Keepsake

Typically I would just pirate an adventure game. The problem I have with buying them is that they have no replay value and then you get instant buyer’s remorse from shelling out $35 for eight hours of puzzles. But there is always an exception. I bought a pack of five Adventure Company games at Walmart on closeout for only seven dollars; no doubt a goldmine of anatomically questionable characters, uncomfortable voice acting and half-assed cut scenes. In the pack where Dead Reefs, Nibiru, Keepsake, Tunguska and Mysterious Island. Nibiru and Tunguska look more like my kind of thing but I hate to do the best things first so I pick something that looks about medium to me…

Keepsake is a point-and-click adventure that is fantasy based, (AKA badly integrated puzzles.) You play as a girl going to the Dragonvale Academy to learn magic as well as meet up with a long unseen childhood friend, Celeste. When you get there, you find the doors locked shut and all the students and faculty missing. And that’s the main deal, trying to figure out where everyone is.

The only person you get to interact with, other than the peddler man outside, is actually a wolf that you find locked up in a cage. You set him free and then he explains that he’s actually a juvenile dragon but some students turned him into a wolf as a prank. Note: He’s really an ugly dork human. He serves as your guide throughout the game.

The academy is ridiculously enormous and somewhat difficult to navigate even with a map. At some point you get involved with these convoluted networks of color coded warp pads. For the most part it’s useful but what’s with this?

What the hell is the point of this hub? Do people just feel like stopping mid warp to be trapped in here? What am I going to do here? Just take me where I want to go.

Also, one thing you’ll notice is the thousands of dragons decorating every room. I realize it’s Dragonvale Academy but this just makes me want to puke. They’ve got dragons up the ass. They’re on doors, the floor, the wall, lights, chairs, tapestries, books, statues, fountains, windows and virtually everything else.

For being a game with practically two people in it there’s a hell of a lot of dialogue. You can’t find a new puzzle without asking a stupid question and sparking a ten minute long conversation about what that funny glowy thing is. Sometimes you’ll just be walking along and suddenly someone will spontaneously make some sort of horribly introspective remark and voila; you’re not playing a game anymore.
This ghost appears later and you have to talk to it… unfortunately. He talks slower than my grandpa. Luckily It gives you the option to fastforward through dialogue. I can read his entire box of text before he finishes the first syllable. I’m not even exaggerating.

The puzzles in the game are pretty calibrated to my fancy. They aren’t so easy that I feel like I’m playing a game for three-year-olds and they aren’t so hard that I feel retarded. There’s also a hint system with three different degrees of information divulged and even an instant solution button for candy-ass gamers. (Yes I used it.) However, toward the end of the game, the puzzles really began to turn to shit.

Solarium Puzzle

In this puzzle you’re supposed to grow three specific plants in the school solarium. The solarium has a device that allows you to choose what season you want it to be inside of it. The season dictates which plants you can grow in the three pots. Each season has about five different plants associated with it and some of them overlap into other seasons. The first problem with this puzzle is the tapestry that supposedly tells you what plants you need in which pots. I thought I screen captured it but I guess not. But I swear to you that the puzzle will be easier for you having not seen it.

The second problem is the plants. Every time you cycle from one plant to another it has to go through an extremely tedious 10 second animation where the plant you were on shrinks back into its seed and then the next plant slowly grows in its place. You just want to get from plant A to plant E but you have to pay witness to everything in between as it waxes and wanes.

The third problem is the location of the season control for the solarium. Please take note using this helpful map…
Why didn’t they just put the controls in the next county… or South China? Not only does this not make any sense from a gaming standpoint, it doesn’t make any sense from a school construction standpoint. It would be like putting the light switch for the principal’s office on the roof of the gym, or having to go to the baseball field to flush the faculty toilet. It’s a two minute trip from the solarium, (where you cycle the plants), to the stupid controls, (where you cycle the seasons.) Assuming you start at the solarium and know exactly what you’re doing and where you're going, it can’t take any shorter than six minutes to complete the puzzle. That will never happen of course. Imagine just trying to get your bearings on the effects of the various seasons. Cycling through all seasons and plants takes about 16-18 minutes. And you haven’t even started trying to solve the puzzle yet. I could overlook the distance factor if they just had a warp pad going between them but no, the school contractor thought it would be much more useful to have a warp pad that teleports you three feet to a hub where your only choice is to continue teleporting on the same color pad.

Telescope Puzzle

This puzzle is not only overly complicated but very time consuming as well. You’re supposed to enter in each row and column of numbers in the box into the weird gyroscope to look at things in the telescope… I guess. You do that by fiddling with the individual rings. Each ring moves corresponding numbers in a certain way. Each time you press a ring you are subjected to a long-ass animation of the thing twirling around. You may have figured it out but now you have to sit there for an hour entering numbers. What’s the point of making you do the same thing 12 times? After 20 minutes of lining up coordinates for the telescope and not even being half way done, I was ready to press the instant solution button, (and I did.)

Forge Puzzle

This third puzzle is the worst of all puzzles. It’s defective. You get this thing…

Then later you go to a forge and there’s this puzzle with corresponding characters. Obviously since it’s a forge you’re going to enter the word ‘fire’ right?

Wrong. Nothing happened. I spelled ‘earth’ and ‘wind’ too but still nothing. I was going to try ‘water’ too but I couldn’t quite get it. Every button you press makes the surrounding buttons alternate to the opposite of what they just were, so it’s not like you can just punch it in like a typewriter. Naturally I’m stumped because there’s no other logical solution. So I press the instant solution button and turns out the answer is this…

Now I’m even more confused. That sequence isn't even on the legend. Why the hell would I ever enter that sequence? Is there some other legend that I was supposed to be going off of? I looked at three different walkthroughs on the internet and they all said fire was the answer but you were supposed to spell it like what the solution button had rendered. Then I noticed that each symbol on the legend corresponds to a specific letter in the alphabet. In other words it's not just a pretty picture. Each sequence of symbols translates directly and actually spells out one of the four elements. Going back to the solution that everyone agreed on but me. The symbol sequence for the game’s solution was five characters long. The word ‘fire’ is of course four characters long so those symbols *can’t* mean fire. In fact if you translate it it says ‘whfra’ which doesn’t mean shit. I kept looking at walkthroughs and finally found this picture.

Well that corresponds with *my* answer but this is for a different version of the game. I can’t even recognize the language that it’s in. So maybe I have some kind of screwed up hybrid. But then why is it still able to spell ‘fire’ in the English version?

So after entering in WHFRA like it wanted, the puzzle unlocked and then the camera cut out to a wider angle. Then, just for one last kick in the crotch it does this…

IT FUCKING SWITCHED BACK TO FIRE, MY ORIGINAL ANSWER. Thus my brain exploded and I had to be hospitalized. The end.