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• gamedeal user

  Nov 14, 2021

  [h1]History of the world at your hands[/h1] [b]Intro[/b] Heaven's Vault is a unique game, I would call it an indie gem. It offers good story, captivating gameplay, beautiful world and great sound design combined with interesting and pleasing art-style. [b]Story[/b] The story in this game is awesome. You play as Aliya – an archeologist who's constantly is followed by her robot Six. At first you're not sure what is happening, it seems that you're just doing some detective work or something. Your task is to find a missing archeologist named Renba. You follow his steps, collecting clues and so on. But on your way you start to see the bigger picture. While uncovering more secrets by finding artifacts and translating glyphs you start to understand the world and you start caring about it, you want to know more and to know more you need to learn and explore. You'll learn a lot about the robots, about ancient gods and other people living on different moons, their struggles, their life. It all fits well into story and the complete picture is very appealing. [b]Gameplay[/b] Gameplay is quite unique. While from the first sight the game might seem to have similarities to visual novels, it also provides some interesting gameplay mechanics – exploration and translating glyphs. Fans of Outer Wilds might find this game interesting due to some simlarities. You explore the world while sailing your ship between moons. Each moon is different, some moons could be rich, some poor, some contain some valuable artifacts or glyphs. Artifacts usually have glyphs on them too. So speaking of translating them. You get glyphs and few suggested words and put those words under glyphs until you get a phrase which hopefully makes sense. This is the main mechanic of the game. Don't worry if it doesn't make sense, the whole point of the game is learning so your knowledge of glyphs will improve with time. It's also extremely important to explore every corner of the moon and find as much stuff as you can. You can either trade that stuff for something else which might be valuable for you as an archeologist or you could show those items to someone so they would tell you something about them you don't know. You'll also meet other people and interact with them to some extent. The game isn't linear. You can explore the world and go to places at very different times in different playthroughs. It's also very easy to miss something and you can miss a lot of stuff, like really lot of stuff. Don't worry, you're supposed to miss things. But this game has New Game+ and it's there for a reason. There's almost a guarantee you won't explore everything on your first playthrough and it'll need some time to understand things. So starting a New Game+ lets you restart your journey with all the knowledge from your first playthrough. And then comes the sailing. It's a very insignificant gameplay mechanic since you're basically sailing to a new destination. Sometimes you find shipwrecks on the way and Six searches it and usually picks something up and you start deciphering it. But the sailing sections of the game are extremely relaxing, mesmerizing, it feels like you could sail forever, you don't want it to end. [b]Technical side & Graphics[/b] Graphically the game looks very pretty, it has an interesting graphical design. The environments are all 3D and while pretty simple they still look very good. Every moon and every area is different and beautiful in its own way. Now characters are all 2D and with barely any animations. But that's clearly intentional and it makes the graphical design stand out among other games. One thing I didn't like are the dialogue subtitles. So for example someone is talking and subtitles are displayed on the right side of the screen but camera angle suddenly changes to another character and the same sentence appears on the other side which sometimes makes it harder to read because those subtitles disappear very quickly. Ultrawide support works fine and game runs well. It shouldn't be demanding for resources but since the environments are 3D I guess it could not be friendly to every potato. [b]Sound[/b] Sound is wonderful. The dialogues aren't voiced but narrator (Aliya) speaks sometimes, describing something usually when arriving at the new moon. The voice acting is great. Music is absolutely wonderful and doesn't get repetitive or boring at any point. The music is especially good while sailing and adds to the atmosphere a lot. It also creates that relaxing, chill atmosphere. It's a game designed to be played while comfortably sitting and maybe sipping some coffee. [b]Summary[/b] This is a wonderful exploration/adventure game. It's not linear and allows freedom, you have some choices to make and it offers a unique gameplay accompanied by wonderful art design and sound direction. Just buy it. [b]Pros[/b] [list] [*]Unique [*]Fun gameplay [*]Replayability [*]Beautiful art-style [*]Great sound design [/list] [b]Cons[/b] [list] [*]Subtitles are sometime hard to read [/list] [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/32930811-Kosmos%27s-Cosmic-reviews/?appid=704030][h1]Follow my curator page for more[/h1][/url] [url=https://www.twitch.tv/crazykosmikbunny] [b]My Twitch[/b] [/url]
• gamedeal user

