The Last Keeper

THE LIGHT IS THE BORDER BETWEEN LIFE AND MADNESS.

Farpoint is an island off the northern coast that nobody visits without a reason. Keepers do not last here: one after another they lost their minds and disappeared. You are Thomas Marshall. You are next.

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The work is simple, and it does not forgive carelessness.

Polish the lens. Trim the wick. Pour the kerosene. Wind the mechanism. Fire the boiler when the fog rolls in, and sound the horn. By day it is almost cosy: tidy the house, patch the roof, unload supplies from the boat, set the nets, make coffee.

At night none of it is routine any more. The lamp must burn, because the light holds down what lives under the island. And because there are ships out there waiting for it.

If you don't light it, they don't arrive. The game remembers.

A lighthouse you actually have to run

Lens, wick, kerosene, clockwork, a steam horn with coal and pipes that burst under pressure. Nothing here is done with one button.

A radio, not a menu

A real receiver: turn the dial, find the frequency, wait for the window to open. Ships reach you through it, you pass them coordinates, and a ship either makes port or breaks on the rocks. Something else speaks to you through it too, as someone it is not.

Your voice is the weapon

The game hears you through your microphone. Incantations are spoken out loud: to frighten off, to hold still, to banish. Recognition runs on your own machine with no internet, and works in English. Text and button input are there if you have no microphone, or would rather not speak.

Weather that gets in your way

Fog, rain, snow, storm. Fog cuts visibility down to arm's length, and then the horn matters more than the light.

Lore you have to dig up

Journals of the keepers before you, notes from a Franciscan mission, finds in the old mine under the island. Nobody is going to tell you what happened here.

The ending counts what you did not do

The game weighs not only what you did, but what you left undone.

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Format: single-player, six in-game days, 3 to 4 hours. Russian voice acting and text, English interface. A free demo covering the opening days is on Steam now.

For creators: the microphone is the hook. Speaking a banishment out loud on stream, badly, is the clip.