Keepsake

"Only for the most hardcore of adventure game fans."

Adventure games are a dying (if not dead) genre, and frankly I'll take anything I can get to satisfy my cravings. A game that would normally get about a 5 had the market been saturated with quality adventure games, now gets a 6. I'll try to justify this perhaps unfair difference in the review.

In Keepsake, you start out as a young girl named Lydia who just arrived at a gigantic magic academy in some fantasy world. After a (thankfully) brief tutorial, you enter the academy and find there is no one there. Then, you free a wolf that claims to be a dragon and a teacher's familiar from a locker. Zak, the wolf, will serve as your annoying tour guide throughout the rest of the game.

The gameplay in Keepsake is simple. It essentially boils down to you solving puzzles in order to find items you need to solve other puzzles. There are a fair number of these puzzles, but unfortunately they seem to fit into either one of two difficulties: easy, and frustratingly difficult. They are however clever and original, and most are actually fun as well. A large problem I had with the gameplay was the sheer amount of backtracking you must do. There is a lot of it. This becomes increasingly aggravating because there is no in-game map available, and the academy has a rather complicated design with many shortcuts and confusing angles that will eventually put you at odds with the designer.

The backtracking is made bearable by the beautiful scenery. You travel between one pre-rendered screen to the next, all drawn by hand (albeit on a computer). Every screen is a pleasure to look at. The character designs, all four or five of them, are decent. The close-up views of faces are quite unrealistic and almost annoying to view, especially on contrast to the realistic environments, but there aren't many of them. They only appear in memories Lydia occasionally experiences that come in the form of short cut-scenes. You'll also have to put up with Lydia's buck-toothed grin on the bottom-left hand side of the screen.

The ambient music is also decent. Not memorable, but not annoying either. The sound effects are passable as well, although you might find yourself memorizing the specific order of "step-sounds" Lydia makes when she runs or walks. It's all part of the backtracking package. The voice acting...is, well, atrocious. To me, it seemed like the voice actors were given a series of lines to read out with absolutely no context given and no one there from Wicked Studios to help out, and only once chance to say each line. The blame can't fall entirely on Wicked Studios however, because the voice actors were clearly bad enough by themselves. You'll likely do one of two things after you see what I mean. Either you'll turn the sound off and turn some of your own music on while you play, or, like me, listen to them anyway like a true masochist and see how bad it can get. Believe me, it gets bad.

An important saving grace for the game was the surprisingly touching ending. Even with the goofy-looking faces and awkward body positions, I was very impressed with how they wrapped it up. I won't spoil anything, but for me it did make the overall mediocre game worth playing through.

It's no Believe it or Not!: Riddle of Master-Lu or The Dig and any non-adventure game fan would have a very, very hard time getting into Keepsake, but for a modern adventure game it really isn't that bad. If you are a die-hard fan like myself, I suggest you ask yourself how truly desperate you are for an adventure game you haven't played through three times already, and if you are...pick this one up. It's quite cheap and if you like really challenging puzzles, you'll like the last half of the game a lot. Otherwise...stay far, far away from it.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 04/26/06