The Closing Caretaker: A Unique Survival Crafting Adventure with a Robotic Twist

This is quite the intriguing concept: a survival game set in a submerged world that may be Earth, where you assume the role of a robot known as a Caretaker. Your mission is to cultivate humans in pods, instill them with memories, and launch them into space (where they might possibly survive). However, a shroud of enigma looms over everything. You appear to be, as the title of the game suggests, the final Caretaker, and you have been reactivated at a moment when it’s unclear what, if anything, still exists. The underwater facility you ‘awaken’ in is in decline, and while you set about restoring power and fixing it up, as well as sailing around the nearby ocean, a larger question arises: what is happening here?

This game comes from a group of former developers from RedLynx and their relatively new seven-person studio Channel37, founded in 2021, which includes Antti Ilvessuo—the original creator of the Trials bike game. You might remember Ilvessuo from Ubisoft’s E3 2018 conference, where he made a memorable entrance clad in a white jumpsuit and dramatically crashed onto the stage as part of a planned stunt. He is quite the character. It’s Ilvessuo who introduces me to The Last Caretaker in a video call, featuring former Rooster Teeth presenter Jack Pattillo demonstrating the game.

Excitingly, The Last Caretaker isn’t really like anything I’ve encountered before. It incorporates elements I recognize, and I’m sure you will as well, but they are integrated in a way that feels innovative. As you begin, let’s say, it resembles a conventional first-person puzzle game. You find yourself in the depths of a power-less facility, necessitating that you figure out how to gradually restore it to functionality. You’ll see unplugged wires, which is a recurring motif in the game—albeit these look less like typical wires from everyday life and more akin to hoses used by firefighters—though you can’t plug them in because they aren’t long enough. The first challenge, then, is to locate additional cabling and connect it so that you can.

Now that the doors have power, you can also open them and begin to explore the rest of the facility. As you do, you will encounter robots like yourself, damaged and scattered throughout the corridors, which seems foreboding. You might come across various interface points where you can recharge your health-like energy by connecting to them through your abdomen (it appears to function somewhat like that) and save your game. Currently, The Last Caretaker is a single-player experience. There are online goals, Ilvessuo mentions, but they are a concept for another time.

Eventually, after a bit of exploration, you arrive at a location you will return to frequently in the game: a hangar with a boat. Your boat, it seems, which you will use to navigate the open seas in search of resources and answers. You can find a computer terminal there that dispatches quests and lore to you, and downstairs is a warehouse with machines that can manufacture tools for you.

Everything here also requires plugging in and powering up—I told you it was a recurring theme—yet it shouldn’t be long before you are ready to open the hangar and see what is available, and this is where the open-world aspect of the experience begins. Surrounding you is what appears to be endless ocean, and you can seemingly set off in any direction to explore it. The boat is intentionally slow, allowing you time to contemplate the fate of the world, or engage with your audience if you are a streamer (they are a significant consideration here, Ilvessuo notes), but you can also upgrade the boat and increase its speed as desired.

Life on the open seas is not exactly secure, though. There are threats lurking, such as mecha-sharks and explosive buoys or mines, so every journey will come with risks. However, you can defend yourself with an arsenal of weaponry that includes a diverse range of guns that fire bolts, electricity, or flames. These are modular items that can be modified during your voyage, using mechanics that make the game feel distinctly like a shooter. There is a moment where Pattillo makes the character focus on the gun and various modular pop-up menus appear. The presentation is generally streamlined in this way: there is minimal user interface, with nearly all information provided dynamically through the game.

There isn’t actually much combat in the demo I viewed, to be honest – the mini oil rig facility we reach is deserted and merely requires powering up. However, in the game’s debut trailer, you can clearly see combat scenarios. Flamethrowers erupt with fire, electro-guns release charges, and spherical robots equipped with gun-arms defend structures of some sort. It hints that this might indeed be a central element of the game. There is also a bulbous, plant-like growth creeping across the metal surfaces of facilities in the trailer, giving us a strong impression of ‘something