Glowkeeper

Glowkeeper is a puzzle-platformer metroidbrainia where you connect elements to heal a luminescent, ethereal world. The game uses mechanics inspired by the match-3 genre to craft tight, creative brainteasers. Along your journey through the interconnected world, you’ll discover clever ways to utilize your abilities that were available to you all along, as the game joyfully explores all the consequences of its mechanics.

Your main goals in Glowkeeper are to explore the world and attain collectible scrolls that open locked gates. You control a simple platformer character who can run and jump around. However, obstacles and hazards like dirt and ice tend to block your way. Luckily, you have an extra ability: your cursor controls a firefly that can connect adjacent elements of the same type. Whenever three or more elements are connected they vanish, while everything sitting atop them falls into new positions.

You can use this improved match-3 ability in countless ways, such as clearing obstructions, lowering an unreachable ledge, creating a bridge across dangerous terrain, and much more. When this is combined with the different behaviors of the elements, a host of unique, engaging puzzles emerges.

Glowkeeper takes place in a single continuous world, where there are almost always multiple different puzzles to tackle at once. The game’s simple fast travel system minimizes pointless backtracking, and its built-in hint system can help guide you to the solution for a particularly tricky puzzle. The game even has a way to slow down time to make platforming easier, as platforming isn’t intended to be the source of the game’s challenge.

Glowkeeper calls up a vague sense of restoring a forgotten land, but it does not include an explicit narrative. The art is soft and lush but not distracting, and the music is gentle and coaxing, meant to fall into the background while you concentrate on the puzzles. The various quality-of-life features make reaching the end a fairly chill experience. Reaching 100% completion is more challenging though, as the game explores almost every single nuance of its mechanics in at least one puzzle.

This description was written by Asher Stone.