We reviewed the Quest Keeper last week, and said it was a thoroughly enjoyable, polished and aggravatingly challenging game. Well, it is aggravating for a reflex-challenged gamer like myself, but when I saw my younger brother play it, I must admit it looked a lot less challenging. His young flexible fingers kept swiping swoosh-swoosh, leading the little cube guy through the perils, and by the time the weekend ended, he beat all my high scores and spent all the coins I have been collecting to buy the Crossy Cleats of the Beatnik Porpoise. Doh.. Despite his being faster, he kept buying literally pointless stuff that bore nothing but cosmetic changes, and ultimately kept losing in the quests. Below are a few useful tricks for the non-initiated but aspiring players of the Quest Keepers. Hopefully, they will do you good and help you beat the game with less or no frustration.
Change the Camera Angle
When you first start playing it, the Quest Keeper may appear as an impossible challenge, and not only due to the super-challenging controls, but also due to the camera view that keeps too many obstacles out of your view, so when you see them it’s too late. A great deal of deaths is attributed to that default camera angle.
So, the first thing we suggest you should do when you launch the game is find the gray box in the right upper corner, right under the Pause button. Tapping it will change the camera angle. There are two camera angles in the Quest Keeper – the Crossy Road style, and the regular view from above. The default one is the Crossy Road-style, and it makes my teeth go numb because it is very hard to see where you are going, so I suggest you switch to it when you get the hang of the controls and feel confident enough for an extra challenge. The other camera view is more user-friendly and offers a more thorough view of the area.
Controls
In the main area where you can change and buy equipment and quests, you can also access the settings by stepping on the Gear block. Besides turning the music on and off, buying an ad-free version, and changing the graphics quality for the weaker devices, you can also change how the controls work. Swipe Sensitivity and Continuous Drag are the two options that can make the controls slightly less finicky.
Try switching the Swipe Sensitivity to low. If you notice how difficult it is to control the block-y guy that responds to the tiniest tap and ruins a good game, you might eventually discover that the longer it takes for the system to register your swipes, the more accurate you get.
Continuous Drag in its turn lets you control the protagonist by keeping your finger continuously on-screen, performing several maneuvers in a go. I am not saying this is the perfect option – it may work for some, but fail the others. Ultimately, you need to try which options work best for you.
Save the Coins
The first quest is endless and it is available by default. The other 9 quests are locked, and cost 150 coins each. Moreover, each quest has an entry-fee off 1 coin, and are finite in their distance. Hence. A reasonable strategy seems to be grinding the endless quest to collect as many coins as you can, so that later on you can spend them on quests and power-ups.
The endless quest is the only one that is jam-packed with coins, so it’s a perfect place to grind. Moreover, each death brings you closer to the Mystery Chest, which contains a deal of coins.
Power-Ups
There are three boxes in the main area of the Quest Keeper. Each contains different types of power-ups.
The first power-up you should buy is an affordable magic wand that lets you open the nearby treasure chests without walking face-to-face to them, which you are bound to do without that wand. It is a useful tool that will let you maneuver with more caution, just passing by the treasure chests and opening them automatically. A must-have boost for the endless quest.
The next indispensable power-up is the Holy Hightops of the Stylish Savior, which cost 500 coins and let you walk on water – also great basically for any quest because crossing a river implies you jumping on a piece of wood floating by and jumping off of it just in time. Hence, you will be dying by drowning many-many painful times.
Another pretty handy pair are the Nimble Boots of the Oracle’s Servant, which will set you off for 1000 coins, and let you jump over small holes, which are the frequent cause of death.
The one power-up that will change the entire mechanics of the gameplay is the already mentioned Crossy Cleats of the Beatnik Porpoise, which cost 2500 coins, the most expensive of them all, and let you move 1 block at a time. Clearly, some people don’t understand this before buying and complain the block guy moves “slowly.” That is the entire point of the Crossy Cleats – to let you move one block at a time and therefore, you will be tapping a lot more to move, but will be able to be more precise.
Next come the outfits – the cloaks and the costumes. If you pay attention, you will notice how each cloak may serve you in each particular quest. There is a quest with spiders, and there is cloak that protects you from their bites – namely, it lets the spider bites take only half a life. The same is true about the other quest / cloak correlation.
The only items that bear no particular meaning and don’t make it easier are the outfits – the bat, the pig, the robot and the devil, as much as the others are nothing but fancy dresses.
Revive Blocks, the Checkpoints
In every quest, there are special blocks that bear colored symbols on them – step on those, they are checkpoints. If you die, you will be able to start over from the checkpoint, provided you have the coins to pay for it. In many cases, it costs 5 coins to re-start from the last checkpoint. However, if you die several times and re-use the checkpoint, at some re-try the price will go up.
The catch with the checkpoints is there is no point using them in the endless quest. It’s endless, and its main advantage is in grinding for coins. At the same time, using checkpoints in the other quests makes perfect sense.
Grinding
Allow yourself to play a few sessions without buying anything, just walk, die, collect coins and get to those Mystery Chests. They usually take 400+ blocks forward to open. That way, you will be able to save for a really meaningful power-ups.
The Artifacts and the Quests
Each quest has an artifact somewhere near the end. One artifact is a half life extra, but it only works when combined with another artifact, so eventually you have one life extra. If you combine one extra life with a cloak that works against a particular trap in a particular quest, you can extend your life span without resorting to checkpoints quite significantly.
Rest
One unique feature of the Quest Keeper is despite it being the auto-runner is you can actually find a nook to rest for a while, for example while you wait for that wooden log to flow your way along the river. You can face a wall and stay there, or you can keep walking back and forth waiting till better things come your way.
If you experience lags
I hate to say it, but sometimes the loading ads may interrupt the gameplay not because they load in the middle of it, but because the game gets laggy before and after they load. If you experience the lags, there are two things you can try to solve them. One is to switch to Airplane mode, or turn off Wi-Fi, and the other is choose a low-res graphics in the settings.
Finally, you can always use a third-party app that terminates other tasks to boost some RAM and let the game play smoother.
That is it for now; let us know if you have discovered a trick of your own!
