I have to admit, I’ve been waiting in delirious anticipation
for Keepsake ever since first discovering the official website several
months ago. The graphics looked delicious and Wicked Studios tantalized
you with just enough info to leave you wanting more. Clearly, there
was a mystery to be solved, and waiting for
the game’s arrival only created more interest for me in just what that
mystery might be.

You are Lydia, a young
woman destined for studies at the prestigious Dragonvale Academy.
Not only is Lydia eager to study magic and become
a wizard, but there is another more person reason she’s looking
forward to starting school today. Her best friend from childhood
Celeste, is attending the school as well. After a long separation
the chance to see her friend again is very exciting and Lydia is
more than ready for her new life to begin. Unfortunately, as she
soon discovers, things have changed at Dragonvale, and not in a good
way.

Instead of being greeted
by Celeste upon her arrival, Lydia finds that she’s alone. And alone on a large, lush campus such as
this means “alone”! After wandering a bit she finds Mustavio,
a gypsy-like gentleman who sells his wares to the students, and eventually
a dragon-in-wolf’s clothing named Zak who tags along with her.
Through their explorations they find that the school is entirely
empty, abandoned. And the reasons why will take them throughout a
gorgeous castle and sunny fertile forests as they try to discover
what’s happened to the students and staff of Dragonvale.

Story:

The story as hinted at
above, is an emotional one. You imagine yourself as Lydia, a bundle
of first-day-of-school nerves, filled with excitement
at seeing her old friend, only to be both let down and intrigued
by the mystery of the empty academy. Having to jump into action gives
us a reason to move Lydia around the game; this is more than simple
pointing and clicking through beautiful pictures with no goal in
sight. For me the story was key and I’d give that part a B.

Graphics:

I was stunned by the graphics
in this game. Literally. The academy is in a mind-bogglingly large
castle, set in the backdrop of a lush
forest, and both are created with loving detail. The castle soars
into the sky, the leaves glitter in the sunlight, and the interiors
are drawn with delicious detail. There is one point in the game where
Lydia stands outside of the castle on a very high level, and the
purple towers shooting towards the sky are just eye-watering they’re
so wonderful. This kind of art makes me long to run to the nearest
school and take up digital art; if I could create a game this beautiful
I’d do it in a heartbeat! This part, I have to give an A+!

Sound:

The sounds in Keepsake are a sort of mixed bag. The music, the puzzle sounds, etc. are
all fairly good; not intrusive nor annoying, just
nice background sounds. But I was disappointed with the character
voices. Lydia’s in particular was simply “okay”,
nothing to write home about, while Mustavio’s was (for me)
completely annoying. Zak’s is fine…he sounds like a teenage
guy and that works pretty well. But often I stuck to the subtitles
and turned the speakers off because Lydia’s voice sometimes
got on my nerves.

Another thing that I
noticed was sometimes the dialogues would start seemingly for no
reason. For example, Zak and Lydia are walking
in a certain area of the castle and for no apparent reason, Zak decides
to start telling her about what a “familiar” is. I think
that certain dialogues are triggered by certain areas in the game,
but sometimes they didn’t seem to go with the room I was in
or the part of the game I was currently working on. For that reason
along with others, I’d give the sounds section a C+.

Puzzles:

Some of the puzzles, such
as the very first one you must solve in order to enter the school,
are not too hard and can be a lot of fun.
I really enjoyed that one and there were others along the way that
held just enough degree of difficulty to keep me interested in solving
them, but were not so difficult I wanted to throw my monitor across
the room. There were some though that I absolutely had to look at
a walkthrough in order to complete. My method is usually to try it
on my own until I’m desperate, and then if I can’t solve
it, peek at the walkthrough. The good thing is that not all of the
puzzles are this hard. They are sprinkled in among others that are
medium-difficult so that you don’t spend the entire game feeling
chained to the puzzle-solving when you’d rather be exploring
the beautiful environment. I’d give the puzzles in Keepsake a B.

Enjoyment/Entertainment Factor:

There were a lot of things
to enjoy in Keepsake, especially the freedom to explore. Granted
some areas were off-limits until Lydia
reached a certain part of the story, solved certain puzzle, etc.
But for the most part, you could roam around a lot, and that’s
important for me. I don’t like to feel hemmed in when I’m
playing a game, and having the ability to wander at will was a huge
plus. Another thing I enjoyed was having a companion along my journey.
In general, I prefer for my character to be by his or herself while
exploring and I thought at first that having Zak along might not
be my cup of tea. In this game though, it can be such lonely environment
that having him along was actually comforting. Plus, he’d been
there much longer than Lydia and in was helpful to have along! I
felt engaged and entertained while playing Keepsake and that’s
important to me. Sometimes games can leave you feeling as if you’re
a mere bystander while the real action is going on elsewhere. In
this game, I felt a part of the action, and that increased my enjoyment
of it.. I’d give this section a B.

Other Info:

Keepsake comes on 3 discs,
but you don’t need a disc in your
drive in order to play the game. Once it’s installed you can
play it right from the hard drive; something I enjoyed a lot. When
you save the game, there are no extra save slots, so you will end
up saving over your game again and again. I wish that there had been
extra save slots, but there was something about the saving that I
really did like: you can hit “save and quit” and are
sent immediately back to your desktop. I could go from playing Keepsake to surfing the internet in about two seconds, and for me, that was
a feature that I could really appreciate!

As for the ending? Well,
I won’t ruin it by going into great
detail. But I’ll say that it was sad and that after all of
my searching, seeking, and wandering as Lydia, I was disappointed.
Like Lydia, I wanted a happy ending, but just as in life, sometimes
those are not to be. Still, the ending was satisfying in its way,
and the journey was more than enjoyable. So…how would I rate
Keepsake overall? I’d have to give this pretty new classic
a B+.

Final Grade: B+
(find out more about our
grading system)

System Requirements:

• OS: Windows® ME/2000/XP
• CPU: 1 GHz Intel® Pentium® 3
  processor or AMD® Athlon™ processor
• RAM: 256 MB (512 MB
  on Windows® XP)
• Video: 32 MB 3D accelerated
  video card (NVIDIA GeForce™ or
  ATI)
• CD-ROM: 4x (or PC
  DVD-ROM drive)
• Sound: 100% DirectX® Compliant (EAX Recommended)
• DirectX: DirectX® 9.0
• Hard Disk Space: 1.4
  GB
• Other: Mouse, Keyboard
  and Speakers