MINI-REVIEW: Keepsake

MINI-REVIEW: Keepsake

(Review copyright 2006, Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath RemoveThis @eblong.com>)

Keepsake started out with a jumping-pegs puzzle. Not quite that, I should
say. It started out with a very simple but very nice puzzle -- an
introduction to figure-out-the-rules mechanical puzzles in graphical
adventures. The *second* puzzle was the jumping pegs. The linear one, that
is -- the one you can solve in your sleep -- not the nasty
leave-one-peg-on-the-grid puzzle that makes you pull up a walkthrough or a
solving tool. So I didn't give up immediately, but I did think "Who puts the
jumping-pegs puzzle in a game these days? Without immediately showing me
their bloody intestines by way of restitution? Have we not said it enough?
Have we not wept and rent our garments by the riverside?"

Apparently not. Here it is again: *We don't need the jumping-pegs puzzle
again. It's been done. You don't have to do it.*

And that was an unfair reaction, because *most* of the puzzles in _Keepsake_
are original. All but that one, as far as I could tell. A couple were of
familiar types, and a few more were related to puzzles I'd solved before,
but that's fine; that's how the genre works.

The game's structure was a little weird. It was *all* set-piece puzzles --
devices stuck into doors and walls. They were only barely integrated into
the game world. There might be plant-themed puzzles in a garden, and at one
point you have to turn on water pumps to water the garden, but that's as far
as the integration goes. You were almost never acting in the game world;
rather, you were acting in the miniature puzzle-worlds.

If that sounds the same as most graphical adventure games, let me detail the
biggest difference. You have an inventory; but there are no inventory
commands (except "look at this closely"). There is no command to use *this*
item on *that* puzzle. There is no command to combine two items. Certain
puzzles need inventory items, but if you have the right item, it's used
automatically. Even complex recipes are carried out automatically (in
cut-scenes) if you have all the ingredients and the information. In essence,
the inventory is a progress track and clue repository, not part of the
gameplay.

I'm not saying this is a bad design decision. If your complaint about
adventure games is that they make you walk the UI through a lot of "obvious"
actions, you will favor this design. However, my complaint is much more
often that I feel isolated and uninvolved in the story. _Keepsake_ raised
that problem to a screaming pitch and then nailed it between my eyes. I
rarely reached what I consider the true adventure gestalt -- the experience
of looking around the world and deciding which of the disparate elements
I've found *make sense* together.

But, you ask, why are you obsessing about inventory? Don't your high ideals
of graphical adventures, the Myst games, eschew inventory items entirely?
Or, for that matter, those low-but-terribly-entertaining ideals, the Rhem
games?

Well, yes. (Well, nearly they do.) But those games achieve integration
through other means. Their game worlds are tied together, location to
location, by many obvious and subtle connections. You must observe their
worlds, and -- again -- consider what *makes sense*. _Keepsake_ doesn't do
much of that. Oh, in a few places, yes. But mostly, you're looking at
encapsulated, isolated puzzles.

Mind you, that has its advantages. _Keepsake_ has *lots* of set-piece
puzzles. When your game contains nothing else, you wind up with quite a
list. And, like I said, nearly all of them are original.

On the down side again: the quality varies. Many of the puzzles are quite
good, and a few drove me to serious brow-wrinkling and state-space
exploration. However, some were badly underclued. You had to pick one of
several approaches to a cloud of information, and while the "right" answer
was reasonable in retrospect, I was glad of the in-game hint system. Several
times.

And the riddle puzzles were terrible. I don't know if it was a translation
problem (the development studio is French); but many of the riddles were
incomprehensible, even with the answers in hand.

And once, I solved a major puzzle by dumb luck, and never understood what
I'd done. That was frustrating.

But enough about the gameplay. Let me wail about the interface for a while.
May I say that an adventure game whose save/restore interface *confuses me*
has a serious, serious problem? If you treat it as having one save slot --
which, admittedly, is a reasonable approach -- it's fine. But if you try to
open the list of *all* the save slots, you're suddenly faced with columns of
scary, unlabelled buttons -- and a dialog box that says "Warning! Don't do
this unless you know what you're doing!" No, seriously, it does. And I
*didn't* know what I was doing. What does this green "+" button do? Will it
overwrite the slot I pick? Turn my hard drive to anchovy paste? I still
don't know. I chickened out (anchovied out?) and went back to the single
save slot idea.

