Despite never giving 80 Days or Sorcery series a proper playthrough, I’ve been curious about Heaven’s Vault, a new game from the same developers at inkle. Probably mostly due to the fact that the game is all centered around the translation and archaeology, around uncovering history and visiting long forgotten places, which sounded extremely alluring to me. It looked like a potentially interesting, but rather niche game, but what I didn’t suspect was just how niche it can be due to it’s “choose your own adventure” non-linear approach.
Mechanically speaking, the game plays like a very simple 3D adventure, except all characters are 2D sprites, where you (slowly) walk around locations looking for things to interact with. When you interact, it usually involves one of two things: either it’s dialogue, where choices can shape how future interactions with the same characters will go and where you can make big story choices, or it’s the process of translation from Ancient script to English. Additionally, as you walk around you might have an option to ask or tell something to the main character’s companion robot, something that can be either a short back and forth, or a dialogue in several parts, sometimes even with the dialogue choices that you get when initiating the dialogue normally. Another part of the game, that’s rather clearly separated from the one described, is floating on the rivers in space, where you can either go to a place already discovered, or try to find something that hasn’t been uncovered yet on your own, without help from the NPCs or any archaeological finds.
The most fun, and occasionally a lot of frustration, I personally was getting from the translation process. It’s a rather simple concept where you have a set of symbols in Ancient and can guess the meanings of words in it based on the context and prior knowledge gained elsewhere. Ancient script has very clearly defined rules and the way it’s structured is actually rather simple, but the process of discovering it and assigning meaning to the inscriptions you find simply never gets old, at least it did not for me. Additionally, in a move similar to what was done in last year’s Return of the Obra Dinn, some of the inscriptions you find can confirm or deny any of the previously selected assumptions making your dictionary of confirmed words more full as you encounter more and more complex pieces of text. In a curious turn, when you complete the game you are presented with a New Game + option where you retain all of your language knowledge, but all of the text excerpts you find are bigger than before, thus giving you even more context but at the price of more complex translations.
The whole “choose your own adventure” part in terms of dialogues and talks to the robot companion was far less interesting to me in general. The game is pretty open-ended, choices constantly shift the story in small or huge ways, even if the beginning and the end remain mostly the same (to my knowledge), but what this also means is that the developers had to find ways to “lock” your choices somehow in an exceedingly clear cut way and as a result, you often see how the opportunities you have are gone once you’ve made once choice, even if the others are still feasible. Luckily, in lots of cases it is handled well and conversations flow nicely, actually resembling a real dialogue, but there are numerous cases where you’re left with a “Wait, why can’t I do this now? This makes absolutely no sense.”
It is also hurting the way you explore. The game wants you to check every corner of any location you’re in, as very often it hides tiny artefacts that give you more translation opportunities and more information on big archaeological sites you can go to, yet the process of doing this is really unfun. Locations have invisible transition points everywhere, going through which starts a cutscene of a character going to the next section of the location, and very often when you do this you might be locked out of some part of the map forever. There are many instances where “aiming” at the spot of interaction is extremely hard. Most of the tiny objects seem to be randomly generated during your playthrough to constantly give you enough info on finding the site. Most sites cannot be entered again when you exit them, often with absolutely no reasoning behind this. And sometimes you’re given a time limit on what you can do in a site, yet time goes on during lots of meaningless transitional dialogue (repeated every time with slight variations) just because it can. Or it can randomly gets replenished as well, as the game is quite buggy.
Oh yeah, and there’s the part on the ship which is just tedious. It looks nice and the music is beautiful, but exploring the nebula the game takes place in is just horrifyingly boring. And the quick travel-like option added in a patch does not help (when it works, sometimes it freezes the game). Everything about it is unfun and it’s a shame that it might take a considerable chunk of the overall gameplay, especially if you’d want to explore on your own.
But the biggest problem of the game isn’t the bugs, the weird inconsistencies, the glitchy interface, the fact that you never have any idea what the character will say when choosing the “question” or “reply” options with the robot or anything like that, but rather the fact that it’s not particularly exciting on its own, unless you’re already interested in the process of translation and archaeology. And depending on how you play and where you go, you might not get to places where the story takes interesting turns until several hours in, and lots of things are missable. In fact, considering everything that’s missable due to the non-linear nature of the game, there’s a chance you will never get to learn anything interesting and the big revelations you get will never have any proper context that would give you a reason to care. Because the main characters, or any characters for that matter, on their own in the game are pretty bland. It’s the situations they get in, the context, the history that makes them work or not work and you can miss it all, sometimes on accident.
Because of that, while I really liked my time with the Heaven’s Vault, as flawed as it was at times, it is a hard game to recommend. If you get past the technical problems, horrid controls and UI and give the game time to get you interested, there’s still a rather solid chance you will not find the game interesting, as the path you take will take too long to get to anything exciting. So you’ll just get bored before the game has the chance to say anything good. It’s a real shame as Heaven’s Vault has everything to be great. I’d still recommend checking this game out, because it is a really interesting experience, just be ready that it might not click with you at all.