Steam NextFest First Impressions: Gatekeeper

Hello and welcome to the fourth installment of my six-part Steam NextFest series!

So far we've explored Creature Keeper, Dread Dawn, and Orc Warchief... three games that have not being fantastic enough to be immediately wish-listed.

Today we're having a look at Gatekeeper! A rogue-like that looked pretty spiffy when I was browsing the list of available games. It's both single-player and co-op so that's nice. I'm always looking for a fun co-op game to play with my partner.

Here's hoping this could be a game that we add to our co-op list!

There's not that much information about it in its description on the Steam Store, but if you want to have a looksie for yourself you can find it HERE.

Upon starting a game, we can create a private or public lobby. This is very much a multiplayer game but it appears to be very solo-friendly too, thankfully, as I am playing these demos in a single-player capacity. xD

There are two characters to choose from, both with their own abilities, and I choose Character #2 - Nidum.

The controls are immediately intuitive. I'm not sure if this has controller support or not and I don't really care — keyboard and mouse is flawless and I get into it straight away.

My initial feeling is that this is similar to Soulstone Survivors — even the music is somewhat similar, to the extent I went to the dev page to see if it were made by the same developers. It's not. The abilities aren't automatic like in those Survivor games, however, they need to be activated by you. Which is completely fine! I like pressing buttons.

In each "stage" there is an objective to achieve and several perks around the area that you need to find, and, of course, the enemies you must fight.

You get experience and can level up one thing per level-up prompt. Health, movement speed, ability cooldown, ability charges, etc. Sometimes you can level up one of your specific abilities.

It's all random — it's a roguelike.

The abilities feel appropriately powerful enough and you need to time your cooldown-skills so you're able to use your big hitters when necessary.

At one point, once I completed a stage, a huge boss manifested from the ground and my next objective was to defeat the foul beast.

I managed to get it to half before it ripped me to shreds.

And thus I died, the above screenshot my finishing screen that shows what I achieved before my inevitable demise.

It's a pretty cool little game! I finally found a NextFest game during this round of demos that I actually like. This one is going on the wishlist. 😊

Now I need to show my partner and see if he likes it too. This could be quite a good little co-op game! Or even proper multiplayer if others of our friend's group end up interested, since it is up to 4-person co-op.

 

See you next time for another Steam NextFest first impressions! 😊

 

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_{All screenshots in this post are courtesy of me, @kaelci and are from the game demo: Gatekeeper.}