There are no ships left to guide, as humans haven't been seen in centuries. After what seems like a brief eternity, there is a rumbling, a shaking. The lighthouse shifts, first gradually, almost imperceptibly, then more violently, back and forth, back-and-forth. Then without warning, its torso shatters and the upper section of the lighthouse crashes to the ground.
Spiderly legs sprout from its base like fungal roots after rain. It wobbles forward, beam sweeping the haze, its beacon light blinks like a human eye clearing morning sleep.
Is it...alive?
This is Keeper. Double Fine Productions' newest release, and their first game fully developed under the shade of Xbox Game Studios' umbrella.
You may remember Double Fine from other creative outings like Costume Quest and Psychonauts, among many others.
To understand Keeper it's helpful to understand its development studio, and more importantly the studio's founder: Tim Schafer. Tim Schafer got his first game industry job working at Lucasarts, and his first major project was The Secret of Monkey Island. Schafer became known for his storytelling and comedic style, which has carried into his works even to this day.
Schafer worked at Lucasarts until January 2000 when he left to form his own production studio: Double Fine Productions, where he created the creative platforming game Psychonauts for the original Xbox, PC and PS2.
While Psychonauts didn't sell well initially, it was critically acclaimed and eventually found commercial success.
Psychonauts on the Original Xbox
After being acquired by Microsoft, some fans feared that Double Fine might lose its creative edge, or worse. Microsoft's stewardship of acquired studios has often prioritized short-term metrics over sustained creative investment, casting a long shadow over outliers like Keeper. Since the 2019 Double Fine acquisition, fans feared similar fates for Schafer's team amid a pattern of closures and mismanagement.
For example:
Tango Gameworks: Closed in 2024, shortly after the acclaimed Hi-Fi Rush (2023)
Arkane Austin: Developer of the acclaimed 2017 Prey. Shut down in 2024 following Redfall’s troubled launch (2023)
Rare: Previously a major hit-maker for Nintendo, including seminal titles like Battletoads, Donkey Kong Country, Banjo Kazooie, Perfect Dark and Killer Instinct. Post-2002 acquisition, its output has largely been limited to Sea of Thieves (2018) as their one major hit.
If you want to read about Xbox's studio layoffs and closures, you can reference this excellent article from gameindustry.biz.
These closures, part of broader 1,900+ Xbox layoffs in 2024, highlight a troubling trend, even as Microsoft boasts successes like Game Pass's 25 million subscribers and consistently excellent Forza franchise entries.
In light of this, Keeper's emergence feels like a rare triumph: Double Fine retained the autonomy to craft something strangely poetic on a modest scale, unburdened by AAA bloat.
In an industry where risks are increasingly punished, Keeper's survival underscores what's possible when a studio's funding is assured and its creative vision is protected. It's a beacon, but one that illuminates how many others have dimmed.
But for all of Microsoft's faults, the sheer range of games they make available day one on Gamepass, allowing more gamers to discover and play strange and wonderful gems like Keeper, is incredible.
Between the value price-point of the Xbox Series S, and the relatively low monthly cost of Gamepass, Xbox is still delivering one of the best deals in gaming for people who like to discover and play new and interesting games (and yes, I believe, despite the recent price increases, this combination is still one of the best deals in gaming).
So what about Keeper itself? What makes it so good?
Well... it's just so damn strange, and beautiful, and poetic.
...and it's also frustrating and sometimes obtuse, and if you don't find the optional achievements you don't get any sense of the story
...and it's freakin' cool that the only written story text is told via the in-game achievement pop-up messages
...but then it's kind of boring to just walk around as a sentient lighthouse and shine your light at things
...and just when you think you might give up then you burst apart and are reborn as a ship!
...then you transform again to become a flaming wheel of death, and end up playing some of the best Sonic the Hedgehog-type speed and loop sequences you've ever seen
...and it all culminates in a very strange climatic ending, and...
it's all so very satisfying.
Seriously, if you are the kind of person who started playing Keeper but fell off when you were still playing as a lighthouse, you should go back and just power through it. Trust me. The best is yet to come.
If you haven't had a chance to play Keeper yet, you can see some beginning gameplay in the YouTube video below:
So... this is Keeper, and I'm so very glad it exists.
Double Fine’s surreal pilgrimage; a poetic triumph born under Microsoft’s shadow.
In an era of studio closures and squandered talent (Tango Gameworks shuttered, Arkane Austin axed) Keeper’s existence is a rare beacon of creative freedom, amplified by Game Pass’s reach.
But despite all of the layoffs and studio closures, I'm glad if Double Fine's Microsoft acquisition allowed Tim Schafer and team the financial backing to be able to take the time and have the creative freedom to keep making wonderfully strange games like Keeper.
Yet their success only underscores the deeper tragedy:
Why can’t Microsoft nurture more studios to shine this brightly?
Horses is a provocative new game from Italian game production studio Santa Ragione, in partnership withAndrea Lucco Borlera - a film graduate student at Roma Tre University, examining themes of dehumanization through authoritarian control and puritanical repression.
