レビュー

• 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”.
• gamedeal user

  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.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 9, 2023

  As much as I loved the puzzle-solving aspect of this game and the innate excitement of uncovering the past through piecing together fragments of an ancient language, the storyline of this game is not for me. You play as Aliya, whom pretty much everyone dislikes for some reason or other, so expect the characters in the game to have an attitude. At one point, Aliya mentions visiting a friend, and I personally thought, "Oh, nice, finally a friendly face." That didn't really happen. The friend wasn't exactly overjoyed to see Aliya. The gameplay is also a bit tedious. You can't sprint, and there's no way to rush through dialogue, so you're going to spend a lot of time walking around and having to sit through condescending dialogue. I tried to power through this game because I enjoyed the puzzle-solving aspect very much. There isn't another game that captures Heaven's Vault language-deciphering aspect, so I wanted to like this game very much. Alas, the writing and the story ultimately dissuaded me to the point of abandoning this game. 5/10, and that is only because of the language-deciphering. I wasn't thrilled about anything else.
• gamedeal user

  Apr 16, 2019

  An unbelievably unique game, everything from the visuals and animations, to the unfamiliar world/lore (and even physics), to the way you interact with the environment and people - I have never seen a game that deviates from so many norms. I can't wait to continue my exploration and find out more about the history and story engulfing this exotic and curious world!
• gamedeal user

  Apr 17, 2019

  [strike] [h1] So far, so good. [/h1] [/strike] [h1] A gem. [/h1] Due to the low amount of reviews I had to guess this game was either not famous or recently released. As it turns out, it's both. [strike] I've decided to go ahead and buy it and I´m pretty happy with my purchase so far. [/strike] [b]Having finished the game I must stand by all I said before and make a second edit[/b] All that I have found in this game is just right; +I was worried the visual style might become a nuisance, but it turns out it works really well and it fits the game perfectly. +Then my second worry was that the translation puzzles were too hard or too easy, they are just in the right spot, the game doesn't guide you through them, that's great because you still have to use that brain, but I didn´t find myself with the need to grab a notebook either, which is great. Read edit 1 for more details. Like I said earlier, just the right amount of difficulty. +Then my third worry in a game like this was the narrative, but so far, it is carefully written, the world it takes place in is perfect and the story is very interesting. +Another worry is the lenght, it's actually quite long, I'm glad. +And how's the soundtrack? One word: [b] YES [/b] All of this means, it's great, I haven't found a single negative point worth mentioning, and trust me I've tried. [strike]However, it's also true I haven't finished it, so I'm going to try to finish it and update this review a day before the initial sale is over. But if you can't hold your horses and you need to know right now if it's good or not, all I can say it's going perfectly so far. [/strike] [b] READ EDIT 2 FOR CONCLUSION [/b] ############# EDIT 1 ############## It looks like the translation puzzles are actually deeper than it looks like. The game does make it simpler by offering you a set of aids, but if seems like if you learn how to do certain stuff yourself like reckognize ceratin gliphs you could make more accurate translations. Now while it is not necessary at all, it seems you can make it as complicated as you want. I do plan to make a second run of the game using a notebook to try to do some translating myself and take some notes. PD: I know I said before the narrative is great but the ambience is even better, the world is very carefuly constructed. ############# EDIT 2 ############## I finished the main storyline of the game, but as the game is open world, there's a lot left to discover. The game gives you the choice once finished of starting a new game+, wich will carry your knowledge to the next game. Or you can also reset it if you like. Personally for me, there's a lot left to discover and I can't possibly wait to keep exploring ancient ruins and get the entire timeline of the world. [b] Still haven't found a single negative thing worth mentioning, suprisingly enough, it's perfect. [/b] Well, I did get a tiny bug at one point wich fixed itself in a matter of minutes, otherwise the game is polished really well. A must buy if you are into exploration/story games.
• gamedeal user

  Apr 17, 2019

  I have an Oxford degree in Archaeology and this game is my wet dream. It's in no way reflective of modern Archaeology, but modern Archaeology is boring as fuck. It's like early 20th century Archaeology meets Sci-fi. What more can you ask for?
• gamedeal user

  Apr 29, 2019

  It's a bit hard for me to write a negative review of this game because I loved 80 Days and Sorcery! by inkle. Maybe my expectations got spoiled by those games. TL;DR There were immersion issues for me, and this game has a "the world sucks" theme. Exploring ruins and the translation mechanic is nice, but its too slow to get to those parts. The environment is gorgeous. My main issue is the narrative. Aliya (the main character) has a fixed personality. This is a huge problem because the game also offers dialogue options reflecting that. In a regular book, I might read from the perspective of a single person. That's fine because I'm viewing the world through the lens of that person as if I'm simply an observer going along for the ride while the narrator dictates what happens. Or in other games, the perspective of the character serves as the background where I make no choices (e.g. cutscenes) and then I get to play the "game parts" of the game. But in a game where I make meaningful dialogue choices based on personality and world views, I am actively participating in that world and cannot simply be observing it. 80 Days pulled this off beautifully. Passepartout was more or less a blank canvas. I could be nice or mean to basically anyone I met. I could hold and express different views on technology, politics, and aesthetics. I could make choices that mostly fit my personality, views, and instincts so it felt like I was Passepartout and I was really in the world of 80 Days. The only way for a fixed personality to feel immersive is if that personality mostly coincides with my own. But as Aliya, I can't even choose to be nice to Six :(. A lot of the times when dialogue options came up, I wondered, "why bother?". Its [i]her[/i] story, not mine. She already has notions about how much she does or doesn't trust people which certainly don't match my gut reaction with these people. She already has views on how society ought to be. And clearly she hates robots. I'm not in control, yet the game keeps giving me "control". The game would have felt more immersive if those dialogue options (not the ones concerning where to go/explore or asking about what happened) were stripped away and chosen for me. Then I would be putting myself in her shoes and not trying to also wear my own and then tripping out of immersion all the time. Other players don't seem to have this immersion breaking problem though, so take this with a grain of salt. The voice actor sounds too nice for Aliya. Even ignoring tone, they sound like two different people based on what they say. The game would have been better without voice acting altogether. Also, the people you meet are all mean or deceiving, and the world Heaven's Vault builds is so bleak that it drained any wholesomeness from me. The closest thing to a positive experience is finding a beautiful garden, but turns out [spoiler] its a graveyard and [/spoiler] [spoiler] makes you speak to a suffering soul that is stuck there.[/spoiler] I guess it was going for a "the world sucks" theme while I was playing this game as an attempt at escapism. I'm usually fine with playing games with such a theme and without any positivity, but only when I'm in the mood and know what I'm getting into (e.g. Frostpunk makes it very obvious its not a happy game and I still enjoyed it because I knew that upfront and played when I was ready). While 80 Days did show how much the world can suck, it had some positive/hopeful notes as well. In Heaven's Vault, its just suffering, struggling, and slavery. Combined with a mean protagonist... its too much for me. Nothing in the game description even hints at this. I won't go over how slow gameplay is because I think other reviews have covered it enough. I wish there was a sprint key. My favourite part of the game was [spoiler]finding a book and translations dozens of lines without being interrupted by walking slowly between inscriptions.[/spoiler] To include a positive note (which the game lacks), I like the art style. The world is beautiful, and the 2-D and 3-D styles work together. I can also tell the developers put a lot of effort and details into the game to make such a non-linear story cohesive.