Keeper: a note from its creator on launch day

Hello, my name is Lee Petty and I am the Creative Manager at Double Fine Productions. I have been with Double Fine for almost 20 years! I was the artistic director of brutal legend And Broken agebut was also the creative director of Stacking, Turning point, AutonomousAnd RAD.

My new game, Guardianis inspired by the events of recent years. Like most, I’ve been thinking a lot about isolation and connecting with others. I have always loved hiking, backpacking, and spending time outdoors with my family. During the pandemic, this has become even more important to me. I wondered if the wildlife around me would be all I had left in the future. Would this continue to develop, to evolve? I thought about mycelium, the vast underground networks that connect fungi, and how they are also used by trees to share nutrients and communicate with each other.

I imagined an isolated island in the distant future without humans. What kinds of life would evolve there? Would this life still be inhabited by the need to connect with others and have a purpose?

As I thought about what this world might look like, I took inspiration from surrealist painters, like Max Ernst and Salvador Dali, who created vibrant dream worlds that were both familiar and different from everything else. Some of my favorite films, like “The Dark Crystal” and “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,” are about strange, supernatural places and unusual life forms, and both are presented as family films but have stranger, darker undercurrents. This is reflected in Guardian also, giving him a style of play that I like to call “Weird, but Chill”.

A story told entirely without words, Guardian is the story of a long-forgotten lighthouse on a post-human island, which awakens after eons of sleep. The old masonry of the lighthouse crumbles and he falls to the ground, but then he grows legs, gets back up and sets off on a journey to the top of the mountain in the center of the island, joined by a feisty seabird companion, named Twig.

It’s a psychedelic tale of camaraderie and a mystifying shapeshifting adventure, all set in a beautiful and surreal otherworldly realm beyond belief.

It’s a game that relies heavily on the unexpected, and we’ve gone to great lengths to preserve the mysteries and surprises it holds. I’m really looking forward to you discovering them all for yourselves as you play – and I’d like to ask you to please think about how you talk about these surprising elements, ideally preserving some of the mystery for others as much as possible. Thanks for playing!

Lee and the Double Fine Productions team