Glowkeeper

Whenever I see a puzzle platformer, I always have my doubts. When the adventure side takes too much space, many of these games end up being uninteresting puzzle-wise. You can see from my ratings that Glowkeeper, however, doesn’t disappoint.
I guess Glowkeeper could be called a metroidvania? It uses the same structure despite not having any power ups or combat. Instead, you explore a world with several branching paths that require a certain amount of scrolls. These scrolls are the not-so-optional resources of Glowkeeper, they are either hidden behind secret paths or “optional” puzzles that you’ll eventually have to complete if you want to unlock everything.

Glowkeeper’s controls are a bit peculiar. You don’t just move like in your classic platformer game, you also need to use the mouse. The main mechanic is your ability to destroy elements by drawing a line through them. These elements can either be fire, dirt blocks, yellow symbols… as long as there are at least 3 of them next to each other, you can destroy them.

Your adventure begins with fairly easy puzzles in which you simply need to find how to go to the next room, yet you’ll also quickly encounter scrolls that are seemingly impossible to get. Don’t worry, that’s normal.
Glowkeeper hides a number of mechanics and special interactions that you’ll learn as you progress through the game. I don’t like this word but I guess “metroidbrainia” fits this game pretty well.
The first puzzle of each area will teach you something you didn’t necessarily need to use before, but was hidden in plain sight. And then the entire area will be based around it.

I absolutely loved how inspired and ambitious the puzzle design is, I can’t really go into details without straight up spoiling the mechanics so you’ll have to trust me on this one, sorry! I really think it’s better to discover everything by yourself.
Just know that you’ll get everything: classic puzzles, hardcore puzzles, small platforming, hard timings, meta puzzles…
If you worry about the hard timings, well there is indeed one puzzle that I had a LOT of trouble with. I felt like what I did was the intended solution but it required a tremendous amount of dexterity and multiple tries, so maybe there are smarter things to do.

The overall difficulty of Glowkeeper is pretty high: this is not an easy game, you’ll probably struggle on a lot of puzzles. This game is very clever and precise but never punishing, there’s at least one checkpoint in every room and the puzzles are very quickly done if you know how to do them. Resetting the rooms is even used as a puzzle mechanic, Glowkeeper really makes use of everything.

I didn’t encounter any bugs, you can use a slow motion feature for the few “tricky” platforming parts, you can fast travel, you have a map that also shows where the scrolls are, and I can’t even complain about the undo button!
You can actually undo a reset, there’s really nothing negative to say about the game.

Glowkeeper is the kind of puzzle game I love so much, it tries its best to offer a challenging, original and surprising experience, and completely succeeds.

Highly recommended.

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Developer: oolimry, bucketfish
Publisher: oolimry, bucketfish
Platforms: Steam – Windows/macOS/Linux
Release Date: August 29, 2025