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Heaven’s Vault

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Total Posts: 2582

Joined 2005-08-12

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I’m surprised that there’s no thread for this yet. Or has the search function failed me again?

Anyway, this launched today. It’s a game in which you play an archaeologist from the distant future tasked with scouring the galaxy to investigate the disappearance of a university professor, while also learning more about an ancient empire.

I’ve played a little bit. The first hour is really rough, and I was very close to just giving up. The controls feel awful, you have no clear idea what you’re supposed to be doing, you’re constantly bombarded with information, and the stupid robot who’s supposed to be helping you just won’t stop asking you questions and trying to psychoanalyze you.

But then at some point everything starts to click and I found myself really getting into the mystery of the missing guy, and into the archaeological stuff—including deciphering a lost language word by word. I particularly love how the game constantly encourages you to make hypotheses based on the clues you’ve found and rolls with whatever you come up with—at least until you find new clues that force you to correct your guesses. It’s fun, and really makes me want to explore more.

Is anybody else playing?

     

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Joined 2019-04-20

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I’m playing right now, but I’m stuck trying to get to Elboreth. Pretty sure it’s a glitch. No matter what I do, I “missed my turn.”

     
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Joined 2003-09-30

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It’s may worth playing but looks like in a beta state.

     

“Going on means going far - Going far means returning”

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Joined 2019-04-20

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Na, I got a hang of the “flying.”  Gotta use the map a lot. I’m in over 10 hours now and loving it. My BA is in Archaeology though.

     
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Finished the game today. And I have absolutely no idea how I feel about it, which means I’m going to write a thousand words about it in an attempt to sort out my feelings.

At its heart, Heaven’s Vault is a game about being a space archaeologist—and a proper archaeologist to boot, not a glorified thug like Indiana Jones or Lara Croft. Sailing through space on literal rivers, you explore various sites to find artefacts and inscriptions that help you piece together the history of this weird nebula you live in. The biggest task is slowly deciphering the nebula’s ancient language, using context and similarities to figure things out, word by word and ideogram by ideogram. This is definitely not for everyone, but I loved it. The world is fascinating, and uncovering its secrets is a joy. The problem is that pretty much everything else in Heaven’s Vault is bad—and the game keeps shoving it into your face.

Some of the problems stem from the fact that the game was released in a rough state. In the past couple of weeks, it’s been receiving patches on a daily basis. The worst offender is travelling between places, which is buggy and mind-numbingly tedious (even after all the patching). The UI is also generally a complete mess. And there are various problems with the game’s logic. (To be fair, the game is incredibly ambitious on that front, letting you explore in a non-linear way, and keeping track of your hypotheses, deductions and mistaken assumptions; some stuff was bound to get through the cracks.)

The biggest problem to me is Inkle’s design philosophy, which has been clear in all their games since halfway through the Sorcery! series, especially in 80 Days. Basically, they seem to want players to randomly miss half of the game’s content, and then have to replay the game again and again to see everything. As a completionist, this frustrates me to no end. I like replaying games; I’m alright with needing more than one playthrough to see everything. What I can’t stand is the unpredictability of it, the feeling that any step you take might lock you out of some story arc for no clear reason. That happens all the time in Heaven’s Vault: anything you say, any room you walk into, might unpredictably trigger some event that will irreparably close off some narrative path. (And you can’t save, so you have to live with it!) It feels awful, like getting punished for exploring. Heaven’s Vault is a game about digging up potsherds that somehow gave me constant anxiety—and not the fun kind.

It’s made worse by the fact that it makes no in-game sense. In 80 Days, when you’re rushing around the world, you know that you’re not going to visit Moscow and Cape Town on the same trip, and that you can’t spend too long following every story thread. But when playing as an archaeologist, you’d think that you wouldn’t need to constantly fight the game for the right to be methodical. The worst offender is that you can’t revisit archaeological sites. Once you leave (and the game will endlessly pressure you to leave before you’ve explored everything), you can never come back—for no clear in-game reason. For instance, one of the sites I visited left me completely stumped; maybe I went there too early, before I had the right info; maybe I just missed some hotspot; but I left without having understood what it was all about, and never got the chance to go back to do better. I don’t care that I can replay the game and try again; it felt awful and it shouldn’t have.

