Heaven's Vault
An archaeologist uncovers a lost history in an ancient space Nebula. Award-winning narrative adventure game with hieroglyphic language puzzles, from the creators of 80 DAYS.
Heaven's Vault is a adventure, narrative and mystery game
developed and published by inkle Ltd.
Released on April 16th 2019 is available in English only on Windows.
It has received 2,138 reviews of which 1,840 were positive and 298 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.3 out of 10. 😎
The game is currently priced at 21.99€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified Heaven's Vault into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
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Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS *: Windows 7 or later
- Processor: SSE2 instruction set support
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia Geforce GTX 660 / AMD Radeon HD 7850, 2+ Gb of vram
- DirectX: Version 10
- Storage: 5 GB available space
- Additional Notes: Not recommended for Intel HD GPUs
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Heaven's Vault is a good game that could've been a great game. The story is engaging. Actually, piecing together the story by uncovering artefacts, learning new words and exploring lost sites is what the game is about and what it excels at. The art is beautiful. But some aspects weight the game down. One of the main culprits I'd say is the sailing. There are space rivers you sail on. They flow in a certain direction and you can't go against their current. And they are slow. If you miss a connection you can waste minutes going back. Sailing them will be a considerable portion of your playtime and it gets old fast. It takes too long to go from place to place, sailing controls are unresponsive. In the last few hours I stopped exploring for ruins and shipwrecks, because here exploring is boring. And this takes me to the next problem... By the end the story looses steam. You progress by finding artefacts that point you to new sites which will have new artefacts to further direct your journey. There's a point where I feel the influx of artefacts sputtered which means progression slowed. By the end I just wanted to finish the story, I couldn't be bothered to explore the rivers because doing so was boring. The last area picked up the slack, but the game lost me for a few hours. Just be warned. The third problem is the confusing UI. Sometimes you leave a planet when you don't mean to. When decyphering longer sentences, you''ll be forced to scroll a long list of possible words. You can strike wrong ones, but why they aren't removed entirely I don't know. By the end, some really long sentences I just couldn't be bothered to translate with the burdensome interface. You have a dictionary of learned words, but can't directly consult it. You have an inventory of artefacts, but also can't access it to see what you should focus on. Little things like that. To close, the game is definitely worth playing and maybe even replaying (there's a NG+ but what it involves I don't know). At its core it successfully gamefies archeology and philology (the study of languages) and as a Tolkien fan I can appreciate the connection between culture, history and language that is so well portrayed here. But it leaves much to be desired in many other 'gamey' aspects. If you're a fan of adventure games or visual novels, this probably won't matter much.
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[*] Interesting story [*] Deciphering ancient language [*] Great linguistic fun [*] Nice graphics [*] Has a Disney's Treasure Planet vibe
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Let's start with the negative points . All the traversal is messed up. Okay it's a significant issue, let me explain. Controlling the character isn't pleasant, heavy and slow. It's difficult to explain, but you can't control your character when it's not on regular ground. The game takes back control at each stair, slope, when walking on a plank, etc. That's terribly frustrating. The ship control has the same issue. It's heavy, and the "flow" is one way, so if you choose the wrong path, you could spend a long time turning around! And even, you have to drive because if you fast travel (which is sometimes possible, sometimes not, I don't understand the rule) because you don't want to miss islands that contain glyphs. The second point is about the robot who assists you. When he decides that you have to leave a planet, he will ask you every 2 minutes to leave... until you accept... That's terribly annoying. But Let's talk about the good part! ! I think you've researched the translation/traduction gameplay, which is a really nice part. There are a lot of glyphs to decipher, and it's really the strength of this game. You need to research in the environment to find all of them. And if you don't understand the meaning, no problem, you can wait to find more glyphs in another context and translate later. It's really satisfying to take the book with all the glyphs and translate several of them in one stroke.
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This game is deceptively slow paced. Absolutely fantastic and immersive language translation that keeps you puzzling out more. The flying is beautiful and interesting if a little clunky. You can skip it but miss out on some dialogue. Don't forget to talk to everyone! Game really gets going and feels even more satisfying in New Game+ I absolutely recommend this!
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Wonderfully delivers on the concept of playing as an archaeologist uncovering the history and the lost language of the world you're placed in, and unlike most games, Heaven's Vault really does let you explore and uncover history rather than just passively collect logs and notes. An essential difference is that this game will allow you to speculate and be wrong, and put your wrong assumptions on the timeline the same way it would correct ones, and have reactions and unique dialogue prepared for them, which means that you as a player do actually need to pay attention, and amend past mistakes, and cross-reference your knowledge to reach proper conclusions. This is present in both the translation minigame and the general exploration/dialogue portions. The meat of the gameplay is deciphering an ancient language, and in my view, it's executed wonderfully. There are literally hundreds of samples of text for you to collect and reference, and by the end of the game you are likely to actually be able to read this (actually functional) language and recognize most of the graphemes, which feels incredibly gratifying. The game also provides a few opportunities to flex this knowledge in more... practical applications which serves to further that sense of real accomplishment as well. The other major part of the game is exploring and talking to people with some (relatively light, depending on how you choose to approach it) investigation elements. Things are more standard in this part with not as many interesting mechanics, but it's worth noting that the writing and the mystery itself are top of the range in terms of what you may generally see in videogames. It's very rare to be able to play a game and say "The writing here is good" without having to add "...for a game". Basically, what I'm saying is that I would still be able to recommend Heaven's Vault even if it were a book. This recommendation comes with a qualifier that the game DOES still feel about as smooth to play as chewing a bag of nails when you're starting out. The amount of little (and not so little) annoyances during gameplay is immense, and there is so much space for quality-of-life improvements (list of known graphemes for translations, better indication of what your character is about to say on any given generic "remark" or "question" prompt, etc.), and yet the good parts were good enough to win me over, despite me very much being a gameplay-first person. You have to teach yourself to trust this game: trust that it will bring up that one topic you didn't get to explore in a conversation, that it will remember one of your previous actions, that it will give you a chance to correct a mistake in deduction with new information, and so on; and once you get used to this approach, as well as the unconventional dialogue flow, and make peace with inability to manually save and try things out, you're in for a truly unique experience.
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 13 January 2025 00:32 |
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| SteamSpy data | 19 January 2025 10:37 |
| Steam price | 23 January 2025 12:41 |
| Steam reviews | 22 January 2025 11:53 |
