Heaven's Vault (2019)

I got many hours of enjoyment on stream out of the story of the...intergalactic archeo-linguistic number. The visuals and soundtrack couple well to give an almost ASMR feel, and the story kept me interested throughout.

Learning languages from artifacts and ancient books and buildings was a unique way to engage and I found myself enthusiastic to find more.

Nice easy to play almost visual novel style.

If I was a game developer, this is the kind of game I would make.

1. Art history and archaeology? Check.
2. Robots? Check.
3. Linguistics? Check.
4. Detective and mystery elements? Check.

So I'm kind of predisposed to like this game. That said, it has been almost four years since I've played it so my memory of the actual story is pretty foggy. So I won't be discussing that in this review.

In Heaven's Vault, you play as an archaeologist who is trying to learn about an ancient culture by exploring old ruins and translating texts and inscriptions found there. It's somewhat reminiscent of Outer Wilds in this way (which I have played but never finished due to embarrassingly struggling with the controls in a specific section, giving up, then getting too much distance from the narrative to easily pick back up again but I digress). However, in this game, translation is actually the primary game mechanic.

You have to use context clues and the symbols of the glyphs to figure out what the words are, along with words you've previously translated. The game does give you a few options to pick from so you aren't completely in the dark. I really like how the words aren't clearly separated by spaces and you have to parse those out yourself, it's a nice realistic touch. Another thing I like about this system is that you won't know whether or not you've translated something correctly immediately. It will likely appear in other texts before Aliya (the protragonist) or your robot companion will be like, "Okay, I think this is right," or, "I'm not sure about this translation anymore," and you try a different solution.

However, I will admit that this game has it's issues. Namely, flying your ship around is tedious and takes too long. Additionally, if you make a wrong turn, you have to sail around for a bit to correct your error. Fortunately after you've sailed a route once you can skip it the next time.

I really enjoy the 2D character art and the robots overall design. Usually 2D characters in a 3D environment isn't my thing but I think it's done well here.

This review was a little all over the place, but I find it difficult to talk about games I really like for some reason. It's easier for me to articulate things I don't like than things I do like.

So the game is pretty and I like some of what it's doing.

The language system where you get to pick words and the game weaves them in is super clever. The stop-motion style animation is pretty. The choice on the responses is nice...

But the text is slow. And unskippable. And large in quantity. And that's the bulk of the game from my limited experience.

Also, the main character seems to have chip on her shoulder, or that might just have been my answers that I was giving.

Either way. I appreciate the game, but I'm not going to spend my time in this. Might make a decent watch through on YouTube though or something like thati.

~David.

I finally finished Heaven's Vault and my first thought is: this is not a game for me! I can see why it has so much praise and why people love it, and I respect that. The problem is my lack of patience rather than the game itself.

Heaven's Vault is a really unique experience. It's a blend between adventure game, visual novel and with puzzle elements. This game is really doing its own thing; everything from the story, the gameplay, the presentation. It's a little bit of an Indiana Jones type story; you're uncovering the secrets of lost civilisations. You spend a lot of time talking to various characters and the dialogue is done really well, each character has their own personality and you're given interesting choices. Although it's science-fiction, the whole game feels quite believable with its middle-eastern setting and architecture. The story itself was pretty interesting and I think that's the only thing that kept me there until the very end.

My complaints about the game are ones of impatience. The game is full of dialogue and you can't skip any of it. You can't skip cutscenes. Inbetween areas there are little cutscenes, walking from A-to-B, walking into a building, you can't skip any of it. Travelling between areas requires you to pilot this airship, and at first it's really pretty to fly around the clouds and mountains in this thing, but by the end you've spent hours doing it and most of the time you can't skip it and just fast-travel. The game is really slow-moving, especially at first, and it plods along at a very slow-and-steady pace. I think a lot of players will find this peaceful and relaxing and they'll immerse themselves in the dreamy atmosphere; for me, I was tapping my feet and white-knuckled clutching my controller and shrieking obscenities.

The puzzles, which all involved translating ancient texts/hieroglyphs, were a cool idea but it grew very repetitive after a time, and it was too easy imo. I would have liked to have seen other types of puzzles or other alien languages involving greater complexity or different structures/number systems (instead of this language being simply an english substitution cryptogram, which isn't really how languages work). I think games like Riven or Obduction have done this really well in the past.

