Creature Keeper Review - Dog Walker For Hire

Creature Keeper is a monster collector from Chicago-based studio Fervir Games, and one that went through the trenches to get here. A successful Kickstarter campaign in 2019, and an expected release of 2021, was just the beginning of a road built piece-by-piece in real-time whilst they were traveling on it, and indeed, even now. It’s always nice to see the fruits of labor, regardless of the outcome.

You play as Blank, a young up-and-coming “Creature Keeper” from Thera, based in the hills of Sodland. After a grueling training period, Blank immediately has their feet put to the fire, as a growing corruption is enveloping Thera, as well as ruining the livelihoods and prospects of several nearby towns. Together with the creatures uncorrupted by this mysterious influence, Blank has to learn quickly.

There’s a lot that Creature Keeper keeps under the bonnet, namely, what exactly is being showcased. Is it a Pokémon-esque creature collector? Is it an action-RPG in the Diablo vein? Is it a brawler evoking Dynasty Warriors, of all things? The answer is all 3, and more, including a gardening mini-game. Inside and out, you can tell this is someone’s baby, “nurture over nature” as it gleefully sprawls out on screen like a Jackson Pollock painting.

This works both for Creature Keeper’s benefit and against it. When the game is showing you how it works in its initial throes, it’s all very contained. You’re given a creature to control, and in their own time, the AI can attack whatever’s attacking Blank. If you want to expedite the process, however, you can select the monster as the game slows down, and choose whether it’s a normal attack, a special attack that you can switch out for each separate creature, or whether they ignore that monster entirely.

In this contained environment, it works well. It helps that Blank is also an element in each fight, with weapons readily available and found throughout chests in Thera. Cracks start to show almost immediately however, as after the tutorial, each fight is an insane explosion of mushy pixels that cannot and will not determine separate factors in each fight you decide to take on.

You see, it’s not just Blank and their monsters on display, but the monsters that have been corrupted, and the monsters you can befriend that haven’t been corrupted. Then there’s the icons attached to the corrupted monsters, your owned creatures' health bars, and the damage numbers in tiny groups of pixels, and the projectiles certain monsters will fire profusely to the point of sub-5 FPS slowdown… and the hats. It’s mesmerizing, albeit completely unintelligible chaos, and that’s before you’re allowed more than one creature to follow you on your adventure.

There’s no real way to mitigate this. All but a small handful of creatures will have collisions on their sprites, but that’s when they showcase size on top of their massive attacks, so what you have is a melting pot of nothing. You can strategize and line up attacks for your creatures to make, but it’s tough to determine in the heat of the moment where it starts and ends, even with appropriate set-ups.

It’s the set-ups themselves that seem to have the primary focus in Creature Keeper. Creatures level up, and they unlock perks, but there are some absolutely baffling design decisions made here. Why would I want my creature to get a 10% damage buff, but an increase of 15% in damage taken? Why do HP bonuses only offer paltry +10s when my creatures can reach health that pushes 1000? Why is movement speed a bonus to consider when the creatures are strictly tethered to the player character?

There are also other bonuses you can attach in the form of a garden where you can plant seeds, which you can place clay figures of your current party nearby certain seeds, so you attain bonuses in battles. It’s not as explicitly black-and-white as that, but you’d be hard pressed to find the strategy involved. Even when the game introduces its Rock/Paper/Scissors mechanics for monster weaknesses and strengths, the trick lies in staggering.

Hit a monster enough times, and they’ll become stunned briefly, and you can wail on them, which is Blank’s job. It appears that Fervir Games anticipated this, which is why Blank’s damage doesn’t scale to the same height as the monsters you can catch, so before long, your role in the battle becomes near-negligible. 

You’re still a stagger merchant, make no mistake, but as a player, you become tertiary to a creature system that only relies on numbers; numbers in power, numbers in size, neither of which demand the intricacies that Creature Keeper promises.

That isn’t a detriment, as it’s nice that the game gives enough leeway for the player to simply just play it without worrying about its largely context-less flow in battles. Indeed, it was more fun trying to see the world of Thera as Fervir have crafted it, which does lead to some interesting moments. The campaign isn’t exactly Moby Dick, but Creature Keeper pulls punches when necessary with some heartfelt decisions, ones that lean into the lore with vigor.

Mind you, this is when the game isn’t forcing through some unbelievably painful attempts at comedy. This may be a complaint that varies with how one perceives comedy, but each time Creature Keeper is attempting to make the player chortle, it is always with long-winded scenes, mixed in with unnecessary and downright annoying pixelated emojis plastering the screen. It barely adds anything to proceedings, just pure eye-rolling whenever it tries to hit you with a goofy Jerry Lewis prat-fall in 16-bit format.

Creature Keeper Review | Final Verdict

Did I have fun with Creature Keeper? It’s really hard to say. It’s a true “shut your brain off” button masher that doesn’t do enough with its tactical potential, and its story is sandbagged by some truly unfunny comedy beats. Beyond its mostly ineffectual perk system, what changes could be made would also poison the well of its extremely specific flavor, and as it stands, it HAS identity. As it stands, the journey Creature Keeper has made to be here could be worth the price of admission alone.

Creature Keeper was reviewed on PC using a copy provided by the publisher over the course of 12 hours of gameplay - all screenshots were taken during the process of review.