Heaven's Vault

I've never played a game like this. It's an amazing combination of history and the future, with all the awe of the distant past combined with the best of the philosophical questions that science fiction excels at. I found myself immersed in this archaeologist's life - sort of interested in the present, but driven by understanding the many mysteries of the past. Learning about this world was fascinating. Grappling with real challenges of history in a world that may not value an objective account of the past (as I'm sure many archaeologists can relate to) helped to ground this story. I often felt that the choices I made had genuine consequences. At times, I felt real danger. I didn't take for granted that the game would protect me from failing. This (combined with the single save file) made everything feel more real. I love languages, so I was thrilled to find a game that incorporated this. It does a good job balancing puzzle difficulty so that it's hard enough to feel like you're genuinely working through something, but you also don't need a linguistics background to do this. It's amazing to me that they managed to make a compelling game built around this core task. It pains me to not give such a creative and enjoyable game a perfect score, but the fact that pieces of the environment would sometimes fail to render until I was very close made early play a bit jarring, and entire walls failing to appear in key moments undercut what might otherwise have been a much more dramatic experience. I played this on a brand-new gaming desktop with a GTX 1660 Super GPU, leading me to believe that any graphical issues must be due to the game rather than hardware. The game's narrative quality was able to carry most of this weight, though. I'd give it a 4.5/5 if I could. Thanks for making a great game! tl;dr: If you like puzzles, language, history, and/or interactive fiction, I heartily recommend this. It's easily worth the 25 USD that I got it for. On sale, it would be a steal.

I rather enjoy this game, it has a meditative quality to it. The ongoing puzzle is to decrypt an ancient language, by building a dictionary along the way. The movement controls could be better, I nudged the heroine and she kept walking to a different area, but the worldbuilding has me hooked.

Beautiful, peaceful, calming, original ... A slow paced game where you explore and discover interesting new worlds accompanied by a robot. A companion, a guide, a guard, or ...... it is up to you to discover as the story unravels .... Deciphering glyphs could be confusing sometimes but overall I enjoyed it. I loved the story, the graphics, the pace, the characters .... the only objection is a very tedious and monotone space travel. I liked it a lot at the beginning, but then it started to become longer, and longer, and longer ............ to the point of a sheer frustration and almost giving up on the game. Still, I highly recommend this game.

Adventure games traditionally present the player with a series of puzzles which must be completed to open up new areas and advance the story. 'Walking simulators' removed most of the puzzles and allowed the stories to stand alone. Heaven's Vault is different to both. There are puzzles to solve, mostly relating to a lost language which can be found all over the landscapes you visit and items you pick up. But the game won't stop if you can't translate something. Nor will it demand you visit the 'next' place the story suggests. Your character, Aliya, is an archeologist and she will uncover items and leads to all sorts of sites around the fictional Nebula which will build your understanding of its history. Whether you rush from place to place or take your time, the story will continue to be told and new dialogues will occur between Aliya and her robot companion, Six based on whatever you've discovered up to that point. The game is almost gleeful in its insistence that not everything can be experienced in one playthrough and you'll need to come back for more in NG+. The downside of building for multiple replays is that the first one shows up all the game's frustrations. Navigating the Nebula's rivers can be a slow process as you can only autopilot on routes you've mapped. And the first few hours of translation can feel unrewarding until you begin build a better vocabulary. Both these issues resolve themselves in NG+ which begins with your dictionary and map of the rivers intact. And you'll want to get going on that NG+ soon after you finish. It's where all the promise of understanding a new history and a new language really shines. It's a bold move to create a game which necessitates multiple playthroughs to truly excel but it's something inkle has been working towards for years through Sorcery! and 80 Days. Heaven's Vault is easily the most beautiful and satisfying world they have created so far. I'm already looking forward to my next loop around the Nebula.

(played through a different client) This game was a big, big surprise. It's what I play when I just want the rest of the world to curl up and die in a corner somewhere, slowly and painfully. Which is a blood-drenched accolade for a very peaceful game. You play as an archaeologist - though a weird one, as the people around you don't believe in history, for religious reasons. You get to visit beautiful places. You get to fly around, and it's stunning and calming and awesome. You could skip it, but why would you? You also play as a ridiculously bad scholar. Sure, you see an antique bit of...whatever, and you can tell right away how old it is, and where in the universe it comes from. The text on it? No clue. In a way, deciphering those texts IS the game, and it's great fun. This is a game that somehow managed to fill all empty areas around my screen with densely-written post-it notes. The fact that an apparently educated protagonist never seems to realize the words for "Heaven" and "Heaven's" are related is baffling though. On the other hand... the moment you realize that they are, and why and how they're related, is glorious. Play this if you love languages, or if you love discovering stuff for discovery's sake, or whenever the world around you gets altogether too real.