Aliya Elasra is an archaeologist, exploring a strange region of space called the Nebula with her robot sidekick Six, hoping to uncover the secrets of the long-forgotten past. When a roboticist from the University of Iox goes missing, Aliya begins a trail of discoveries that will lead to the very edg...
Aliya Elasra is an archaeologist, exploring a strange region of space called the Nebula with her robot sidekick Six, hoping to uncover the secrets of the long-forgotten past. When a roboticist from the University of Iox goes missing, Aliya begins a trail of discoveries that will lead to the very edge of her world - and the ancient secret of Heaven's Vault.
"One of the most well-realized video game worlds ever, with your curiosity and personality molding your story through the Nebula" - USGamer
"Heaven’s Vault is both ambitious and beautiful. It conjures a world rich with life... I don’t hesitate to recommend Heaven’s Vault." - Game Informer
"Heaven's Vault is one of the most enthralling narrative-driven adventure games I've played" - Wired
Sail an open-world of fast flowing space-rivers, discover lost ruins, explore ancient sites, find artefacts and translate their strange hieroglyphics. Piece together the history of the world and an entire ancient language.
From the creators of massively-branching interactive adventure 80 Days, Heaven's Vault is not your usual linear adventure game. Progress through the game in any order you choose - the game's fully adaptive narrative remembers every choice you make, every discovery and every action you take, influencing what happens next. Meet a diverse cast of characters who remember everything you say, and who's attitude to you will change with how you act. Some are friendly, some are cautious, and some are out to trick you.
Who will you trust? What will you find? What will you learn? What will you risk? What will you lose?
Really enjoyed this game and exploring. The collection of artifacts and the need to translate inscriptions was fun. I love archaelogy and this was a good semblance of finding artifacts and using information to identify new areas to explore as well as improve translation. Fun game. Game play is tempered. No rushing, no missteps. Just exploration and finding the next area to explore until you reach the final destination. Fun!!
It started so promising: Mystery, Nice music, not about violence or selfishness, peaceful, very pleasent.
But please, please, developers: I need just two very simple very little things:
1) A SKIP button for this useless and mega boring travelling. This is absolutely not enjoyable.
2) An option to NOT progress text automatically. Just a little "continue" button, so I can simply,
simply control that I can read everything before it disappears. The text-speed setting is useless for this.
I would absolutely not recommend to buy the game in that state. Just because of that.
Even if the game itself might be super interesting: Figurig out the story, nice.
BUT: If I can get an update, with the two little things mentioned above, I am curious to play it again. I will then delete this bad review.
Such a pitty. How could the developers not consider someone being bored by this slow slow moving around ? This is completely a deal-breakrer, and completely unneccessary.
Apart from that, the graphics are pretty, pretty silly, for a game released in 2019.
But I don't care about graphics, I care about an interesting experience.
And this game COULD have been one.
I nevertheless give a star for the Game Idea. The Game Idea is still great.
The core concept is brilliant. I wish something like The Outer Wilds actually made us piece the language together to figure out the story.
Unfortunately, it ends up not used well. Decyphering the language itself is just a clunky puzzle that didn't really feel very lingustic to me at all. Figuring out the story is tangential, nearly unrelated to figuring out the language. So, wasted opportunity.
More importantly, the game is a chore to play. Weird bugs (don't try to play it on an ultrawide), missing settings, easy to miss dialog that is at the same time way too slow at other times, movement is slow, space travel is slow, animations are slow… soon enough it stops feeling like a game and becomes a series of waiting for things to happen.
Once the history is revealed, it's… cool, but nothing to write home about? And even then it has some holes, presumably because development ran out of time and they left one or two locations out.
And finally you reach the ending, where you're presented with a terrible situation and an obvious good solution, but the good solution is not one of the choices the game offers! You can choose to commit genocide and wipe out everyone you ever knew, or keep the truth to yourself and let them slowly die out. What?
It could have been so much more, and it's probably worth playing if you want a chill time and you have a lot more patience than I do. I suspect for most people, it's not worth either the price or, more importantly, the play time. It's one of the very rare cases where I don't even feel it's worth the time to watch a video playthrough, because it's going to be a slog.
Someone complained in another review about the slow pace of the game. I agree completely, he/she is quite right about that.
BUT BUT BUT no problem mister/lady, that's easily countered. There's an easy fix for this problem (which worked for most of the other potentially tedious games I've played in the past years):
Step 1: Download and install "Cheat Engine" (downloadable freely) or similar program
Step 2: Open Heaven's Vault then open Cheat Engine
Step 3: Open the "process list" (click on the monitor-symbol on the upper left side, can't miss it, it's literally glowing!) select Heaven's Vault and click "Open".
Step 4: Click "Enable speedhack" (to the middle-right)
Step 5: Change the pace of the game the way you like it
For me 2x the speed was the sweet spot. For others 1.5 may be the best choice. You can also set the text speed in the game's menu at the lowest value. As consequence the movement is much faster while you're still being able to read at comfortable speed.
About the game itself: I found the worldbuilding in this game to be excellent. The grafics are quite different from the norm, which made it really enticing for me.
Basically it's a walking sim (or floating sim) intertwined with a really enjoyable language-game. The main appeal besides the language-game is discovering bit by bit the buried and forgotten past of the game's world. Much of the information is mediated via dialogue. The different characters are portrayed in convincing manner, the personalities seem vivid and the different motives and manners are plausible.
For me the main character (a passionate archeologist) was easy to identify with since there are multiple choices when to go where and how to interact with the different characters - possibly changing the course of the relationships.
So all in all - Great concept, great game. I loved it and haven't played something this enjoyable in quite a while!
One of the best stories I’ve encountered in a game so far. The atmosphere of drifting through the Nebula, exploring ancient ruins, and deciphering a forgotten language was just amazing. I’m an archaeologist myself, and this is exactly the kind of atmosphere I’ve experienced during my own prehistoric excavations.
The only flaw I came across was some graphical issues (missing textures, poor rendering, etc.), which I managed to fix. If anyone experiences similar problems, I’m sharing the solution below:
1) Press Windows + R and type regedit
2) Navigate to: Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Inkle Ltd\Heaven's Vault
3) Find the entry called UnityGraphicsQuality_h1669003810
4) Double-click it and set the value to 5
