Heaven's Vault Review
I am not an archaeologist. The closest I’ve come to archaeological training was a few art history courses in college. However, that’s enough to know movies like Indiana Jones and games like Pathway are less about archaeology and more about shooting bad guys near old stuff. That’s not a bad thing, but something about learning about the past through study appeals to me. That’s why I was excited to see the release of Heaven’s Vault by Inkle Studios. While it’s likely the game is not totally accurate to the proper process, it’s far closer to the slow progress and subtle victories of real archaeology.
In Heaven’s Vault, you play as Aliya Elasra, famed archaeologist of the Ioxian university. You are pulled away from your latest search by your adoptive mother, the head of the Ioxian university, and tasked with finding her now-missing colleague, Jaqinni Renba. To help you in your search, all you are given is a set of vague coordinates, an ancient brooch, and a stuffy robot assistant. As you search for the missing scholar, you piece together an understanding of an ancient language as well as an ominous mystery.
Heaven’s Vault, in the most basic gameplay terms, is a puzzle game wrapped around the skeleton of a classic adventure game. In your search for Renba, you will travel to numerous destinations and find artifacts from bygone eras featuring ancient writing on them. This language is the main gameplay hook for Heaven’s Vault. Whenever you encounter new words in the ancient language, you are presented with four possible translations for the word, as well as shown any related words you’ve found and any meaning you’ve determined for them. Since each instance of the ancient language is at least two words, you’re able to look at all the possible meanings of all the words before making decisions, allowing you to use context clue to piece together text that makes at least a little sense. After you have guessed the same definition for a word, Aliya will determine whether the guess is correct or not. If correct, the translation will be confirmed in the current puzzle and also applied to all other puzzles where it is present. If incorrect, that option is removed from the list of potential definitions of that word, leaving you with the remaining three options. This method of giving players limited options and notes on past findings of related words didn’t grab me at first, but as I translated more words, it became more enthralling to deduce the meanings of new words by comparing similar symbols in other words I had translated. The joy and challenge of being given just enough tools to find the truth and succeeding on the power of my own deduction was engrossing. I am being completely honest when I admit that my proudest gaming moment in the past year was in Heaven’s Vault, when I figured out the symbol that signified pluralization of a noun.
Beyond the fantastic translation puzzles, Heaven’s Vault has a lot of other quality components. First and foremost is the world or rather worlds. Heaven’s Vault takes place in The Nebula, an expanse of massive clouds and scattered floating rocks. Rocks big enough to be lived on are known as “moons” and travel between moons is possible through airships sailing on air currents called “rivers”. The setting takes enough from our understanding to give us a foothold in the world, but little enough to explore the mysteries and legends of The Nebula. Being a sucker for lore and worldbuilding, I was also immediately delighted with the timeline you have access to in the game’s menu. Covering thousands of years, the timeline not only records your actions but also gives a rough outline of the history of the world in Heaven’s Vault, from the formation of an ancient holy empire to its inevitable fall to the modern tense political scene of warring fragments of a long-gone civilization. This elaborate backstory being presented to you as soon as you start the game makes it that much easier to step into Aliya’s shoes and understand her world. Adding to that, the dialogue does a great job of conveying information to the player without sounding like awkward explanation that wouldn’t fit into a normal conversation. This is mostly done by the robot assistant Six asking Aliya why human culture is the way it is, such as why they believe humans will be reincarnated only if their body is burned, or Aliya asking Six to explain the unusual natural phenomena of The Nebula, such as where water comes from in in a world with no lakes or shared atmosphere. Another featured I enjoyed, but others may not, is the art. Heaven’s Vault is presented in two different styles at the same time: the environment is modeled in 3D while all characters are two-dimensional still artwork. This means Aliya walks, instead of smoothly animating between the dozens if not hundreds of modern game-standard frames as she moves forward, instead you see a frame of her stepping out with one leg, then a frame of her with her other leg moving forward, and then a frame with that other leg stepping out in front. To some people it will look like Paper Mario running on exceptionally choppy hardware, but I liked this almost comic book style presentation.
Although I don’t consider the simplistic animation a negative point, there are certainly things about Heaven’s Vault I don’t like. My biggest problem is with the game’s sound. The main issue is that, most of the time, there isn’t sound. I understand that archaeology is a slow, contemplative process but I don’t believe there any natural place that are completely silent. As you explore areas for clues and ancient inscriptions, there aren’t even simple nature sounds such as the buzzing of insects or wind moving through leaves. At first this is unnerving but soon becomes boring and annoying. The translation gameplay is very slow paced and it really could have used some ambient sounds in the background to keep players from dozing off. At dramatic points, there is good orchestral music but those moments are few and far between. Beyond the lack of background sounds, almost no dialogue is voiced, so you can go the better part of an hour hearing nothing aside from your own heartbeat. Then, when narration does kick in, the voice is so loud compared to the silence it’s startling and sometimes painful.
Heaven’s Vault is not a perfect game, but it is incredible and unique. While it’s true that I don’t play a lot of puzzle games, the ones that I have played feel lesser compared to Heaven’s Vault because there is something truly enthralling about piecing together a foreign language. It stands out from other games so much that I know it will be polarizing, but I hope as many people will try it as possible. If you are positive you will get no joy out of traveling across worlds decoding a lost language, you will likely get little to nothing out of this game. But if you are even the least bit intrigued by the concept, I wholeheartedly recommend Heaven’s Vault.
Buy this game at full price
It’s worth every penny they’re asking
