Creature Keeper is a monster-taming RPG that sends you on an adventure to free the land from an ancient corruption before it destroys all that is natural. Along the way, you tame, befriend, and battle local fauna while filling out your trusty beastiary with knowledge. Something like Pokémon meets The Legend of Zelda, Creature Keeper is built on a solid idea and has some great characters and creature designs. However, there are areas where the core mechanics of the game failed to wow me, especially when compared to similar games already on the market, and minor bugs prevented me from enjoying the full experience.
Creature Keeper begins as you start your first day as a titular Creature Keeper, one of the guardians of the nation of Sodland. Every civilian must spend at least a year of service and training under the Creature Keepers to help maintain peace. These guardians are known for their special connection and weaponization of the land’s fauna, but they are no mere squishy trainers. Every one of them is a warrior who fights alongside their pet companion.
That is the main way Creature Keeper wants to separate itself from other pet-taming action games. Rather than relying on your team of monsters to do all of the damage for you, you fight alongside them in every battle, wielding your own weapons as your pet fights essentially independently. In battles against other ‘trainers,’ it becomes something of an exciting 2v2 where you often fight down the human foe before turning to engage their monster.
That is, at least, the theory of how things should work in Creature Keeper. It’s a gameplay design somewhat reminiscent of Sword of the Necromancer, another game that has you fight alongside your pets. However, Creature Keeper is no Sword of the Necromancer, and in my opinion, it is drastically underwhelming in its creature combat.
See, in Creature Keeper, you have almost no control over your monsters. You can swap them out, heal them through petting, level them up, and tell them when to use a special attack. This means the game needs a pretty good system of AI for your creatures to feel impactful. Creature Keeper, to my disappointment, doesn’t honestly have this.
Many battles in the game feel less like me and my trusty companion versus corrupted enemies and more like me fighting for my life while my pet wanders around, sniffing daisies and chasing squirrels. Creature AI in the game can be so bad at times that your monsters often avoid the battle altogether. If they attack at all, they only do so once or twice for every six hits you take from the enemy. There is essentially nothing you can do to work around this either, as the only interactivity you really have with your creatures is sending them away or commanding a special attack, which many will not have for a long time. Boss battles against “trainers” and their monsters are especially bad, as often both monsters forget that a battle is going on and just hang out on the other side of the map.
While my creatures rarely felt impactful, I will say the overall collection mechanics are pretty fun. You do not have to defeat monsters to capture them, and you’re able to essentially approach any non-corrupted enemy and simply pet it to capture it. From then, you train them by defeating enemies, increasing their stats (not that they matter, since again, the creatures do not have any real tangible impact on the battles), and unlocking new perks for them in your beastiary. This was my favorite part of the process, as it is done in a way that looks like you are sketching more and more of the creature into your journal as you fill it out.
Another way in which Creature Keeper separates itself from some other monster-collecting games is by playing out as a traditional 2D RPG. You follow the events of the story as they play out, going from area to area to complete the main questline and help save the land from the evil plaguing it.
There are elements of the story I found a bit cliché and tropey, especially for the genre, but what stood out to me was the characters. You meet many characters throughout your adventure in Creature Keeper, and many of them are very unique and fun to talk to. Particular favorites of mine were the Archmage and the Scarecrow. While a lot of the interactions you have with these characters are fairly straightforward and there is not a whole lot of depth to explore or relationship mechanics to delve into, I still enjoyed the little interactions we had.
There are, unfortunately, a few bugs still present in Creature Keeper that kept me from fully enjoying my experience. The lighter of those that I could remember included the inability to set my character’s name at the start of a new run, meaning I always went by the name ‘Blank.’ A more intrusive bug was that I could never actually access my character’s quest log, seeing only the titles of quests and no actual details or information about them. Without a map, this made the early game especially confusing, but generally going “up” on the screen kept me from getting lost.
The Final Word
As far as monster collection games go, Creature Keeper is certainly an interesting one that does things differently than other titles in the genre. However, bugs and poor AI on the monsters themselves kept me from fully enjoying the experience and made my monsters feel more like pets than valuable combat companions.
Try Hard Guides was provided a PC code for Creature Keeper. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on ourGame Reviewspage! Creature Keeper is available onSteamand Nintendo Switch at a later date.
