Ocean Keeper: Dome Survival Roguelike

Genre: Top-Down 2-Stick Shooter / Roguelike

Players: 1

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Review:

Okay, I need to take a moment to talk about word salad game titles, videogames with long titles seemingly created expressly for the purpose of throwing in every search engine term imaginable in hopes that more people will see it. As much as I try not to let myself get caught up in preconceptions about a game before I play it, it’s hard to see a game with a title like this and not think “this is almost certainly going to be garbage”. Because the overwhelming majority of the time, games with word salad titles are garbage, or at the very least completely disposable – they’ve got very little going on in the gameplay, very little originality, and they’re trying to make up for that by tricking search engines into bringing up their game as often as possible to the sort of people who the publisher deems most likely to spend money to buy the game.

But not this time.

Believe it or not, Ocean Keeper: Dome Survival Roguelike actually has some interesting ideas pinging around under its ugly hood, and amusingly you can even see some feeble attempts by the developer or publisher to distance the game from its embarrassing title, alternately going by just Ocean Keeper or Codename: Ocean Keeper. For the purposes of this review, I’ll just be calling it Ocean Keeper.

Originally released on PC in 2024 and then ported to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch in 2025, Ocean Keeper tosses players right into the game without any sort of pretext or explanation for what’s going on. The short version is, you’re an explorer who finds themselves stuck on an ocean-covered alien world filled with hostile creatures, and you must alternate between gathering resources and fighting off waves of these creatures, building up your diver and their vehicle to more efficiently gather resources and more effectively fight off enemies.

The “fight enemies” phase of things is pretty straightforward, being a Top-Down 2-Stick Shooter controlling a walking tank of an underwater vehicle with a rotating turret and eventually additional weapons. Once the current wave of enemies has been fought off, you’ll want to locate one of the underwater caves, where you’ll change to a side-scrolling view as you swim down and use a drill (and later other tools) to mine through rock to find the minerals you need to build up your abilities, as well as the remnants of a civilization containing other useful objects to salvage. This side-scrolling gameplay reminded me a bit of the Steamworld Dig series, though here you’re swimming rather than jumping, and what keeps bringing you back to the surface is a ticking timer telling you when the next wave of enemies is about to arrive and needs to be fended off.

Upon dying, you’ll be able to spend some of what you found in the prior run on permanent upgrades to stats for both your vehicle and diver, as well as tools and weapons. I should note that these menus are clunky to navigate – it’s nothing that outright ruins the experience, but it is frustrating. Anyway, once you finish this, then you’re off for another randomly-generated run.

The funny thing about Ocean Keeper is that each individual part of this experience feels lacking in some way, yet it all still manages to come together as a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Even once you upgrade your vehicle’s speed, it’s still extremely sluggish, and the same goes for your diver in the side-scrolling caves. You rarely feel like you have enough time to do what you want between waves, and the way enemies spawn during waves makes it difficult to take up any sort of defensible position. And while there are some decent upgrade options between run, there don’t really seem to be any especially fun Roguelike upgrades during the runs themselves.

Yet despite all of that, this is still a pretty enjoyable game, rushing to gather resources with what little time you have, deciding which upgrades to buy and which to hold off on, seeing new enemy types as waves progress, and even fighting some interesting bosses. There’s a lot to like here.

That includes the presentation, which makes use of some pretty decent 3D with some decent animation, along with some 2D elements in the side-scrolling segments, although there’s noticeable slowdown when the number of enemies starts to ramp up, and the music and sound are both pretty forgettable, with a fairly generic action soundtrack.

Overall, I think that Ocean Keeper overcomes its flaws, and its terrible full title, to give players a pretty unique 2-Stick Shooter Roguelike where players need to alternate between two gameplay styles while keeping an eye on the next impending wave of enemies. There’s a ton of room for improvement here, but even with this being the case I still think that this game is worth playing.

tl;dr – Ocean Keeper offers a unique blend of Top-Down 2-Stick Shooter gameplay, side-scrolling mining sequences, and Roguelike structure, and while each of these elements is flawed in some way, they come together to form something that’s fairly original and oddly compelling. There’s a lot of room for improvement here, but overall this is still well worth playing.

Grade: B-

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2025 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Best Roguelike, Most Efficient Use of File Storage Space, The “Wow, this game was way better than I expected!” Award

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