While leading digital storefronts Steam and Epic banned it from sale, through word-of-mouth and listing on independent storefronts like Itch.io, Horses managed to breakthrough the attempts to silence it, and has sold more than 18,000 copies since release.
Seemingly unintentionally, these attempts to silence Horses' message only ended up reinforcing and amplifying it.
But is Horses controversial enough to warrant banning it in the first place?
Presented in stark black and white, Horses’ color palette, 4:3 screen ratio and limited audio (often presented with the droning sound of a film projector in the background), gives strong silent-film vibes.
As the player, you embody Anselmo, a young man sent to a ranch in the Italian countryside for a few weeks over the summer to “build character.” The time period isn’t specified, but it feels “old”, like it’s based in the past. Things seem innocent enough in the beginning, as you are told you will be working on a farm helping the farmer with daily tasks, but things take a dark turn almost immediately after you arrive.
You soon discover that the farmer's prized "horses" aren't really horses at all, they are human beings with horse masks strapped to their heads and otherwise entirely naked (with blurred out pixels obscuring their genitals). There are perhaps 8 to 10 of them, all crowded together in a small gated corral.
The way the farmer talks about them, you wouldn't know that they weren't regular everyday horses, so clearly there is something seriously wrong with the entire situation.
There is a "dog" on the farm as well (named Fido), but as you may guess, it's also a naked human with a dog mask forcefully strapped onto its head.
On a regular day you help with common chores around the farm like feeding Fido, gathering or watering vegetables, and taking hay to feed the "horses". You are also told to inform the farmer if you notice any of the horses fornicating, and fornicate they do.
It actually becomes quite common that whenever you pass by the horses' pen, there is at least one pair of them going at it, although whether the sex is consensual or not is unclear. There isn't enough refinement to the animation to imply whether the act is forced or mutually desired. Whether this is a conscious design choice or a limitation of the developer's skill is seemingly unclear to the player.
There are also a few sequences where the player ends up riding one of the horses, and it's about as disturbing as you might imagine it to be.
Another disturbing event involves the possible SA(unclear whether it's consensual or not, but seems like it's probably not) of one of the horses by Fido while the farmer watches. (The scene is even more disturbing than just that, but I think you get the general idea.)
Then there is a sequence where you have to help the farmer castrate one of the male horses for fornicating with the female horses, and after the farmer cuts their penis off, you have to staple the wound shut. This is more horrific sounding than the actual in-game event is, since lots of things happen off camera, and the hole is very blurry and pixelated, but still... its quite disturbing.
These are not the only disturbing scenes in the game, but these were some of the most shocking from my perspective, and sure these are pretty terrible, but they aren't done in a way that glorifies it. It's horrible, you feel horrible after viewing it, and that's the entire point.
But despite all that, is Horses really THAT controversial that it deserved to be banned from sale on Steam?
I could see a storefront like Nintendo's not allowing it, given their (somewhat) family-friendly image (although there are a lot of questionable games on the Nintendo online store these days), but Steam has A LOT of very sexual and disturbing games that it allows on its platform. Furthermore, the initial ban decision occurred prior to the more recent decision around some sexual games being removed from Steam due to pressures from payment processing companies, and while some adult and sexual content was removed, there are still plenty of games that could be considered more objectionable and "obscene" than Horses, like...
Sex with Hilter - an Adults-only game that is exactly what you think it is. (I don't recommend looking it up on Steam unless you are prepared for a VERY NSFW trailer and screenshots.)
Ironically, the act of banning Horses seems to have just drawn more attention to it, and probably helped it sell more copies than it would have otherwise.
While Steam is a very large and important store front, there are a lot of games that go unnoticed and never find commercial success on it, no matter how shocking they may be. If Horses had been allowed to release as originally intended, I doubt it would have garnered the attention it did, or sold as many copies as it did, due to the critical attention garnered by the Steam ban.
Personally, while I like the silent-film-esque aesthetics and brief FMV action clips, I found Horses to be only mildly disturbing and somewhat interesting.
While I applaud the idea of making video games that are more than just pure entertainment, and start to enter the realm of critical artwork, I don't think Horses has a sharp enough point to really leave a lasting mark.
Sure, its themes of puritanical oppression and authoritarianism are somewhat interesting, and the shock of seeing enslaved humans as "horses" is interesting at first, but the general simplistic gameplay and meaningless decision paths take away from the impact it could have had.
To be fair though, I don't believe Horses was meant to be a well honed, expertly crafted masterpiece. The game retails for only $4.99, and it seems to deliver exactly the experience it was going for: somewhat provocative, short and disturbing. It was the first game from Borlera, and even the game studio itself is a relatively small indie operation that has only shipped a handful of titles.
Even though I don't believe the Steam ban was justified, I believe it inadvertently helped Horses enter a level of critical dialogue and awareness that probably wouldn't have happened without it.
After all, I chose this game for D1SC0URS' inaugural article and if it hadn't been banned on Steam and created the surrounding controversy, I probably wouldn't even know it existed.
If you want to see a bit of beginning gameplay from Horses, you can watch the YouTube clip below. It doesn't contain any of the more controversial scenes I mentioned, but it gives you a sense of the overall vibe and disturbing nature of the game.
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