In Keepsake, you are going to control the role of Lydia. She is a new prospective student for the Dragonvale Academy, a school focusing on magic. When she arrives at the school expecting to meet up with her friend Celeste, who is already a student, she finds the school completely empty. Not far in she finds a talking wolf named Zak. Together, they explore the school and solve various puzzles as they try to find where all of the teachers and students have disappeared to.

The puzzles in this game range from an entertaining challenge to so difficult you have the urge to head butt your keyboard. However, don’t let the challenge of difficult puzzles scare you away. The developers put in a hint system, and it really helps a lot. There is no penalty for using it. The game offers three hints, and if after those hints you still can’t figure it out, you can ask the game to solve the puzzle for you. Yes, it’s possible to cheat your way through by asking the game to solve every puzzle for you, but that would remove a lot of the fun and point of playing it. It’s basically there so that you don’t run into a game-stopping puzzle in case you really can’t figure something out.

The school has two floors. To begin with, you must complete everything on the first floor to advance up. The puzzles on the first floor were the most fun. I was able to solve most of them by only using the hints. Yes, I admit there were a couple I had to ask the game to solve for me. Don’t laugh, I never said I was a genius! The second floor of the school has more advanced puzzles. Not all of them are that tough, but I swear, this is the part where the puzzles can go from “Hey, that was pretty fun!” to “I’d rather chew broken glass.” I spent a long time trying to figure some of them out, and to be honest I’m not sure some of the higher-end puzzles made sense. Maybe if you’re a puzzle solving master, you can take a look at this game and tell me if it’s just me or the game.

The controls are pretty standard for a game like this. You click where you want to go, and the cursor will tell you if Lydia can move somewhere or not, or if moving there will change the view. If your cursor turns into a magnifying glass, you can examine the object. A gear symbol tells you the object is usable or interactive. I would have really liked the ability to use something like a mouselook option, but you’re confined to where the still cameras look. That’s not really something that affects the game; call it a feature for someone who just likes examining the surroundings.

One beef I had with the gameplay was the fact I spent a lot of time running back and forth between rooms. I mean, the school didn’t look that big, but after running around it so long I finally grasped that it’s bigger than it seems. At least there is a map feature so you can tell where you’re at. Also, the hint system not only helps on puzzles, it also tells you exactly where you need to go next. Trust me, you need this feature, because while exploring on your own can be fun, it would just be way too time consuming to try and play through the whole game that way. It might have also been nice to be able to revisit puzzles after you’ve already completed them. Some of them were fun enough to warrant a second go. However, the only way to play a puzzle a second time after you beat it is to reload a saved game or to play the whole thing over again. Oh well.

The graphics were pretty solid. I really enjoyed the atmosphere of the school. The well-done visuals definitely helped bring the game to life. The animations after completing some of the puzzles were entertaining too, such as watching the school’s water system turn back on or seeing a seed fast forward into a giant tree. Sometimes Lydia looked a little pixilated up close against the pretty backdrop of the school, but eh, you don’t see that often. It’s obvious the artists spent a lot of time and effort into designing and implementing this academy.

As for sound, well, I have mixed feelings on this. The music and ambient sounds I had no problem with. It was the voice acting that I’m not so sure on. The girl who voiced Lydia was alright, with a few quirks here and there. Zak’s voice kind of annoyed me most of the time, but after a while he grew on me. Most of the other voices were…how can I say this…cheesy? Some of the lines lacked emotion that matched the character’s actions or expected feelings. Some of them went way too overboard and I felt like I was listening to a daytime soap opera for a moment. I rolled my eyes at some of the cutscenes.

Keepsake is a long game, which surprised me since I had no idea what to expect from it. I normally complete a game within a few days, start to finish, but I was wondering if Keepsake was ever going to end. Granted a lot of that time was spent running back and forth, but even discounting that, all of the exploration, dialogue and puzzles just gave the game a long life. I almost did not want to finish it, but it was one of those times where I felt I had invested so much time already that it would be foolish to stop now and not finish. Plus, I like to really complete a game before I give my opinion on it. So in all fairness to myself and the game, I stuck it out.

If you’re big into puzzle games, I recommend Keepsake to you. However, you’re going to have to go into it knowing that it has its tedious moments between running back and forth to places and some really difficult puzzles in its later half. If you think you can deal with that, then maybe you should consider this game. From my personal perspective, this is not something I would play a second time. I do like a decent puzzle game, but it just had too many irritants between the good aspects to make me want to play it any longer than I had to.