Gatekeeper

I have a soft spot for the small games that nobody covers, and Gatekeeper from Gravity Lagoon is exactly that kind of overlooked thing. It arrived in August 2025 carrying a solid Steam rating and almost zero discourse, which is a shame, because the mechanical core here is genuinely thoughtful once you understand what it is asking of you. At its heart the game is an isometric top-down shooter built around planetary progression. You pick one of nine Gatekeepers, each with a distinct skill kit - a standard attack, a dash, and three core abilities - and push through five alien worlds, each guarded by formidable Siren bosses. Those bosses are not padding; they have real attack patterns and will punish you hard for walking in with a half-assembled build. The mission structure rotating through four different objective types per planet (escort, resistance, activation and more) does solid work preventing any single run from feeling identical to the last. The piece that makes Gatekeeper tick is the artifact system. Over a hundred unique artifacts drop across runs, tweaking projectile behavior, stacking cooldown multipliers, introducing area-denial fields. The real engine is the Triad mechanic: slot three artifacts of the same type and trigger a power bonus that can flip a struggling run into something extraordinary. Watching a mediocre build snap into coherence with a single drop is the kind of moment that keeps the loop alive across repeated sessions. A full run through all five planets runs roughly three to five hours, and expect fifteen to thirty hours before you have seen most of what the game offers. That is a respectable lifespan for the price point. The audio is worth a mention in its own right. The soundtrack is upbeat and electronic, the kind of thing that quietly raises your heart rate without demanding your attention, and the weapon and ability sound effects land with satisfying weight during the busiest firefights. Visually, each planet carries its own palette and enemy design, which does real work preventing the visual fatigue that can set in on long roguelite sessions. Character designs are expressive enough that you will actually feel something about your chosen Gatekeeper. The criticisms are real and worth naming. The meta-progression - unlocking characters and expanding the Emporium's artifact pool - can feel slow, closer to a gate on forward movement than a genuine reward for mastery. Solo players will find a functional and enjoyable game, but the four-player co-op is clearly where Gravity Lagoon aimed the experience. Builds complement each other across a squad in ways that solo runs simply cannot replicate. Accessibility options are also thin; there is key remapping and audio adjustment, but players who want difficulty scaling or visual assists will not find them here. And some characters carry a steeper learning curve than the game communicates upfront, which can make early runs feel punishing before the design philosophy clicks. Gravity Lagoon has been active with updates since launch, and the community around the game, while small, is genuinely invested. This is a studio that studied the genre carefully and built something worth your time, even if the discovery algorithm has not agreed.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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