I really started getting interested in video games when I first played Zork, a text based role playing gmae from the late, great Infocom. Before that I had played arcade games and Pong, and while I enjoyed them they never really captured my imagination the way the simple sentences in Zork did. Ever since then I've been a fan of RPGs, and it hasn't always been easy. Lately RPGs have been out of fashion, replaced by first person shooters and platform games. The genre isn't dead though, and some new games still trickle out from time to time. One of the latest is Keepsake from Dreamcatcher and The Adventure Company. This game starts out with a lot of promise and has some very interesting parts, but due to a couple of significant flaws, the game turns out to be a lot less enjoyable than it should be.

In this game the player takes on the part of Lydia, a young girl who has been admitted to Hogwarts... opps, I mean The Dragonvale Academy, to study magic. Her best friend is Celeste, whose father is the headmaster at Dragonvale. The two haven't seen each other for years, since Celeste's mother died and her father, Nathaniel, moved to become headmaster, but the girls have kept in touch and Lydia is very excited to see her friend once again.

After a very short tutorial that covers everything you need to play the game, Lydia walks up to the giant school and discovers that nobody is there. No students, no teachers, no staff, no one. Searching through the halls she soon finds someone locked in a cupboard, Zak. He's a talking wolf, who used to be a dragon and Nathaniel's familiar until some students slipped him a shape changing potion and locked him up. Or so he claims. With Zak by her side, Lydia has to figure out what happened to her friend and the rest of the students of Dragonvale.

That's the set-up. It's pretty simple but interesting. The gameplay is also straight forward and uncomplicated. To make Lydia walk through the empty rooms and corridors of the school, a player merely places the cursor where he wants Lydia to go and clicks. In some rooms there are objects that Lydia can examine or take, and a magnifying glass or hand (respectively) will appear over those objects when the cursor is placed over them. There is an inventory system, but it's really not needed. When Lydia gets to a point where she needs to use something that she's collected, it almost always happens automatically, without the player having to go to the trouble of locating it and using it. This is a nice touch.

The school is filled with puzzles that Lydia has to solve and that's what a lot of the gameplay involves. These puzzles are neatly divided into two types; those in the lower part of the school that are encountered in the first half of the game are very simple, and the one in the upper section of the school are outrageously difficult. There is no middle ground.

That's the first problem I have with this game. Very few of the things puzzles are challenging. The ones at the beginning (with one or two exceptions) are so facile that they wouldn't stump the most novice gamer. The ones at the end, on the other hand, are so hard that it's nearly impossible to solve them without hints. One of the biggest hurdles to leap in these later riddles is just figuring out what to do.

Which brings us to one of the nicest aspects of this game, the hint system. In any puzzle, or even if you're not sure what to do next in the game, you can click on a hint button. With puzzles it will then give you up to three clues, and the first one always explains what is required of the player. (It will also tell you if you aren't ready to solve the puzzle yet, something that I discovered only after working on one game for quite a bit of time.) After the three clues are given, players have the option of having the puzzle automatically solved. This last bit came in handy a few times especially with challenges that were going to take forever to finish.

These puzzles are often logic games. Arranging numbers or symbols into a certain pattern by following a set of rules or occasionally deciphering a riddle. (Happily there were no musical or repeat-the-pattern style brain twisters. I hate those.) One of the problems is that sometimes the objects that are to be manipulated aren't in the same area causing the player to run hither and yon to complete the task. In the lower levels this isn't too bad. The switches to turn on the schools power supply are in several adjacent areas in the game which take some time but it's not irritating. In the second part the botanical puzzle is horrendous. Players have to grow certain plants in order, but some plants only grow during certain seasons. To change the seasons Lydia has to manipulate a device that is on the other side of the school, ten or more screens away. There's no key, of course, so players have to run back and forth using trial and error. Luckily there's the hint system and people who don't want to spend upwards of half an hour on this one task can just have it solved like I did.

That running back and forth is what really did the game in for me. There is a lot of back tracking. I mean a lot of backtracking. Read this review again from the beginning about 8 times and you'll have an idea of what playing this game is like. Solve a puzzle walk to the opposite side of the school, do one thing, walk to another corner of the school. Repeat. That's pretty much what this game entails. Wanting to know the solution to the mystery quickly dissipated as I was forced to spend a lot of real time going through areas I'd already explored. The worst part about this is that there were times when a player would know he'd need an object later in the game, but couldn't pick it up until it was asked for. By the time a player is asked he's rather far away from the item of course.

There's a lot of padding in the game too, as if the constant backtracking wasn't enough. Zak stops to ask Lydia questions that really don't have anything to do with the game a few times, and the cut scenes, while they are the only thing that really advances the story sometime go on for much too long.

The game does have an ending that worked well that I really liked (though I can see where some wouldn't) but it's a case of too little too late. By the time I reached the ending I really didn't care what happened to the missing students. The creators just couldn't sustain my interest. There isn't a gradual discovery of answers that keeps a player's interest piqued, like parts fitting together, the whole mystery is revealed in two sections really. That's too bad, because the game started out with a lot of promise.

Graphics:

The most outstanding aspect of this game are the graphics. The rendered backgrounds are gorgeous and detailed and really add a lot to the game. Some of the animation is excellent too, going up to the observatory via the transport pads always gave me a rush. The animation is smooth and flowing and works well in the context of the game.

The characters are another story however. They didn't look quite right, even the faces that appeared next to the text when they'd talk looked odd. (And Lydia is butt-ugly to boot. Is it too much to ask to make her look at least average?) They were a bit too skinny and the movements didn't look natural. This was a minor matter though and may not bother everyone who plays.

Audio:

While the graphics were nice, the audio was generally horrible. The voice actors did an exceedingly bad job on the dialog. I review a lot of anime and I know that good dubs can be created. This wasn't one of them. It sounded like the actors didn't have any context for what they were saying, just given a series of lines to read. That's the only reason I can think of for the overacting. Every sentence had a word that was accented and that got old real fast. Not only that, but even the sound effects had problems. When Lydia walks through the halls of the school her footsteps echo, which is fine. Unfortunately the same thing happens when she's walking through a forest! Things like that really prevent players from being immersed in the game. Would it have been that hard to take the echo off sometimes?

Conclusion:

While this game had a lot of potential, it doesn't live up to it. The mystery was interesting in the beginning but it just couldn't hold my interest for the entire game. While there were some logic games I liked, the goblin and the giant game for example, the vast majority were either too easy or too hard (and sometimes too long.) The bad voice overs didn't help either. It was the excessive backtracking though that really sapped my interest in the game. RPG fans who don't have anything else to play might want to give this one a rental if they are really looking for something new.