Heaven's Vault

While this game has an interesting premise and a good aesthetic, the gameplay execution slowly rots the experience. A slow-paced, unraveling mystery works great for this set of mechanics, but I more often found myself waiting for the game to catch up to what I wanted to do than excited for the next twist of the narrative. Every user action, in the world or menu, triggers a slow animation that restricts player control until complete. Your companion will interrupt you walking from point to point for a conversation that neither advances the narrative or your character's relationship with them. Dialogue, even at the fastest setting, fades onto the screen dramatically, when static text might have been more legible. The translation puzzles are interesting and promising, but cross-referencing any characters that aren't auto-recommended to you means switching back and forth between menus multiple times, again, with an animation between each. The frustrating thing is that it wouldn't take much work to resolve everything I'm describing, and the core of this game seems compelling. But presently, when it's paced slower than reading a book, I'd rather just read the book.

I don't think I've ever played a game with a more irritating and frustrating control scheme. The character walks as fast as a slug. Your obnoxious robot companion interrupts you constantly but the conversations are not interesting at all. And there is a sailing minigame to get from world to world that is so tedious that it makes me question the sanity of the programmers who made this. This game has an interesting premise--deciphering an alien language, but the actual mechanics of that are childish at best. Which is really the tone overall--it's like a child's idea of archaeology and linguistics.

Yes, but it should be shorter and let you move faster. Only for patient gamers.

I've tried to play this a few times over the years. I follow Inkle and really liked 80 Days and am interested in linguistics. But I've never had a good experience with this game. Everything is very slow. Walking, talking, interactions take a lot of time. It's easy to accidentally transition between areas and have to watch a slow walking animation as your character climbs stairs or something that you didn't even mean to go up. NPCs like the robot talk at you randomly and the conversation doesn't really make sense. The protagonist is really angry at people around her, but to start off it's not clear why, so she just comes of as mean. On top of that it takes a while to get to the language puzzles, and when you finally do they're very abstract. There's no feedback about right or wrong, but the choices also don't really feel self-expressive, so it's kind of like operating in a vacuum. I never managed to play long so maybe it gets better later, but again, with all the slowness I just couldn't keep going.

It's a translation game but the linguistics UI is rage-inducing. It's a dialogue-heavy game but the dialogue is mediocre and quick to disappear. It's an exploration game but the exploring is painfully slow and it's never clear when control will be wrested away from you for a random cutscene. Great idea, total failure in execution. Cannot believe this even gets mentioned in the same breath as Chants of Sennaar.

According to the achievements, only 27.9% of players completed this game. I think the other 72.1% died of boredom. The game seems to consist of tediously long journeys to find random artifacts to collect and attempt to translate the inscriptions on them. There is a story, but I couldn't really understand it. I think perhaps it needs to be played through several time to fully grasp it, but that's not going to happen for me. There's a lot of unvoiced dialogue to read too. It's a shame that this game turned out so poorly (in my opinion) as there's obviously been a lot of effort put into crafting it. I'd give it a 3/10.

an entire functional fictional language. that i can learn in a way that feels natural, like im an archeologist. no other game like this. i love how these puzzles feel in my brain

I've only been playing it for a short while and already the UI and mechanics are incredibly nausating and off to me. I do like aspects of the mystery and the history. The main character Aliya has tons of personality to her and I love her but the robot Six seems to be slow to warm up to. Honestly I think It's a game better watched than played which is a pity because the game itself appears to be quite a slow burn and I'm already sick of the first world I went to and I was only there for like five minutes. I don't know how to describe it. Maybe I'll retract it if I play far more, maybe not.

This game falls into that middle ground that I have trouble reviewing because it deserves something between a thumbs up and a thumbs down. I'm settling on the latter because, while I enjoyed the game, I don't know that I'd recommend it to others. [h2]What I liked[/h2] The central puzzle mechanic was fun. I liked finding new words and trying to decipher them. That's easily what drove me to finish the game. I liked building out the timeline of everything as I discovered it, though admittedly I didn't really go look at it too often. The mysteries you're working to solve are compelling, the world's well imagined, and while I get why some folks gripe about the dialogue options, I usually liked them. The art style was... fine. The whole after-image of your movement was cool, I guess. It's probably symbolic of something or plays into the theme in ways I didn't catch. [h2]What I didn't[/h2] The controls are terrible. You can only walk (or sail, also tedious). When you get to thresholds, it plays a little cutscene of you walking to the next place. Suppose you're trying to explore an area because apparently some artifacts require you to get right up on them and you accidentally hit that threshold. Now you're walking away with a little scene, then have to walk back with a little scene. Super tedious, and it led me to avoid scouring all corners of the map to find artifacts, which bums me out. You're compiling a vocabulary of an ancient language and an inventory of artifacts. Things you cannot do (or I couldn't figure out how to do): * see a list of all the items you have * see a list of discovered words (other than clicking through every single line of text discovered) * look at your discovered words in any useful way, e.g. all artifacts with X word on it, or all words containing Y glyph The game's "word lookup" mechanic is that when you're working out a phrase it'll show you 3 "related" words above your highlighted word. Often only 1 of them will seem relevant. Not infrequently, you might recall that you have a different, non-suggested related word you'd like to see and you're just out of luck there, bud. Click into the related word and you'll see the phrase it comes from, but not before playing a little cutscene, "Let me think to where else I saw that...." Again, tedious. Sailing felt so tacked on, dead time to have often pointless conversations. I didn't enjoy sailing but felt compelled to do it rather than engage autopilot, lest I miss a ruin on the route. Minor nit to pick, but the stakes felt pretty minimal. Every now and then a health/stamina bar pops up, but I'm pretty sure you face no consequences if it fully depletes (I had it happen once and it triggered the end of the scene, I suppose). Similarly, sometimes when sailing, you'll encounter rocks in the stream. Nothing happens if you crash into them. I don't know that I [i]want[/i] game over conditions in this game, though, so maybe this is an unfair criticism. [h2]Bottom line[/h2] The puzzle solving was fun. Navigating between the puzzles was pure tedium. I made it to New Game+ and am deliberating another playthrough to chase the achievements I missed (and decipher more words), so I definitely don't hate it. Still, do I [i]recommend[/i] this game? Can't say that I do.

I admit I'm angry right now. I already had to start over once. Then I got stuck, can't do anything. Tried everything I could think of but the camera is stuck, can't get anyone to talk to me, cant even get six to hopper us out. All of this because YOU CAN'T SAVE. Don't know if I have it in me to start over again. The really sad part is that I like the game. I enjoyed the search for passages. working out the meanings, and figuring out the past mystery. The flying could get annoying even letting the robot do it, it still went on too long. Maybe I'll give it another try but not for a while.