Heaven's Vault

I picked this game up due the praise it gets for it's primary theme. The idea of revealing the past using artifacts and translating a lost and forgotten language combined with a current and active mystery thrown in sounds great, and it is, except when you have to play the game... The most polished and functional thing in the entire game is the timeline screen that has a timeline of the past 4000+ years that gets filled with events as you discover more of the past, it is a really fitting and cool concept, but even that screen has UX and technical problems, and that's as good as it gets. Here are some game design sins this game commits: - Slow walking speed combined with invisible walls and no strict paths. - A lot of story and exposition is done via text on the screen, that moves from side to side as the camera moves, while "gameplay" is happening. - You get two options during conversation, sometimes they are just "Option" and "Option?" with no context or tone, might as well flip a coin. - Randomly generated overworld events that can occur while traveling, but you can only find out if you open your map every 10 or 15 seconds to see if one is nearby or not (random). - In my case one of those spawned in a path now closed permanently, I reloaded a save, not it didn't spawn. - Story areas with content that get locked off permanently once you leave, no narrative reason, just to screw with you. - Your companions nags you to leave these areas even if you haven't gotten all the artifacts or w/e, the companion has no real reason to do this, no narrative or mechanical reason, just another player-hostile design choice. - Terrible pop-in, some items are visible all the time, others only within 2m of the camera, no rhyme or reason to this, the game still manages to run poorly with an average poly count of < room temp. - All dynamic characters are sprites with 1 animation frame per second or similar, they are pixelated and terrible in one frame, high-res the next.

Don't expect a fast paced action games. It took me 12 hours to finish this game - and it was like reading a good book. I'm busy playing it a second time now and can only recommend to get this game (or any other inkle game - 80 days or Sorcery anyone?)... Thank you, Inkle team! I'm a huge fan! There is plenty to say about the game - some good and some bad things, so let me tell you my impressions: The graphics. It's beautifully designed. They may not have a big budget but they used it well. The graphics are ok at best compared to AA games, but the art style is phenomenal. The comic art of the characters may be a bit strange at first and the polygon count of the surrounding may be a bit low - but it just fits and the details are made with love (I was happy to find my gecko on the ship). They don't have much voice acting, but when it is available it is well done. The writing... ...is great, simply great! You follow a captivating story while you meet interesting characters and beautiful places along the way. The world building was done in a fresh and really impressing way. Sometimes dialog quick events may lead to new aspects or branches of the story some may never see. The game mechanics. You explore a word and its history word by word. You have to fill a dictionary and play glyph sudoku from time to time. Thats more fun than it may sound and a central part of the mechanic. I enjoyed this, the slow revealing of the past is a good motivation to shuffle some more glyphs. The bad. Space travel, oh my! It's a good idea but it may get tedious. You can use your robot as autopilot but that only works 10% of the time. Still it's not as bad as some said. You have nice talks about recent events on your way and the visuals are quite nice most of the time. But it's too slow and boring sometimes. The search for ruins and grinding for artefacts is nice at best. The whole part could have been a bit shorter. The movement both on moons and rivers is too slow.

Oh dear where to begin... This is a game that has a promising start, filled with mystery and a rather neat language exploration mechanic... and thats about all it has going for it. To call this a sci-fi game would be incorrect, it is actually just a fantasy game. The narrative fails to provide any sort of payoff but instead goes for the whole "we are back at the beginning again loop". Which is a shame as you could have done so much with the given material. The language puzzles themselves while interesting often don't gel with the story and often times don't even make sense in the context of the game. The setting itself is needless overcomplicated, it becomes difficult to immerse yourself in the story when the laws of physics are completely absent and characters seem to forgot that they can teleport. The dialogue in this game is incredibly messy, often times just lazily labelled as "question" or "remark" rather than allow the player to know what exactly he/she wants to ask. It can also be quite tricky to figure out who is even talking half the time, and this in combination with the lack of voice acting can creates confusing moments when multiple characters are standing too close together or just off screen. The game also pointless tries to incorporate a shallow exploration mechanic which doesnt add anything to the game other than pad out its run time, the movement controls are sluggish in both the Nightingale and Aliya herself, which seems impossible in a point and click but for whatever reason the developers picked a terrible engine.

This game felt like a deep, refreshing draught for the mind. The linguistic puzzles are satisfying. The mystery of the Nebula's history is intriguing and the way in which it reveals itself under investigation reminds me of Return of the Obra Din. It rewards exploration without turning itself into a pixel hunt. The space river navigation sequences are simple but manage to come off as relaxing rather than boring (and if you do find them boring you can hand over control to your robot - if you still have him)! There are many little details in this game that can completely change how things go. You may find yourself discovering things you never expected, and entire segments of the game can be missed. The game autosaves often and you cannot take actions back, which feels consequential in the game's atmosphere rather than unfair. I liked this, except for a couple of moments where I felt the game had gone out of its way to trick me. A word of warning: Dialogue choices matter and cannot be taken back. If you habitually try to explore dialogue trees to the fullest, show everyone everything, and do other things that would be completely okay in other adveture games then you will quickly discover unexpectedly bad things happening. For all the game's wonderfully good points, it's also buggy and janky. I had entire segments of environment completely fail to load during one of the final sequences, leaving me bemusedly gazing out to the skybox as I tried to imagine what I might be seeing. In another case, the camera refused to reset from its position during a scripted sequence. I restarted from my save and ended up with a completely different outcome, which displeased me. The further into the game you go, the more these seem to occur, meaning that it'll get in your way just as you're most invested in what you see. Still recommended. You should buy and play this, but be prepared to roll your eyes and kick it a few times.

As a professional translator who loves fantasy and sci-fi stories, I was very excited to finally play this. There were so many things I loved. The visual style quickly grew on me and the music was pleasant. The language mechanic quickly drew me in and the story kept me interested. But then came the little frustrations: - Learning words and matching them in phrases is truly fun... until the game wants you to try several obviously wrong ideas, before telling you you don't know enough for this phrase. Then there's the switching back and forth between the translation screen and Aliya telling you it's a start of a sentence or Six telling you the word is correct, before you can even start. Then you have to go into the interface from time to time and click to confirm your translations. Just 'cause. Then towards the end the texts get longer and the list of suggested words longer still, but they remain a single line, so you have to scroll and scroll... - No saves. Ok, maybe that's how "it's meant to be experienced" and maybe I would've been fine with that, if it wasn't for the fact that: - Conversation prompts are a roll of the dice. I'm walking on a lush moon with my robot, talking about how green and fresh it is, when I get a prompt to remark and Aliya says "Robots are stupid". Seriously. And the way the prompts pop-up one after the other, or right as you activate some hotspot on the screen is just inexplicable. - Sailing the rivers is actually quite relaxing... until Six tells you to go right and the second you make the turn, he goes "There was a ruin on the left we could have explored". - Finding artifacts and bringing them to the curators on Iox - cool, but Huang can only accept three at a time, because staring at his student is more important than a pair of ancient telescopes and some carved golden statues. People say it has replay value, but I just can't bring myself to go through that again, in order to fill in some blanks in the story, wonderful as it may be.