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| Your first test! |
Let's hope the dragon doesn't mind people breaking and entering... |
Once I got over these two jarring oversights, it became apparent that Keepsake is in fact, a very beautiful game. Probably due to the fact that the environments can remain absolutely static, they have been rendered rather exquisitely. Each blade of grass and leaf of tree looks great.
Keepsake is a role playing game about a girl on her first day of magic school who shows up and realizes that there is absolutely no-one there. She makes a lot of inane comments, but apparently never considers that perhaps she has the date wrong. After breaking into the school, releasing a dangerous animal and poking around a bit, she discovers that things are very wrong indeed.
Thus begins your problem solving adventure. Where this game is to be complimented is in the amount and complexity of puzzles. There are many to solve over the course of the game, and they range from the simple to the complex. This makes for quite a head scratching fun ride.
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| Now where was that passage? | Never trust a wolf/dragon, or a girl who reads a book that she has closed. |
In order to help you out, a little help icon has been installed that tells you what to do next if you become stuck. This is a great help when you get lost in the game. It is apparently there to help you solve puzzles, but what it is really there for is to guide you through the game's linear game play, which soon makes itself abundantly evident. Certain events must follow one another, and they are usually not intuitive. For example, the first thing you are supposed to do after breaking into the Academy, is go for a walk in the forests near the Academy. This of course makes no sense, as the intuitive thing to do would be to have a look around. If you do look around though, you will come across all sorts of puzzles which you can solve, but which won't activate properly due to the fact that you have yet to stroll through the glade and have an asinine conversation with a bulky merchant.
Thus the game unfortunately very quickly becomes more about following the little question mark prompts than exploring the world for yourself. Problems also arise when trying to find things. This is partially because the camera is non existent, and partially because certain things are somewhat hidden in poky out of the way places which means that at certain points you will simply be stymied and unable to continue without a walk through. Walk through's certainly have their place, but a game should be able to be played basically through without them, and I am afraid that most have a hard time doing this in Keepsake. I certainly did.
The next feature of Keepsake that just has to be mentioned is the voice acting. Voice acting is usually either great, or pretty forgettable. Keepsake's voice acting falls into a totally different category however, and that is bone chillingly, nails on a blackboard, want to reach into the screen and throttle the character, grating.
Seriously. This is some of the most terrible voice acting I have heard in a long time. There is some blessing in that you can click through most of it without having to listen to it, but if I have to ever hear Mustavio the Merchant's high pitched euro-English screeching in my ear again, I may actually hurt someone. The rest of the characters aren't so bad, but the fact that one of the initial main characters is so unreservedly terrible does not exactly invite positive feelings about the rest of the game.
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| If they'd just have known she was coming, they would have cleaned up. |
So, hows it going up there, your house is hot! |
So then, if you can deal with a non existent camera, and really enjoy solving puzzles, which are the one thing apart from the graphics that this game does do an extremely good job of, then certainly pick up this game. In spite of its flaws it is fun to play when you're not searching for the next location, or retracing your steps to jump through a bunch of hoops that really feel rather inessential to the game, or should have been worked around so that they could have been performed non linearly.
Top Game Moment:
TOP GAME MOMENT
Breaking into the Academy, ah I was so fresh and naive that first day.