Ultimately, it’s a testament to the game’s exceptional, fascinating world-building that I resented being locked out of exploring it more thoroughly. As I said, whenever the game gets out of your way and lets you explore and figure things out, it’s brilliant. I just wish it trusted its strengths more, instead of trying to find artificial ways to prevent you from doing what you want.

Heaven’s Vault has a NewGame+ option, which lets you replay the game with your previously-discovered translations intact. I’m tempted to try it, though I’ll probably wait until the flurry of patches has abated. The fact that I want to jump back into the nebula so soon after spending 20 hours there speaks to the game’s qualities. And yet I feel unable to quite say whether I enjoyed it, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t feel confident recommending it to anyone.

3/5???

     

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Joined 2019-05-03

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I’ve poking around here for different reasons, but since the game is mentioned and I’m kinda musing about it currently ...

I’ve actually played through it and then played through NG+ (not only do you keep translations, but the inscriptions also change), since I had some questions left that I wanted answers for (and missed a location).

I personally found that this is not a game that should be played “like a game”. For one thing, it basically has no true gameplay component. Sailing isn’t anything you can “lose” or do wrong, and if you think that deciphering the language is the point of the game - well, you’d be right, but oddly enough it doesn’t matter one bit if you do or don’t. At no point is it required for further progress. At no point do you unlock additional otherwise unreachable elements through it. At no point does it change how the story will ultimately play out.

It’s a game about figuring out an invented language (or, more precisely?, an invented script), yet doing so doesn’t matter.

The true “plot” is the history you uncover. But that all already happened. It’s what it is whether you learn about it or you don’t. All you can do about that is satisfy your own curiosity.

I think that says more than anything else what kind of “game” this is.

And the rest follows from that. It does have decisions to make, but they aren’t the classic “do you want to do A or do you want to do B?” game kind of decisions, but implicit in your actions - ie, you get called back by your boss, well, maybe don’t go and see what happens, the action itself is a “decision”. And the same applies to when you leave planets or when you are forced to leave planets - take it as a decision you’ve made through your actions and forget about “game-y” attitudes like “I need to do everything”.

You really don’t. It won’t change anything anyway.

I imagine if you can’t go for that the only thing Heaven’s Vault manages to do is being boring.

The script does have a whole bunch of issues (and depending on the patch you’ve played it at there’ll be more or some will be fixed by now). And I found the actions you can take to affect the current plot are essentially not very interesting as you don’t get to see what effects they’ll have in the longer run, or that actually what looks in your first playthrough like something that will lead to something else ultimately doesn’t do anything.
Plus, expect glitch-y behavior; where the script gets mixed up about what you’ve actually done or not and characters saying something that doesn’t make sense in the context and so on. It’s a very complex game overall with a ton of variables so I found myself trying to be forgiving of that, but it can seriously dampen the mood (there’s also a bunch of proofreading misses).

Also, I found some of what I expect to be “major” scenes like when the Professor goes on about being your mother to mostly fall flat. Overall, while I was happy to explore the past, the “current events” seemed to be rather superficial; you can’t affect too much and often things stay kinda alluded to but you can’t go further with them.

And it does the typical adventure game thing were at the very end you are presented with a decision for either End A or End B. I just find that boring design (but it’s so common I can hardly criticize yet another game doing it ...).

Ultimately, I surprisingly loved it, yet was disappointed with the language being too easy to figure out and with too little player-agency and the actual story not actually being too interesting either ... yet I still played through it twice since I just felt like I really needed to figure out one or two more things, so it must have gotten something really right.

