Keepsake

Suspiria, anyone?

Not the (rather incomprehensible) recent remake, but Dario Argento's original 1970 masterpiece about a ballet student arriving at a dance academy which is actually a witch coven. Keepsake is a lovely vintage adeventure game that seems to be using an engine similar to the one another, older classic game, Sanitarium, was made with. Throughout the evolution of the plot, there are many winks at Argento's visionary thriller, although the general atmosphere and spirit are quite different.

Lydia, a young prospective student of magic, arrives at Dragonvale Academy expecting to be met by her childhood friend Celeste, only to find the premises locked up and apparently deserted. With the help of Zak, a talking wolf who claims to be a transformed dragon, as well as Mustavio, a wandering merchant who regularly provides the students with fancy toy figurines, Lydia must solve one deeply challenging mystery after another, until the school's darkest, best hidden secret is revealed...

A lot of love and dedication have obviously gone into the making of this game, whose gorgeous graphics, emotional coming-of-age story, rich imagination and originality, interesting puzzles and mini games of varied difficulty, fantastic soundtrack and beautiful, if bittersweet ending touchingly referencing The Little Prince, make for an unexpectedly pleasant discovery.

There is unfortunately a recurring bug of the game suddenly locking up or crashing at specific locations, but it can (inexplicably) be fixed by changing the in-game language. I began with the English version but had to switch to French for this reason, and subsequently kept the French language because I liked the voices better.