Although I've just torn this game apart, I still quite liked it in many ways. I was frustrated a lot, but I liked the characters and I enjoyed being in that world. It was all just a bit too dreary and slow-paced for me, and way outstayed its welcome (took me over 20 hours to beat, felt more like it should have been an 8 hour experience). In many ways it did give off vibes of The Longest Journey, one of my favourite games. I think a lot of people will love this game, and I give it extra points for being so unique and for doing something different.

I think most has been said already, but I'll just add my own thoughts anyway. There's some spoilers, though I try to keep things vague enough.

This certainly isn't a perfect game, but it's a game that's so amazing in what it does, that it far outweighs the problems (and it really has some). It's more or less the game I always wanted to be playing when I was playing Tomb Raider or Uncharted. The game takes its time unfolding the narrative, and even after finishing the game for the first time, I had nowhere near a full grasp of what everything was, or what everything meant. Stories, after all, as Aliya puts it, don't have neat beginnings (or endings). But beyond painstakingly retracing my footsteps to see what I had missed in my first playthrough, my second playthrough played out wildly different. Having a better grasp of the language than the first time, and there being more elaborate sentences to translate was already enough to keep my attention, but the fact that I skipped over certain clues and found others greatly impacted the way the story played out. Both in the order in which I uncovered sites, as in the understanding Aliya got from the clues.

I also met different people (and didn't meet others). And my behaviour towards others was different from the first time too. I had started my playthrough the first time around, trying to be as kind as I could, but after most people treated me either coldly or plain hostile, I started to bark back. The second time around, I started with that banter attitude, but at some point changed my ways to be kinder again, as I was hurting others now. The difference in how conversations play out, and how organically it does so is pretty amazing. I am now on my third playthrough, and again I'm playing in a different way. Being kind helps, but telling the truth, as I've learned, certainly doesn't get you the best results. So whenever I can, I try to avoid the gaze of Iox, while maintaining my facade of kindness towards them.

The biggest problems it does have are with the traveling, both the part of sailing as the part of uncovering a site can play painfully slow. The sailing isn't really engaging and often feels like driving through a city with only one way streets. Six has messed up directions a couple times during my play time, so when I'm not paying constant attention to the map myself, I might be in for another big sailaround to get back to the current I want to see. He has a nack for calling out ruins the exact moment you passed the intersection too, so I gave up hunting them down at a certain point. While on the ground, he often asks me if I'm done with investigating, when there are still obvious parts that need to be searched, and while I'm fine with this, and I can see it as a character quirk that is deliberately written so, it's also inconsistent and at certain parts he won't ask it, when I've clearly turned the entire place inside out and there's nothing more to find. There is no way of asking him myself, so I will need to walk to the vicinity of the landing spot to trigger it.

And the game does have a tendency to waste your time like this. When discussing artefacts with Huang, he will always ask to archive the object, and walk off, letting me wait for him to get back, and honestly, I have yet to figure out what good this brings me. If I hang on to the artefacts I can trade them, or show them to others. If I let him bring them to the curators, I just lose them without gaining anything. Then he only ever has 'time' for me to discuss two or three artefacts. I can understand that this places emphasis on picking the right items with the most importance to uncovering new clues, but when I can hop over to Elboreth and back to get another opportunity, it just feels a bit arbitrary.

But all that never bothered me enough to make me stop enjoying the game. I just wanted to uncover more writing, and more lore, figure out just how this history had played out. Slowly understanding the components of the language and at a certain point understand the words better than the system of the game would let me. That was the real victory for me. It's a real gem of a game with a unique presentation, fun main gameplay hook, great way of telling a story, and a pace that few games dare to adopt, but that pays off real well.

You can read my review on GamerFocus: https://gamerfocus.co/juegos/heavens-vault-resena/

Can't read spanish? Just let me tell you that the devs CREATED A REAL LANGUAGE for us to discover and learn.

Finding and translating inscriptions found in ruins and relics across the nebula we'll learn about the secrets of past empires... or not. The narrative is fragmented and obscure and is our task to put it together. Fans of Dark Souls and Bloodborne lore will feel at home here.

It has a lot of technical issues, bugs, and the navigation sections can be a little boring (but relaxing). But it's easily forgiven. I never played something like this and I loved it.