  Nov 25, 2021

  Heaven's Vault's mystery managed to hook me like no other adventure before. Let me get the bad out of the way before getting to the good: The controls are awkward, the visual style takes some getting used to, and the Reply/Remark dialogue system feels tedious. However, if you can live with those things, you are getting a detective adventure game that is - as far as I'm aware - unique in its execution. It's not patronizing or stupid, it allows you the freedom of leading your own investigation into the past of this world, and to shape the relationships with the rest of the cast. There's a lot more... on my first playthrough I could barely make sense of some of the historical events; there were ancient empires, revolutions, presumably a banished emperor, and so much more; it feels tangible, and it feels like a lot of the decisions I made I could have made differently and uncovered more, get a clearer picture of some of it. I'm usually not one to re-play a story-based game, but this here is a rare exception. NG+ is not like in your typical visual novel, "just fast forward until you can make a decision", but instead you get to shape new relationships with every NPC you talk to, down to your main character developing entirely new theories and ideas that lead to entirely new situations on the different archeological dig sites. I think it's hard to describe like that, so I'll give an example of what the game does that sets it apart from other games (spoiler-free, made-up scenario): If your main character would stumble into an ancient house, she might see a table with food out front and an inscription that she (and you as player) can only guess to mean "Take food when hungry". Now you might get a follow-up dialogue with your robot, and since you select "This could be a food stall or inn", she will now treat all other discoveries as if this was the case. She will see a few books in a shelf and deduct "Oh, this must be where they had their recipes", or something else. Now, if you had translated the phrase earlier differently, or had come to another conclusion based on that same translation, she (and you as the player) might have rolled with the idea that this was a private house that just shared food with the needy, and maybe some follow-up clues would have led to her pondering if there was a famine back then that made people share food openly. You get to shape the assumptions of your own investigations in a way that I have never seen before in other games. It offers a unique freedom to uncover the clues and make sense of the mysteries of the past. What I'm getting at: Even if you have played adventure games, you have not played an adventure game like this. If you have the money for it, buy it, play it. Even if you end up not liking it or being ambivalent, you will have played something unique. If that appeals to you at all, don't put it off.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 5, 2021

  Heaven's Vault is a bit of an odd duck - an adventure/puzzle game based around gradually deciphering a strange, ancient language in order to unravel the secrets of the distant past, and through it, a rather more current mystery. The core part of it - the linguistic puzzles - are quite unique and interesting, presenting an genuine challenge where you have to gradually narrow down random guesswork into qualified assumptions and eventually certainty, at times recontextualizing parts of history you previously thought you'd nailed down. I was really enjoying that, but at the same time, something was niggling at me, annoying me, frustrating me... and it took a few hours before I was able to nail down WHAT and WHY. The issue is with the 'adventure' part of the fusion - walking around, exploring, talking to people, bartering with merchants... this is where you gradually become aware of an extremely sharp divide between YOU, the player, and the character you're ostensibly playing as. SHE is a former street-rat, an orphan who grew up on a slum-moon before being more-or-less adopted by a professor from a wealthy university-moon, and being learning the trade of a historian and archaeologist there. She, presumably, has a basic understanding of how the world she lives in WORKS. YOU don't, and the game seems to have absolutely no interest in helping you obtain one. The bartering was the first issue. It takes a while before you encounter it - the Nebulae you live in seemingly doesn't have an actual CURRENCY, which is just WEIRD, so you have to barter the various objects you collect while exploring for vital information or useful things... but I had no way of knowing that, so by the time this popped up, I'd already donated the majority of my finds to the university, with no way of knowing that there was any other use for them. SHE presumably DID know, but did not see fit to tell me. More generally, you essentially have no idea what's going on in her head, with only a vague sense of what she might do if you point her in any given direction. Going through a portal may lock you away from other options because she'll just arbitrarily refuse to go back, seemingly innocuous dialogue-options might make her insult or lambast someone she's supposed to try and butter up for information, and so on. Eventually, I hit a point where a robot-merchant offered some seemingly valuable information in return for my loyal robotic sidekick, Six, refusing any other deal... now, it was obvious that he wasn't accustomed to dealing with fully sentient and willful robots like Six, so the obvious trick would be to pretend to go along with the deal, only for Six to later give him the slip and return to my side. But there was nothing in the dialogue to indicate any such plans, and I still had no idea what was going on inside that woman's head - no way of knowing if that was exactly what she was planning, or if she was genuinely trying to get rid of her persistent ally, what with the robo-hatred she so often spews regardless of what the player wants. That is, of course, a highly specific example, but it's illustrative of the broader issue - the game didn't make me feel like Aliya Elasra, adventurer-archaeologist in a strange and mysterious science-fantasy spacetime, it made me feel like her recently-arrived and rather beleaguered manager, trying to simultaneously come to grips with the intricacies of the local culture and a willful subordinate who seemed largely disinterested in what I wanted from her. Which is more frustrating than fun.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 18, 2022