But that's not the real interface problem. The real interface problem is
that the dialogue is slow, slow, slow.

It's dialogue trees. I'm resigned to those. Dialogues start up
spontaneously, at many points, to liven up run-around parts of the gameplay.
That's pretty nifty. Dialogue appears as subtitles, a line at a time, as
it's spoken. That's fine.

But you can't skip ahead.

Oh, they lie to you. They offer a "fast forward" button that cuts off the
current line. But it doesn't help. See, some interface "designer" (those
aren't sneer quotes, those are sentenced-to-death-in-absentia quotes)
decided that the subtitles should fade smoothly in and out. Out and in. Try
to click ahead, and the game punishes you by fading the subtitle out and the
next one in. Two seconds lost. Per click. Every single. Line.

(Many of the puzzles have this problem too, by the way. Not fade-ins, but
intricate "you pushed the button!" animations. They look great, but in a
puzzle where you have to push the button scores of times, you quickly reach
an incandescence of rage.)

It gets worse. The little 3D character avatars have little emoting
animations. I think there are about six of these -- you see them over and
over. (Wave arms, cross arms, sigh dramatically. Repeat.) And you *can't*
skip out of those. If you hit the fast-forward button, the line cuts off,
and then you have to watch the animation sequence *anyway*. Wave arms, clap
hands, jump up and down. In silence. For as long as the spoken line would
have taken.

I suppose I wouldn't have noticed if the voice acting had been good. No,
that's a lie. I would have been clicking through anyway, because it's
dialogue trees, and that means you're being fed a lot of information which
is vaguely repetitive but you have to go through it all anyway. But in fact,
the voice acting is deeply mediocre. Not that that matters, because the
*script* is absolute garbage. Bone-rottingly awful. Reads like a
Saturday-morning cartoon -- the kind that is supposed to be good for you,
not the kind anyone likes. That fast-forward button was self-defense for my
brain, and whoever crippled it badly needs to be hit with a leaden bell full
of dead fish, because that's what a lot of this game's dialogue lines felt
like.

Weirdly, the actual *story* -- if you consider it as a synopsis, or a script
yet to be written -- is decent. There are characters; they have emotional
arcs; the ending isn't a cheat. The story is even tied into the gameplay.
The climax of the story is interactive, in a way which ties back to your
experiences throughout the game. You have to look back and them and
consider... yes... what *makes sense*, in the story's terms.

If it weren't for the dialogue and the acting, it would be impressive.

Oh well. Maybe, like the riddles, it's a translation issue. I don't think it
is, but I am clinging to the hope.

I do think that the story missed a bet. Did I explain the story? You're a
student at an academy of magic. Now you know. (Yes, it's a total ripoff,
Caroline Stevermer must be turning over in her grave... what? Oh, she's not
dead. That's okay, neither is Patricia McKillip, to whom Stevermer was
paying homage.) Anyway. The game makes much of the office of Caretaker, who
is responsible for all the machinery of the school. And the game makes much
of your mechanical ability. And, in fact, that's pretty much what you do in
this game: play with machines. They're magical machines, and there's also
some potion-brewing and some other magic, but I was sure the story was
setting up a cool "magic isn't everything" theme. Nope -- that was all in my
head, it turns out. Once again: oh well.

(This review, and my reviews of other adventure games, are at
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/gamerev/index.html)

--Z

--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
"Bush has kept America safe from terrorism since 9/11." Too bad his
job was to keep America safe *on* 9/11.

On Thu, 26 Oct 2006 01:32:50 +0000, Andrew Plotkin wrote:

> I do think that the story missed a bet. Did I explain the story? You're a
> student at an academy of magic. Now you know. (Yes, it's a total ripoff,
> Caroline Stevermer must be turning over in her grave... what? Oh, she's
> not dead. That's okay, neither is Patricia McKillip, to whom Stevermer was
> paying homage.)

Thanks for the book recommendations. I hadn't heard of those authors
before.