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Recent Playing: Heaven's Vault
Today I finally finished Heaven's Vault! I bought this game because it was put out by Inkle studio and I was fanatical about their text-based travel game 80 Days (based on the Jules Verne novel Around the World in 80 Days). Heaven's Vault is a very different game, but with the same story-telling prowess Inkle showed in 80 Days! The description from Steam is:
The main mechanic of the game is the translation puzzle (this is a combat-free game). Aliya's main method of learning more about the galaxy is uncovering old artifacts and translating the Ancient script on them. I think this mechanic works very well; it's intuitive and as you build out your dictionary of words it's exciting to able to translate longer and longer phrases. It's not especially difficult, so if you're looking for a brain-bender puzzle, look elsewhere.
I absolutely love the story-telling in this game, as noted. One of the things I noted with this game is how respectful Aliya is of the cultures she's investigating. She's never dismissive or demeaning, or with the cultural arrogance one might fear going into a game with this premise. There are a lot of mysteries in this galaxy, and most of them the game will not give you a concrete answer about. With Aliya you can spend as much time as you like looking for puzzle pieces, and then make your best guess about what happened, and often it will just be left at that. If you're looking for a story that wraps everything up neat with a bow on top, this is not the right game for that. As befits a story about ancient long-lost cultures, there's often only Aliya's best guess about what happened.
That said, the game gives you some vivid hints at some of the things that went on in the Ioxian Empire and things that came before, both on a large scale (I still think my worker/robot solidarity idea wasn't totally ruled out by canon!) and on a smaller, personal scale (investigating the site of the mining moon gave me chills).
The game does a fantastic job of sharing with you Aliya's excitement over finding scraps--a bit of sailcloth from an old Empire ship here, a carved figure from Ancient times there--and about puzzling through the translations. When you do (minor spoilers!) find some relatively in-tact Ancient sites, the game shares with you Aliya's awe and amazement--although some of this technology may look very familiar to you.
For some criticism, it's clear the game was made on a low budget. The artwork is lovely but the animation is jerky and glitchy. The characters doesn't have feet (character models just fade out, presumably to avoid some walking animation) and the camera can be pesky at times, but none of these things I ever felt overshadowed the gameplay. The other thing I'd say is that the ship sailing minigame as Aliya moves from planet to planet gets old fairly quickly. You can skip it by passing control of the ship to your robot, but if you're sailing somewhere you've never been before, she'll pass control back to you once you move out of familiar space. There are reasons to want to sail yourself (dialogue, opportunities to snag more artifacts) but I don't think you miss a ton by letting the robot steer.
You can also do new game plus, where your dictionary of Ancient translations carries over, which I will definitely be trying. Choices do have an impact in this game, so your outcomes may be different on a second playthrough!
Overall, this is a fairly mellow exploration game which goes hard on the "exploring the ruins of lost space cultures" angle, so if you're into that, definitely check this one out! Thank you Inkle for another great game!
"An archaeologist uncovers a lost history in an ancient space Nebula. Award-winning narrative adventure game with hieroglyphic language puzzles, from the creators of 80 DAYS."
This is a little skimpy on details so I'll give some more: You play as Aliya, an archaeologist and amateur linguist who works for a university. Sailing around the galaxy in her trusty ship the Nightingale, Aliya seeks out remnants of the galaxy's long-lost history of the Ioxian Empire which came before, and peoples who existed even earlier. The game begins with Aliya investigating a small mystery on behalf of her benefactor at the university, but she quickly realizes there's more at play here and more secrets of the galaxy to uncover.The main mechanic of the game is the translation puzzle (this is a combat-free game). Aliya's main method of learning more about the galaxy is uncovering old artifacts and translating the Ancient script on them. I think this mechanic works very well; it's intuitive and as you build out your dictionary of words it's exciting to able to translate longer and longer phrases. It's not especially difficult, so if you're looking for a brain-bender puzzle, look elsewhere.
I absolutely love the story-telling in this game, as noted. One of the things I noted with this game is how respectful Aliya is of the cultures she's investigating. She's never dismissive or demeaning, or with the cultural arrogance one might fear going into a game with this premise. There are a lot of mysteries in this galaxy, and most of them the game will not give you a concrete answer about. With Aliya you can spend as much time as you like looking for puzzle pieces, and then make your best guess about what happened, and often it will just be left at that. If you're looking for a story that wraps everything up neat with a bow on top, this is not the right game for that. As befits a story about ancient long-lost cultures, there's often only Aliya's best guess about what happened.
That said, the game gives you some vivid hints at some of the things that went on in the Ioxian Empire and things that came before, both on a large scale (I still think my worker/robot solidarity idea wasn't totally ruled out by canon!) and on a smaller, personal scale (investigating the site of the mining moon gave me chills).
The game does a fantastic job of sharing with you Aliya's excitement over finding scraps--a bit of sailcloth from an old Empire ship here, a carved figure from Ancient times there--and about puzzling through the translations. When you do (minor spoilers!) find some relatively in-tact Ancient sites, the game shares with you Aliya's awe and amazement--although some of this technology may look very familiar to you.
For some criticism, it's clear the game was made on a low budget. The artwork is lovely but the animation is jerky and glitchy. The characters doesn't have feet (character models just fade out, presumably to avoid some walking animation) and the camera can be pesky at times, but none of these things I ever felt overshadowed the gameplay. The other thing I'd say is that the ship sailing minigame as Aliya moves from planet to planet gets old fairly quickly. You can skip it by passing control of the ship to your robot, but if you're sailing somewhere you've never been before, she'll pass control back to you once you move out of familiar space. There are reasons to want to sail yourself (dialogue, opportunities to snag more artifacts) but I don't think you miss a ton by letting the robot steer.
You can also do new game plus, where your dictionary of Ancient translations carries over, which I will definitely be trying. Choices do have an impact in this game, so your outcomes may be different on a second playthrough!
Overall, this is a fairly mellow exploration game which goes hard on the "exploring the ruins of lost space cultures" angle, so if you're into that, definitely check this one out! Thank you Inkle for another great game!