Keepsake [PC]

It's no secret the ailing adventure game genre needs a serious shot in the arm. Unfortunately, Keepsake isn't the one to resurrect it. While it proves to be a decent point-and-click adventure with a good story and challenging puzzles, the game's unpolished presentation and slow pace will no doubt limit its critical and commercial success.

Keepsake may best be described as Myst meets Harry Potter. The game begins as a young woman, Lydia, arrives at the Dragonvale Academy, a school devoted to teaching magic to budding apprentices. But Lydia soon discovers that all of the students and faculty have disappeared, including her best friend, Celeste.

While exploring this deserted school, Lydia first meets Zak, a dragon transformed into a talking wolf by a few mischievous students. Together, they roam the campus, pick up items such as torn pages of a notebook or keys to access locked areas of the academy, and solve puzzles that unravel new clues to the mystery. To help add some personality and levity to the game, we also learn that Zak is terrified of heights (yes, a dragon with acrophobia, no less).

Similar to many adventure games, players must also engage in dialogue with various characters by selecting from a list of questions (or answers) in order to guide the conversation in a given way. Speaking of which, the game's interface is clean and easy to navigate through.

The environmental puzzles Lydia must solve borrow heavily from the Myst camp, right down to activating ancient machines, analyzing cryptic text and diagrams, and pulling levers to turn on a magical contraption.

For example, one such conundrum blocks the entryway to a room used to imprison punished students --or so your faithful companion Zak leads you to believe. You're presented with six little dragon figurines: three of which are green and three are white. The goal is to move all the white pieces (which can only move left) over to the white squares, while moving the green pieces (which can only move right) over to the green squares one move at a time. The trick is to prevent same-colored pieces from being beside one another; after 10 minutes of trial and error you should be able to solve this logic puzzle.