In Keepsake County, an immersive sim from the creators of Midnight Ultra, you loot the fictionalized state of “Frikota,” where you’ll snag easy pickings from nowheresville McMansions and cookie-cutter bungalows wedged throughout the Ozarks. With your father in jail, your mom in the hospital and your family home foreclosed, you’re hoping to raise quick cash to pay off the avalanche of debts. You don’t have any savings, nor real-world job skills. You do have pliers, a screwdriver, dog treats and a plastic shopping bag, the thin yellow face on its surface sloshing around as trash intermingles with treasure. Petty thievery runs in the family. What other choice do you have?
“I feel like everyone in and out of a video game would benefit from [having] an equitable plastic shopping bag,” says Bobby Matsudaira, lead animator at Keepsake County development studio Forward Instinct. “It’s like having a companion NPC carry all of the weapons you swear you’ll use later in the playthrough. Except it’s a bag with a smiley face and instead of weapons, it’s leftover pizza boxes and ceramic chickens.”
Just because this immersive sim doesn’t have you changing the political tides of a whaling city or plundering forbidden crystals from clockwork deathtraps, that doesn’t mean the residents won’t protect their baubles with their lives. Sleepy as their abodes may be, you’ll still need to navigate potential hazards in these everyday homes, leapin’, sneakin’, and drivin’ through the dusk-drenched hours, the stretch of day where homely domiciles become Fort Knox to the right kind of wrongdoer. You can stuff your bag with family heirlooms and crumpled-up papers, but larger pawnables, like floor-vaulted paintings and home electronics, might need to be carried to the trunk of your car by hand.
You can cut phone lines, bribe guard dogs, and hide in the swimming pool, but so much as landing too hard on the wrong kitchen tile can generate troublemaking noise. It also goes without saying that some residents come well armed, the types who would much rather stand their ground than call the authorities. And even with its cartoony presentation, some of the ways Keepsake County lets you dispose of them in may tie your gut in knots.
Lead developer Daniel Pomidor describes the game as a mix of the seminal ‘90s PC game Thief: The Dark Project and Alex Cox’s ‘80s L.A. alien scumbag odyssey, Repo Man. Outside of stealing some bubble gum and one Beanie Baby from church, no one on the team claims to have been much of a real-world juvenile delinquent. They had more appreciation for broader tomfoolery. Matsudaira said the trouble he got in revolved more around pranks, like filling parked cars with packing peanuts and wearing wigs to impersonate other kids at school.
The past few years have been tumultuous for the games industry writ large and for immersive sims in particular. During an encounter at DreamHack in Atlanta, the team had a chance to show Thief creator Warren Spector an early build of Keepsake County. Pomidor tells me Spector even jokingly offered him a job; an offer that, as of this writing, Spector is no longer capable of making. This underlying distress only contributed to Forward Instinct’s desire to make a game as nihilistic as this.
“The past few years have been tumultuous, especially for me and members of the team, friends and family,” says Pomidor. “We’re all living pretty tight right now, and I think that’s a lot of people I know. Driving delivery, working gig jobs, working freelance, selling everything I own and moving across the country, being unemployed at various points, just the experience of grinding it out and being worse-than-broke. So Keepsake County satirizes some of what it’s like right now.”
Initially, following its 2017 game Midnight Ultra, Forward Instinct was reaching for something more fantastical with its follow-up, but that idea kept running out of gas. Instead, the team kept finding themselves attracted to the fusion of an ambitious genre with a familial, unambitious environment. Instead of infiltrating castle keeps, they opted to make a game in which you pull off coordinated heists amongst the crickets and copper strippers of flyover communities. A kingdom of losers, each with the drive to survive. To have stuff and keep it. “Sinking my teeth hard into where I grew up,” says Pomidor, “and all the weird, goofy things and places people brush over every day. That was the idea.”
Keepsake County comes out on Steam on November 12th.
