Keepsake Review

Keepsake is honestly one of the longest games I have ever played.  This adventure title by Wicked Studios has quite a lot of potential but suffers mainly from failing to keep the player entertained at all times throughout the drawn-out journey.

It all begins in the Elvandar Forest with Lydia, the main character, on her way to the Dragonvale Academy with plans of becoming an apprentice.  However, the subjects that are taught and the building itself are very far from ordinary.  The institution is a skyscraping castle where learning magic is the focus of attention.  After a brief introduction tutorial you’ll soon find yourself staring up at the gates of the magnificent academy.

There’s a problem, though, which is that nobody seems to be around.  When Lydia last talked to Celeste, a childhood friend who is a student at the academy, they had planned to meet by the fountain outside of the school.  Besides an old-time wagon vendor named Mustavio, the only other living thing around is a wolf named Zak who says (yes, he speaks and is a companion throughout the game) that he was previously a dragon but someone played a trick by transforming him into his new mammal form.  It’s hard to read him at first because it is obvious that he is withholding the truth every once in a while, but it was nice to have a companion which most likely lessened the dullness.

The storyline is presented along the way with strange flashbacks that aren’t really flashbacks; they’re memories that Lydia has never had.  Wicked Studios seemed to really push the character development in Keepsake but there were many times where it just got to be too much.  For example:  I’d be hurrying to my next objective because I was eager to solve a puzzle but I would turn a corner, and, all of a sudden, Lydia would start up a long conversation with Zak or have one of those “implanted” flashbacks.  Characters’ feelings were repeated so often that I’d find myself thinking, “I get it already, just let me go!”  It’s possible to skip the dialog, but the big problem with that is the animations still have to play out – leaving the player with a muted conversation of bobbing heads and swaying hands.  Also, by the end of all the “flashbacks,” Lydia would end up in a completely different area of the map which would frustrate me since I was headed to the correct location before it began.  I’m usually quite a patient person but this game just broke my limits on several occasions.

Keepsake is presented in the third-person perspective and is a point-and-click game.  It felt pretty standard but not everything flowed smoothly when it came to moving about.  Some of the camera angles were just plain awkward and I found it difficult to move along the set paths at times because the cursor position had to be so precise.  I’m more used to games where it’s possible to click in a general area to make the character move to it.  An example of this can be seen in the very beginning of the game.  Once the gates open, you’ll be presented with a huge statue of a shiny dragon.  If you attempt to go behind it, the camera switches to a bird’s eye viewpoint and because the dragon’s width takes up such a large portion of the screen in-between two symmetrical stairways, it’s troublesome to move around without accidentally clicking on it, which starts up another irritating piece of dialog.

Without parting from the gamplay let me explain that there are two main parts to the game.  Half of it takes place in the lower part of the castle and once Lydia passes the three main trials she is granted access to the upper portion of the structure.  In the beginning she’ll find herself traveling back and forth and back and forth, which isn’t all that bad in adventure games if you have a lot of variety when it comes to environments, but this entire games takes place in the castle (besides the couple times Lydia needs to go back to the surrounding woods).  I was really thinking the game would have been much better if the castle had been designed in a more efficient way… then I got to the upper portion which had magical teleporters that transfer Lydia around.  I couldn’t stop thinking how much better the lower part would have been if these existed below also.  There was still a lot of back and forth at the top but the portals seemed to make it much more navigable.

Fortunately you’ll never really find yourself getting stuck.  Wicked included a help system where one just clicks a round question mark button in the GUI.  Some of the puzzles in the game were easy while others were more challenging.  They definitely included enough of them, as I found myself cheating right to the solution once in a while.  Many of the puzzles reminded me of board games for some reason, which took a long time to complete, adding to an already long game.  That might be considered a good thing, but some puzzles were just simply irritating due to the mechanics of the controls.  Take the puzzle which requires Lydia to find four magical crystal balls, for instance.  The balls she has collected so far are the keys for the hidden doors – two “locks” flanked either side of most of the doors.  To put just one ball in the lock, the player would first need to zoom in, then lift the door lock, put the ball in, and then step back.  All four actions have to be repeated multiple times!  I found the number of mouse actions required for some of the other puzzles annoying, as well. 

Graphics in Keepsake are a mixed bag.  There are many things that are visually appealing at a distance but when the camera zooms in you’ll notice that this ain’t no Half-Life 2 (Myst 5 if you want an in-genre comparison).  Characters look jagged and, oh, before I forget, you can’t change the screen resolution which I always find distasteful.  Character models could have been better, the implanted video sequences of movement were a bit pixelated and suffered from a small black outline at times, but it’s not altogether bad – maybe just outdated, as I would guess that this game has been in development for several years.  I particularly liked the way water flowed in the game with the fish swimming in the pond next to the garden, and the observatory was a nice surprise.

One thing Wicked desperately needs is a new animator. All of the movement animations, especially Zak’s walking in wolf and cat form – which seemed more like floating – could use a lot of improvement.

The “flashbacks”/cut-scenes, which are really just a sequence of images with dialog, seemed pretty good but there were a couple that showed Lydia and Celeste as young children, and I couldn’t help but notice that the heads of the girls were extremely disproportionate to their bodies.  It really bugged me for some reason.

The in-game music seemed good but its slow pace combined with the length of the game had the tendency of heightening my level of boredom and tiredness.  The background noises, particularly in the forest, seemed extremely realistic and added to the immersion factor.  The voice acting, however, suffered from average to poor quality and this is where the game takes another big hit.

The voices of Lydia and Zak are not bad most of the time but there were instances where I was groaning.  For example, in the aforementioned library puzzle where the object is to find magical crystal balls, every time the player is able to come upon a new one Lydia would announce, “Look, the ball is changing color!”  By the time the fourth scene rolled around I found myself mimicking the dreadful and unimaginative line.  Beyond the script, the voice work of Nathaniel, the antagonist, and the Grandmaster Nightingale ghost were extraordinarily lacking in quality.  Why are ghosts always portrayed as having extremely slow voices?!  It drove me crazy in this game as well as in Crime Stories.  As I mentioned above, one cannot skip conversations, only mute them.

There are many games that are just plain bad but I don’t want people to think that it’s the same way with this game when they see the scores below.  I think Keepsake can be appreciated by a small percentage of adventure genre lovers if players pace themselves; and by that I mean playing for a while every couple of days when time and patience are on one’s hands. Keepsake seemed almost epic in size because of the in-depth storyline and overall length.  What adventure gamer wouldn’t appreciate a puzzle where she is sent to the deck of a ship in a bottle that is sitting on someone’s office desk?  I was tempted to just stop playing mid-game and write this review but I absolutely had to see what happened at the end, so intrigue isn’t necessarily absent.  It’s an adventure game that has potential but it’s primarily the boring and irritating portions that give Keepsake a limp in a crowded race.