Review of Keepsake by emric

this is an amazingly beautiful game. the art direction is astoundingly good! haunting and desolate and beautiful. at times the artwork even reminded me of ‘Ico’—and that is a high compliment indeed! the way the camera moves cleverly gives a nice sweeping flow to the feel of the game. and the angles they’ve chosen show great composition!!

the characters and story are very strong. it’s a somewhat melancholy experience and I found it highly rewarding. the music and sound are very nice and most of the voice acting is quite high quality.

only a few things hold this game back from being a complete triumph. while most of the puzzles are great, a few are too cryptic and there is a few too many logic based ones (incidentally, none of the puzzles are particularly inventory based, which, on this occasion at least, i found a welcome change from most games of the genre).

i found it disappointing that the characters weren’t anti-aliased (i.e had jagged edges that didn’t blend into the backgrounds) even older games than this have anti-aliased characters (and even the option to turn it on or off if it affects your machine’s performance) so i don’t know why this game decided to leave this out—especially because it’s so visually focused.

also, on closer inspection you find that the background images have been compressed too much, because jpeg-like artefacts are quite evident in some backgrounds and this always annoys me in any image. luckily the artwork is of such high conceptual standard, that the effect of over-compression isn’t as bad as it might’ve been.

the character animation would’ve been greatly improved if they could turn and walk in many degrees rather than just N S E & W. It’s not so bad for the main character, Lydia, but her feline companion Zak, as a longer character, looks rather choppy when changing directions.

and the typography was surprisingly poor. the chosen font was passable for normal sentence case, but on the occasions when they used all caps for emphasis it looked absolutely dreadful. oddly towards the end of the game, the font changed (and still didn’t seem to suit) and the lovely artwork in the end credits was also spoiled by awful typography.

thankfully overall i found the game so awe-inspiring that these weaknesses became relatively insignificant. also, the game had the best on-board hint system i’ve come across so far.

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Time Played: 10-20 hours