Is Double Fine’s New Xbox Game Any Good?

It’s been four years since Psychonauts 2, the last new Double Fine game. The studio’s off-kilter sensibilities have always appealed to me, and they’ve helped it create some really great and memorable games, so I was excited to finally have a new release from them in Keeper. And while this unusual adventure about a lighthouse and a bird is shorter than I expected, what is here is a gorgeous, well-crafted, and incredibly creative game that pulls off an emotional story without a single word. 

Keeper, out now on Xbox and PC, is the first Double Fine game to be completely developed and released since the studio was bought by Xbox. And if you were worried that acquisition would mean that Double Fine might no longer be free to get weird, Keeper will quickly assuage your fears. This is a game that, at least at the start, revolves around a sentient, walking lighthouse that befriends a cartoon bird, and the two of them embark on a long journey through a post-apocalyptic world devoid of humanity, but full of colorful and bizarre plants and critters. 

Weird stuff, right? But while Keeper is an odd game, it ain’t an ugly one. This might be Double Fine’s best-looking game, with a wide color palette and a sometimes surreal and abstract art style that lives between hand-drawn and sculpted. Over the course of the game’s three- to four-hour runtime, I was always excited to see what the next area would look like, and…oh yeah, uhh, the game is very short. 

There’s no getting around that fact. This is a $30 video game that most people will complete in just about three hours. There aren’t many puzzles, and few of them really pushed me to think all that much. There’s also no combat or skill trees. Keeper isn’t a mechanically deep game or a complicated thing to play. Instead, Double Fine wants you to just vibe out with it for like three hours. Enjoy all the pretty colors, the weird shit, and hopefully, by the end, feel something. 

And to Keeper’s credit, by the time credits rolled, I did indeed feel something. It’s wild to think that a story about a lighthouse and a bird with no dialogue could make me tear up a bit at the very end, but that’s exactly what happened. I didn’t expect it, but the conclusion was a wonderful way to end this epic journey. 

In fact, I really didn’t expect most of what happens in Keeper. You’ve seen trailers for the game and likely assume it’s one thing, and it is that for a while. But similar to EA’s Split Fiction, Keeper is a game that relishes in throwing curveballs at you. Every 30 minutes or so, Double Fine’s latest adventure zigs or zags in unexpected ways, and by the end, I was shocked that the game I was playing was the same one I’d started playing a few hours before. 

You may have noticed that I haven’t gone into detail about the specifics that make Keeper so surprising, and that’s because, well, I don’t want to ruin any of the surprise. If you intend to play Keeper, I urge you to avoid videos of it and just hop in. You can easily knock this thing out in a single sitting, and despite a few performance hiccups, I did that and had a great experience. These are the kinds of games I want Xbox to fill Game Pass with, not new Call of Duty titles that make the service more expensive and fill up my hard drive with 4k textures of assault rifles. Give me more silly, strange, and heartfelt experiences that I can finish in a single sitting.

If you were concerned about how Xbox’s ownership of the Double Fine might change it, Keeper is here to remind us all that the former indie studio is still doing its own thing. And while I don’t have insight into the daily operations of Double Fine or what’s happening behind the scenes, Keeper seems to indicate that even under Xbox, the studio behind Brutal Legend and Costume Quest will continue to make weird games filled with heart and not designed to maximize sales. And that fact, like Keeper, makes me really, really happy.