  A game about being lost and not knowing who you are and what you belong to, about how being immersed in time strips you away little by little, day after day, continually forcing you to retreat and leave behind bigger and bigger parts of yourself Time has this way of cutting you up, it can sever you from yourself – SEVER is one of the first ancient verbs you learn in the game – and make a distant relic of what you once were and what you belonged to and this game is about getting it back, about getting [i]you[/i] back, about piercing the veil that time gradually pulls over your eyes, isolating yourself from your history, and reinstating yourself into what was cut out from you in the process. It’s not properly a game about archaeology, archaeology is only a means of getting back into yourself what was lost, but ultimately [i]Heaven’s Vault[/i] is a game about the state of being lost, like [i]Planescape: Torment[/i] or [i]Disco Elysium[/i] or [i]Ether One[/i], it's a game about forgetting oneself, only it doesn’t apply to an individual, but to a people, an entire community scattered away and cut out from itself, having forgotten its purpose and its destiny. But it’s also a game about miraculously finding yourself, no matter if that means reconnecting with your true destiny or finding a new meaning to drive you forward. And it’s a game about sailing, only the waters you’re sailing on are those of the river Styx and they make you forget yourself every time you set sail on them (the metaphors of losing one’s soul on the rivers and the waters being made of the souls of the dead are ever-present in the game’s wonderfully coherent mythology), until you learn to know yourself not as the inner person inhabiting your memories, but as a series of exterior objects this person has left behind in its passing and, yeah, that’s the sharpest feeling [i]Heaven’s Vault[/i] will leave you with: playing it will teach you to see yourself as an external object, to the point that, as one of its characters says to the protagonist, with a profoundly Shakespearean intuition: “you won’t be content until you dig up your own skull”.
• MothKing

  Nov 30, 2022

  I'm actually really enjoying this game and plan on completing it, but it has some SERIOUS problems that you need to know about if you're considering buying it: 1. Bad pacing: The beginning of the game is an absolute slog. Once you get into doing a lot of translating and figure out how you're supposed to be doing that (not clear enough, imo), it's fun, but you regularly get walled by really boring sequences that bring the energy of the game to a grinding halt. 2. Awful controls: I feel like I can't walk more than five steps before the game takes over for me while going through tedious dialogue. Speaking of the dialogue, it's all text, not voiced (with the exception of the main character's monologues) BUT it moves through the lines automatically instead of having you press a button to move on. You can adjust the speed in the settings, but if there's an important bit of information given to you in dialogue and you need to re-read it or write something down, you're screwed. It moves right along and you can never get it back, not even by prompting the NPC again. It baffles me that they wouldn't just have a "next" button like every other game. 3. Absurdly bad menus: The concept of the timeline is cool, but in practice it is so unwieldy and is constantly spinning out of control. Important things are difficult to navigate to with unintuitive menus. You figure it out, but the bad design really slows down gameplay for me. 4. FOR GOD'S SAKE, WHY IS THERE NO DICTIONARY??? The whole game is about translating glyphs, but for some reason they don't give you a dictionary of all the words you have encountered, their possible meanings, and which ones are confirmed translations. It keeps all the phrases you've encountered, but if you want to be able to reference individual words, you basically have to keep a handwritten dictionary. (Which is hard, because it will take up several pages and you can't easily change the order.) If you want to change your translation of a previous word based on new information, you have to remember what phrase it was part of, and when in the game you discovered it (because that's how the phrases are ordered.) Keeping track of words you learn (and haven't quite cracked yet) should be very simple, but because of this staggering oversight, it's an absolute mess. The game is an amazing and creative concept with a really interesting and story, but I often find myself pulled out of it to marvel at how much better it could have been from a game design perspective. It's still mostly fun for me, but often frustrating too.
• Eusher Paul

  Dec 4, 2022

  Heaven's Vault is an immensely creative and sophisticated game about language, history, archeology, society, religion, dialectics, memory, identity, as well as robots and geckos. The visuals and soundtrack are gorgeous, and the gameplay is both fun and addictive, while also calming and therapeutic. An absolute gem.
• Lunatara

  Dec 26, 2022

  The innovative translation mechanic was why I got this game, and it's about what I would've expected. everything else, however, isn't great. Most of the characters are unlikable and I don't know how I feel about the story. Movement, lighting and the graphics in general are unappealing at best. definitely wait for a sale if you're going to buy it.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 19, 2023

  I'm not a fan of games that make you speed read and make decisions without being able to think about them first.
• gamedeal user

  Mar 5, 2023

  though i do have a soft point for the game's theme, restarting it made me remember how unwieldy the made of the game feels. it's different from the usual clunk games of similar scale are often faulted for, more like when you went for a sleek streamlined design but you couldn't draw a line straight. however, i do appreciate the direction in writing. though, like many mainstream works across media, it’s incorrigibly reliant on “wittiness”, but the uneasiness and often unpleasantness during conversation is quite realistic, the flaws of characters mundane and integral, pushing the protagonist further towards ruins and ghosts
• gamedeal user

  Mar 19, 2023

  Others have pointed out the *slowness* of this game. I think that, though it can become frustrating at times, it's one of its strongest perks. Heaven's Vault asks you to take your time. Unlike many other modern, fast-paced games, Heaven's Vault wants you to stop, think, reflect, and take in the beautiful story that will unfold before your eyes. Don't get me wrong, Heaven's Vault is by no means perfect. Travelling across the Nightingale is a drag, and a good reason why sometimes I struggled coming back to this game. But if you love history, and are attracted by the translation mechanics, you're going to love this game too. It is a flawed adventure, yes. But one I would gladly forget so I can replay it all again. Oh, and the main theme. The main theme is just incredible.