Heaven's Vault

Fabulous little puzzle game about being an academic nobody quite likes pursuing your research into the history of your strange space area that you can sail around in an adorable spaceship. The linguistics are a lot of fun (though I wish you could turn off the suggested words, since that sometimes makes it too easy). I appreciate that the story can be SO different depending on what choices you make - I ended up with a completely different story than a friend. (and what a great secret hidden in the game's title!)

Heaven's Vault is a game unlike any I have ever played before--to both its benefit and its detriment. At its heart, it is a mystery game where the player unravels the mystery by slowly deciphering language-based puzzles. You play as an archeologist in a society that believes history is circular and that everything that happened in the past is guaranteed to occur again in the future. Thus, as you explore the various moons of the nebula, you are both uncovering the past and theoretically predicting the future. It was a very interesting premise from the beginning and Inkle realizes some parts of their vision beautifully. The language they created is surprisingly deep and learning it is a very satisfying experience. At the beginning, I was taking ample notes trying to decipher trends in the symbols. By the end of my first playthrough, I was easily recognizing parts of speech and word connections that made it feel almost like reading a real language. The history of the world also feels deep and real. Like there is a lot more to discover that is outside the scope of the game but present none-the-less. However, when it comes to actual gameplay mechanics, the game falls tragically short…

The game is interesting, I'll give it that. The worldbuilding is thorough, and the language is enticing. However, the pacing of the game is slower than a snail, combining walking simulators with no sprint ability, dialogue at a set pace (during which you cannot realize any actions), and the visuals, while interesting, aren't enough to make up for the slow pace.

Very enjoyable story, choices, and mechanics. My main complaints are that longer decodings are quite tedious and that movement and talking is quite slow which made the ruinvault mod was very fun to use on my second playthrough.

This game brings up conflicting feelings. On the one hand I love tha language puzzles, the world, the mistery. On the other hand there are some general and some specific problems that I have: For one, this game does not respect your time. I don't know if this is due to it being more of a console game or something, but you can really feel that movement, the pauses and certain choices are just painfully slow. Another thing (a personal irk) is that everyone is so hostile when communicating. I think only Huang is the only one mc has neutral/slightly positive interactions with. So overall the positives outweighed the negatives for me in the end, but there were several moments I seriously thought about dropping the game due to the negatives.

Ultimately gives the impression of a point-and-click game with fantastic writers, laden with too many ideas, excelling with the text-based content of the game, but inconsistent with translating other concepts across into gameplay mechanics. Focused on translation puzzles in the vein of 'Chants of Sennaar', though considerably more narratively-driven and very much deserving that 'Choices Matter' tag on the Steam store page for how many permutations of a playthrough there can be, and how much of it is optional or missable. Puzzles and worldbuilding are consistently well-done, the gradual uncovering of its setting's history always satisfying, and what's worth sticking with the game for to see through despite its clunkiness being a constant presence in many instances; minor optimization issues, an awkward travel mini-game (albeit with beautiful setdressing), slow animations, dialogue choices and on-going conversations slowing your pace in exploring an area by obstructing interactables besides. One of the better translation-centric games you can find, and encouraging replayability with a New Game Plus mode, but served in the end mostly to interest me in the setting and series of novel…