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Keepsake was disappointing

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 10
Date: January 05, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I had great hopes when I began this game. It was advertised as an adventure game with puzzles to solve. Not only were the puzzles so obscure, but it was impossible to determine a sequence of events with which to proceed. I found myself going to the internet for hint after hint. Another detriment to the game was the endless transporting from one area to another. To solve a puzzle, you would have to go through three or four transports only to be forced to go to another area involving a lot of movement. Truthfully, I got to the point where I only wanted to game to end.

I have to say this was a totally unsatisfying game experience and would not recommend it to anyone.

Fun game, great graphics, cloying dialog.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: April 21, 2006
Author: Amazon User

You can't please all the people all of the time, and this game has beautiful scenery and nice puzzles and an easy to use interface. The one fault lies in the cloying, annoying, affected dialog. I literally muted my computer so I wouldn't have to listen to the sugar-coated accented voices. Even just reading the dialog was annoying, it was so boring and staged. Picture Mr. Rogers. Nice guy, but I wouldn't want to spend a day playing a game with him. Fortunately they give you the option to "skip" the dialog as soon as you've read it. Unfortunately the characters in the game need to go through their dialog animations (waving arms, mouths moving strangely) until they think they are done with their dialog, even though you want to skip forward. I'm an adventure game junkie and have run across quite a few games that had bad reviews on the dialog portion and I never really cared.

This game made me care enough to write my first review. If you don't mind horribly annoying dialog, get it, it's fun.

Bottom Line: It's a great game if you're looking for a gentle adventure game with beautiful graphics and fun puzzles to play. I would recommend it for those adventure gamers who want a non-violent game and that aren't annoyed by the dialog issue.

Better than I expected..

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: December 26, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I know all reviews are subjective, but the wide disparity in opinions about this game made me reluctant to buy it. Well, I got it as an xmas gift and I have to say it really is a 'game of two halves'. If you don't persevere through the first section of the game, which is really an exercise in memorising locations more than anything else (only a dozen or so objects to find and use, and it will take you probably 4 hours to do this)then you miss out on the MUCH better second part of the story where there are a ton of puzzles to solve, although still not that many items to use.

The people who made this are obviously big fans of two games in particular - there are floating islands, teleportation devices and lots of strange levers to pull like in Myst (the teleportation devices use EXACTLY the same sound effect as used in Myst); the main character is supposed to be like April Ryan from The Longest Journey, her sidekick Zak is Crow from the same game. There's even a talking tree just like er, The Longest Journey!

Once things started picking up in the second part I really wanted to finish the game to see how things were resolved and I didn't find it cheesy or corny at all, in fact I was quite moved by the ending. It actually showed some quite deep psychlogical insight into the nature of grief and how to get over it.

Just to deal with the negative points of the other reviews -

1. The voice acting - really only the Merchant is irritating and you don't interact with him very much so who cares?

2. Character graphics - I don't know what people are looking at or why they concentrate so much attention on the length of the characters arms, the character graphics are perfectly ok.

3. Somebody mentioned the 'controls are horrible'.. but all you use is the mouse,theres absolutely no manual dexterity required to solve any of the puzzles so which 'controls' are these exactly?

4. Strange camera angles..all that happens is that you occassionally see the characters from a ceiling viewpoint, this is so that you get a panoramic view of the room you're in, it doesn't get in the way of playing the game at all..just point and click to where you want to go.

5. Lots of tedious walking/trotting around..yes, I'm afraid this does happen a lot in the first part of the game. I can see how the designers wanted you to move around a lot so that you would find all the rooms and be able to memorise their locations, but not having anything interesting to do once you got there doesn't make for a fun time.

The pros for this game are -

The in-built hint system - I can't believe somebody wrote that they had to go on-line to get help for puzzles, the game has its own walkthrough included! Any puzzles I felt I could get past in 20 minutes or so I gave a good shot at solving, the ones that I knew would take hours I just auto-solved. (Even then, one puzzle took the computer ten minutes to play through, that would have taken me days to work out.)

Puzzles that are actually integrated into the flow of the game, not some random events that have nothing to do with the environment you're in.

Very, very simple interface - there's absolutely nothing that can go wrong here, inventory items are used automatically in the areas you need them, you don't even need to use the right mouse button for anything..brilliant!

Graphics are excellent, but mainly static. Cut scene graphics are I think intentionally 'grainy' so I wil cut them some slack there.

The game is plenty long enough, I finished it in about 16 hours, but that was bypassing the tougher puzzles and using the Help function a lot to point me to the next correct location. If you play this 'properly' you could be looking at 30 hours easily.

