoned like a hundred years ago, and it has been converted into walking paths; that's one of my big inspirations. It's nothing super remarkable, but what adds intrigue is the many hills, and as you're climbing up, you occasionally come across old pieces of machinery that you're not even sure what they were for.”

“They kind of resemble strange monuments, just resting within nature, with nature reclaiming the space. When I reflect at the game and the artifacts of humanity in there, I can see the direct connection to me hiking around all that stuff.”

Metaphorical Significance and Closing Reflections

While Petty humorously calls the lighthouse main character