Keeper preview – doubling down on the surrealism

Psychonauts developer Double Fine has a new game out this year and it’s probably going to end up as the weirdest video game ever made.

Microsoft owns a great many video game developers at the moment, but despite having had control of some of them for seven years or more, the output of those studios shows no obvious sign of its parent company being worth $3 trillion. There’s no indication that anything has enjoyed a particularly outrageous budget and while we dread to think how much money has been poured into the Fable reboot, that already seems like an outlier.

Double Fine were bought in 2019 and their only game since then has been Psychonauts 2, which was already almost finished at that point. Until recently it’s been unclear what else they’re working on, but now we know it’s a game where you… control a sentient, walking lighthouse in a surrealist post-apocalyptic landscape.

That’s not exactly an oversubscribed genre but the idea is so strange it hasn’t really been obvious what the game actually is. But we got to see – not play – some extended segments of gameplay at Gamescom last week, as introduced by Double Fine founder Tim Schafer himself, and we kind of, sort of, understand a bit more now.

What seems immediately obvious is that everything in the game will probably make a lot more sense while you’re playing it, compared to when you’re just watching it. There is a, very purposeful, dreamlike logic to everything that’s going on and yet even knowing that, a lot of the time we were just squinting at the screen unclear exactly what was going on, or at least how and why it was happening.

There’s very unlikely to be any definitive explanations for anything that’s going on, since the game apparently features no dialogue whatsoever. Certainly, we have no idea how a lighthouse becomes sentient or what it’s trying to achieve in the story, but on a basic level the game is a third person puzzle adventure, with some light platforming.

The lighthouse interacts with the world by shining its light on objects, causing mutated creatures to shrivel up or helping plants to grown. Some areas of the land seem to be cast in perpetual darkness, for some reason, while at other times the light is used to activate machinery, such as a whole segment that revolves around time manipulation (that’s what Schafer said anyway, we didn’t really follow what was happening).

If you want to pick anything up you have to rely on your bird friend, Twig, who can collect objects and manipulate things like levers and cranks. What the end goal for any of this is, we’re not sure, but we suspect it’s all going to be far more about the journey than the destination.

Although LucasArts veteran Tim Schafer is the face of the company many of its games are directed by the less well known Lee Petty. We spoke to Petty in 2019, for the release of his game Rad, but he’s also behind other oddities such as Headlander and Stacking (where you control a family of Russian dolls that stack inside of each other).

Compared to that, Keeper isn’t necessarily any weirder in concept, although its surreal setting, with fields of cotton candy and bizarre mutated pumpkins (we think) push it over the edge. Schafer reels off a host of surrealist artists as influences, including Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and Giorgio de Chirico and you can definitely see that in the game’s painterly style, making this easily Double Fine’s best looking game so far.

The problem is that not only was Schafer loathe to explain anything in detail, but he also didn’t want to give away any spoilers, so the three sections of gameplay we saw were all quite short and clearly from different levels or areas (we’re not clear whether the game is open world or not). Which made it even harder to follow what was going on.

However, Schafer indicated that the game would only last around six to eight hours and, with a host of difficulty and accessibility options, is much more about mood and atmosphere than challenge or transparent storytelling. In fact, he was very proud of this, stating that that’s how he was trying to take advantage of being owned by Microsoft, by making a game that didn’t have to worry about being profitable or marketable – since its budget wouldn’t even be a rounding error compared to Microsoft’s vast wealth.

Our concern is that in all their 25 years of existence Double Fine has never made anything that’s mechanically satisfying. The platforming in Psychonauts isn’t particularly good, the fighting in Brütal Legend isn’t especially enjoyable in its own right, and so on. Most of the games have compensated for this via their strange ideas and unique visuals, but if Double Fine ever manage to combine all that with equally exceptional gameplay it will be a very special day indeed.

Perhaps Keeper will be that game, but there’s no way to tell, one way or the other, by just watching footage. All we can say is that it’s probably their most ambitious game so far and their most purposefully weird one, which given their previous titles is really saying something.

Formats: Xbox Series X/S and PC*
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
Developer: Double Fine
Release Date: 17th October 2025

*The game may well come to other formats later but, like this year’s South Of Midnight, it’s made by a small studios that probably didn’t anticipate Xbox’s pivot to a multiformat strategy, when they started development of the game.

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