A unique fantasy world with a fascinating histo𒅌ry to disco𒅌ver
Poetic writing that says a lot in few words
Makes learning a 🍌new, Ancient language feel intui🐽tive
An unfocused story that unfolds too slowly
Fiddly controls get in the way of exploration
Boring, repetitive ship sailing segments
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Heaven’s Vault makes a world filled with robots, ancient gods, time loops, rivers in the sky and teleporters completely believable. Its writing, which never wastes a word, and world building are both meticulous: spend two minutes in one of its beautiful towns and you’ll feel like you know the place, whether that’s through a character’s childhood story or a statue’s inscr🌃iption about the locals’ religious beliefs. But the plot progresses too slowly to draw you in, and boring ship-sailing sections drive a wedge between you and the setting you’re trying to explore♎.
Release date: April 16
Platform(s): PC, PS4
Developer: Inkle (of 80 Days fame)
As archaeologist Aliya Elasra, you travel the Nebula uncovering artifacts and deciphering an ancient language. Aliya starts with almost no knowledge of that language, so you’re learning it with her. When you find an inscription, symbols appear on screen as a single, long string, and you drag and drop a bank of words to guess the meaning. It starts as guesswork, but it quickly makes you feel clever. It displays related words𒁏 that ha🌺ve similar shapes, and after a few hours I could recognise individual symbols, such as one that indicated the past tense, or another that turned a word into its negative form. It’s a brilliant feeling to know exactly what these squiggles and lines mean even before the game tells you.
Each object you find reveals nᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚew information about the period of history it was made in, and drops a short te♓xt box onto a timeline that you can peruse at any time. You can zoom out to see the major events of the past 1,000 years, or zoom in to read the key moments in Aliya’s life. Information is tagged by age, location and character, and the slick interface makes it easy to lose 20 minutes clicking from node to node.