It’s a weird one. I wouldn’t randomly recommend it; I imagine if it doesn’t draw you in right away it won’t do anything you for. I feel this is a real hit-or-miss type of ... not-game.

But if it works for you it’s oddly satisfying and good.

 

 

     
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Joined 2013-08-26

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Pyoro-2 - 03 May 2019 05:25 PM

I’ve poking around here for different reasons, but since the game is mentioned and I’m kinda musing about it currently ...

Interesting post. Someone recommended Heaven’s Vault to me and since he liked it so much I got it and played it for one hour. For me it was disappointing in every way.

It’s a weird one. I wouldn’t randomly recommend it; I imagine if it doesn’t draw you in right away it won’t do anything you for. I feel this is a real hit-or-miss type of ... not-game.

I’m glad you said that because that hour of boredom left me with the nagging feeling I wasn’t fair to the game and should give it another chance. Now I won’t. Smile

 

     

See you around, wolf. Nerissa

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Joined 2009-04-28

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So, I have played this twice through, once NG+ obviously.

Similar to some of those above, I find it difficult to decide exactly how I feel about it. I like the game - probably very much - but maybe not quite in a way I like other games.

The setting is fantastic, a really fascinating world to play in. Yes it’s in space and there are robots but it feels different from any other sci-fi I have come across. There is a sadness, an etherial loneliness and sterility to so much of it, it is a world (Galaxy? Universe?) where things have happened - quite a lot of things it would appear - but now just drifts.

I like the way that although a lot of the visuals are familiar (an apparently middle eastern protagonist etc.) they do not mean what we might assume them to mean. It makes things feel very alien indeed and the more you go through the game, the more I think you realise how different this game world is to our own, even in terms of basic assumptions.

There are so many things about the game I like but can’t say why. The decision to fade out character’s feet as they walk, the leaving of dissolving photo stills of Aliya as she moves around, somehow it’s classy and powerful and feels like it fits with the whole… something or other!

I love piecing the language together. I love the fact that robots aren’t exactly menace and aren’t exactly benefactors… in fact after two playthroughs they are still a pretty grey area to me. In many respects similar to the rest of the game, I can make assumptions and the game will let me, even if they are wrong.

Recent patches have fixed the monotony of space travel - so beautiful and dreamy at first and then dull.

I found my NG+ playthrough to be really pretty different and much more revealing. There were things I missed like locations and characters but also a depth of interaction with the characters I had already met that really surprised me. Like Kuru above I knew I hadn’t done everything, but I’m not sure I realised how much I had missed, and some pretty big things too.

My impression of the world after NG+ is definitely different from the first time through and I still feel I don’t understand everything. There is still a fair bit more language to translate, but I do wonder if there is enough ‘game’ left to discover to hold my interest a third time (there definitely was the second time). I think that if I leave it too long I will forget too much so maybe i’ll… I don’t know.

On the whole I am confused but haven’t invested this much time and effort into an Adventure Game for some time. Just as others have said above, this won’t be for everyone, but it is well worth a try, because if it is for you, it’s likely to be a game you won’t forget. It’s certainly affected me in quite a big way.

     

3.5 time winner of the “Really Annoying Caption Contest Saboteur” Award!

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Joined 2017-12-26

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I played it three times now, and will probably play it more often. Each time, you discover more, layer upon layer.
You learn more language, of course, but, more importantly, the history of the Nebula. There is far more to tell about the robots, for instance, the state of Elboreth, and so on.

Each playthrough, you can make different choices, bringing you another part of the story.

It is a relaxing game: sailing is relaxing, but if you want to speed up, you can ask your robot to do it for you. Your robot, that can get the ‘soul’ of someone else (in two occasions; one lasting).

But I yet did not discover all there is to discover, I am sure.

     
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Joined 2019-12-22

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Another game I really want to play this year. Finally.

#goals

     

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