If you have got this far I would just like to sum up by saying that Keepsake isn't the greatest adventure game out there, but its far from the worst. If you can pick it up cheap or borrow it from someone its definitely worth playing, but ultimately leaves you a bit flat when its finished.

The good and the bad, mostly bad.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: August 30, 2006
Author: Amazon User

It's got some occasionally interesting puzzles, but the lame story and irritating characters kill whatever appeal Keepsake might have had.

The Good: Unique and challenging puzzles; handy hint system helps keep the game moving.

The Bad: Some of the worst voice acting you will ever hear; blurry, low-res backgrounds; dull characters and an uninteresting story.

I want my money back.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: January 01, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I haven't even finished playing the game and I felt compelled to write a review. Pretty much everything everybody else has said about the game is true. Good graphics during static scenes, horrible during cuts. Insanely bad acting, it reminds me a little of Scooby Doo (the cartoon). Fairly interesting puzzles, but way too tedious for my liking.

Here are two things that I can't believe nobody's brought up. The camera angles are crazy and sometimes you can't figure out where you are or which way you came from. But at least they're consistent from scene to scene. The worse part for me is there's no way to jump from one place to another. And this academy is HUGE. It doesn't encourage exploration when you spend five minutes getting from one place to another, only to find out there's nothing there (or that you went to the wrong place). I'm spending more time moving from location to location and listening to Lydia and Zak talk than I am solving puzzles and that's just not fun. The last puzzle I came across (which prompted me to exit the game and write the review) requires me to go keep running back and forth between two points in the academy that are furthest from each other about six times until I complete the puzzle. It's just not worth it for me.

I'm really disappointed in this game. If I hadn't gotten it as a gift, I'd ask for my money back.

Fun Game Though a Short One

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: July 22, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Pros:
~The characters are pretty fun, though there are not many
~The built in hint system is helpful if you find yourself stuck on a puzzle
~The graphics are nice

Cons:
~There is little interaction with other characters so if you like being able to converse with a lot of different people then that's a bit of a downfall
~The built in hint system - Now you're probably wondering how that can be both a pro & a con - The hints are nice but having them there can also be bad because you might start to depend on them instead of figuring things out for yourself, which is much more fun
~The length of the game - It was shorter than I had originally anticipated. The game comes with 3 cds but after installation only the first is used to actually play the game
~The actual story - The story was cute. Cute is nice, but that's pretty much all it was. I was personally hoping for a bit more

All in all I enjoyed playing the game, but it's not something that I would really care to play again and again.

Basically a good game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 8 / 16
Date: May 18, 2006
Author: Amazon User

No, this game isn't perfect - you'll be annoyed by the dialogue (luckily you can fast forward through it) and the cut scenes (unfortunately you CAN'T fast forward through those). BUT it's filled with tons of things to solve, and if you get stuck, you can have the game solve it for you. This game will keep you busy for a while...but fair warning, it's CORNY!

If only the characters were mimes...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: February 03, 2007
Author: Amazon User

As others have mentioned in their reviews, the music, sound effects, and graphics were excellent. Unfortunately, the dialog and voice "acting" were terrible. The game play was extremely linear although you could travel to most places at any time. This combination often resulted in puzzles you could not solve and spending huge amounts of time going back to areas you have already been. Although the graphics were well done, you often had to travel though 6 or more scenes just to get from one place to another.

The logic puzzles were well done, but the riddle-type puzzles were so obscure that they made no sense, even with the hints! The same is true for the order in which you had to solve puzzles. Without the buit in hint system, you would have no idea what needed to be done next, especially in the towers.

Finally, the plot and character development were just awful. Within the first 2 hours you knew all the characters, their background and even new how the game would finally end. All conversations past this point are repetitive and add nothing but extending the time it takes to play the game.

By the time we were half way though the game, we just wanted it to be over.

Decent game but buggy

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: March 29, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I liked the storyline behind this game, the puzzles, the amazing artwork, the characters, and all the things the other reviewers have discussed. But the game was seriously buggy, and it got worse as the game progressed. Downloading the patch made things better, but even then, the game would completely lock up my computer about every half hour. I'm not sure I'll ever have the patience to finish it.

Not worth the money.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: September 07, 2006
Author: Amazon User

For this day and age, this game has extremely cheesey graphics and voiceovers. I can't believe how goofy the voiceovers sound. They sure didn't spend a lot on the actors.

Gameplay is fairly easy, which is a plus, but if you aren't enjoying what you see, who cares?

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