Creature Keeper Review

With or without realizing it, many gamers adjust their expectations accordingly when approaching indie games versus AAA ones. After all, it makes sense to hold games made with millions of dollars and thousands of employees to a different standard than Kickstarter projects made by just one or a few developers. It's with these external factors in mind that I analyzed Creature Keeper, the debut project from solo dev Fervir.

As its name suggests, Creature Keeper centers on a character tasked with maintaining and befriending various "creatures" that roam the land. The player-character is part of a rich lineage of Creature Keepers, stewards of a kingdom known as Sodland, which is introduced as being almost perpetually peaceful. Of course, this status quo doesn't last long, as players stumble upon a dangerous plot for control of the kingdom, and its beloved creatures fall victim to a strange, corrupting force.

Without getting into spoilers, Creature Keeper's narrative is, unfortunately, very lackluster. This sense of mediocrity permeates much of the game, from its combat to its quest design, and the experience as a whole is middling. There are flecks of real creativity and panache here, but sadly, these strengths flicker and die almost as soon as they are introduced.

Creature Keeper Is a Cute, Monster-Centric Adventure

To get the obvious out of the way, Creature Keeper is rather distinct from Pokémon and other monster-collecting games, mostly by virtue of the relationship between the player and their pet monsters. Rather than whittling down enemy creatures' health during turn-based battles, weakening them to the point where they no longer resist capture, players must feed non-corrupted creatures various fruits, some of which are favored more than others, until they acquiesce to friendship, willingly joining the player's ranks. This method of capturing creatures certainly makes Creature Keeper feel more humane than Pokémon (you won't be beating these poor wretches into submission), but it comes at a great cost: capturing creatures is boring. There's little mechanical depth or variety to this creature-collecting process, as it simply boils down to whether the player has enough fruit to fill the requisite meter.

Creature-catching qualms aside, Creature Keeper allows you to fight alongside your befriended monsters during real-time battles. You can only fight with one creature at the start of the game, but you'll eventually be able to summon up to three, who will all fight independently of you, requiring little to no input. These hack-and-slash fights form the brunt of Creature Keeper's runtime, and they are serviceable, but also a bit hit-and-miss.

For one thing, the lack of creature interactivity and customization is underwhelming. Each creature can only have one special ability equipped at once, which you can activate after a cooldown period, and the creatures can be instructed to hold a defensive position, but that's about as far as the player's control over creatures extends. There's not much variety in terms of unlockable abilities, and players can overcome any challenge with ease by simply spamming their creatures' offensive special attacks; the game rarely demands or rewards strategic thinking or moment-to-moment skill.

The protagonist's combat options help Creature Keeper achieve greater depth. You can equip up to three different weapons at a time, each having its own affinities and attack styles, and to the game's credit, all of them are satisfying to wield. The best reference point for Creature Keeper's combat would be Stardew Valley, as it has the same simple-but-effective hack-and-slash, 2D melee mechanics. It's not breaking any new ground, but it gets the job done, and early battles can be rather intense, in their own way.

But Creature Keeper's combat balancing further complicates matters. After about the halfway point of my playthrough, my creatures were so powerful that they would often defeat major, narratively significant bosses within seconds, before I, as the player-character, could get more than a few hits in. Meanwhile, small, fodder enemies in the overworld could take several minutes to take down, even when mixing-and-matching different attack types for optimal efficiency. This was a pervasive issue during my time with the game, and greatly undermined its dramatic plot beats as well as its open-world exploration.

Creature Keeper has a general lack of polish. I encountered frequent spelling and grammar errors during dialog, as well as myriad glitches, ranging from story-relevant visuals occurring off-screen all the way to complete crashes.

Mundanity Is Creature Keeper's Greatest Sin

While Creature Keeper's gameplay might be polished with post-launch updates, bringing out its strengths and minimizing its shortcomings, the game's overall blandness is unlikely to change. There's a painful lack of originality in so many of Creature Keeper's narrative, mechanical, and visual elements, which keeps it from reaching its full potential. Take the story, for instance: Creature Keeper's narrative is about a young hero heeding the call of adventure as a strange corruption spreads across the land. This premise is about as paint-by-numbers as you can get, a template upon which a more interesting, complex video game story can be built. Creature Keeper doesn't build an interesting or unique story upon this template—it merely presents it as-is, injecting a few derivative fantasy staples here and there for good measure. This watery, unseasoned quality extends to several other elements of the game, like its humor, environment design, and progression.

What's frustrating is that Creature Keeper feels like it could be so much more interesting. There are a few moments, mostly toward the end of the campaign, where the game actually introduces some promising ideas, but they are swiftly abandoned, not tying into the broader experience; they could be removed from the game, and nothing would change. All in all, much of Creature Keeper feels rushed and unfinished, like Fervir had an outline for its campaign and open-world, but only began filling it in at the eleventh hour.

Creature Keeper is in desperate need of an X-factor: something especially unique and hard-hitting that makes it intriguing and memorable. The game's story isn't offensive, it's just bland and unoriginal; its art style isn't terrible, but it's indistinguishable from so many other retro-influenced indies; its music is good, but nothing special; and its action-RPG combat works just fine, but doesn't leave you itching for more. If something about Creature Keeper's premise strongly appeals to you, then perhaps it's worth a few hours of your time—but don't expect any surprises.

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