Heaven's Vault on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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 2,169 reviews of which 1,863 were positive and 306 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.2 out of 10. 😎
The game is currently priced at 21.99€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified Heaven's Vault into these genres:
System 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
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Initially I was wondering why this game doesn't get more hype despite all the praise, and then I quickly realised that all the other reviews are correct: the travel mechanics of this game is frustrating. Hand sailing makes sense in new unknown waters, but on known and fully mapped out paths? I don't think anyone would be interested in the exact minute details of Indiana Jones' 8+ hours flight to the country of his exciting new dig location. Please just give us the exciting new dig location directly. Regarding storytelling, I'm a big fan of the non-linear narrative so no complaints about that from me. The MC's personality is definitely an acquired taste ( she's so acerbic bordering on hostile so often that it's off-putting for me ). While this game is not mainly a story about MC's life, I'd appreciate a few more breadcrumbs about why some characters aren't welcoming to her . Without the background information on the characters, the dialogues feel very choppy sometimes. Gameplay aspect here is (personally speaking) not bad, although a non-automatic dialogue would be great. I'm easily distracted and have missed several dialogue lines due to autoplay. Overall I'd still recommend this, although not for everyone. The game's linguistic puzzle is very enjoyable for me. The plot is intriguing enough to suffer through the travel mechanics. It's better to come into this with the knowledge that it's not a fast game, and that choices do matter. Just like real life, some decisions are final. Reincarnation is a big deal in this game, so maybe you'll have more luck in your next life playthrough. If they fix the whole travelling thing then I guess people will do NG+ a lot more and complain less about the lack of checkpoints save/load .
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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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ride out the clunky gameplay, you get used to its quirks. Everything you discover makes the story richer and deeper. It's simply addictive to uncover more. I can't wait to play it again. I already am!
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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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I enjoyed playing this game, but it did have a few unfortunate issues that made it not as good as I was hoping for. The general idea is that you're an archaeologist exploring various ruins, viewing ancient script in an effort to deduce the history of the world, what's going on, etc. In this way, you might compare it to Outer Wilds, though the gameplay isn't very similar apart from the basic idea. Apart from actually translating the language yourself, the other main interesting thing about this game is that it features a dynamic story which changes based on the choices you make. In terms of the language discovery, I think it does fine enough, though it's not perfect. The language does end up mirroring the grammar of English, but each word is made of lots of small symbols, and over time you can end up deducing the meaning of new words by paying close attention to how these are put together. The game helps you along by giving you multiple-choice answers for each word rather than filling in the answers yourself. This makes sense, especially early on, as you need a jumping off point to start translating from. As the game goes on, you end up being able to solve things yourself, and if you want a bit higher difficulty I recommend not looking at the multiple-choice answers unless you think you already have a good guess of what the translation means from the symbols alone. The game will occasionally tell you whether one of your guesses was right or wrong. This was annoying to me a couple of times when I really thought something was right, and it ended up being wrong, but unless you're as strict as me about spoilers you'll probably not find this to be a bad thing. Most of the time, it ended up telling me things I was already confident in anyway. In terms of the story, I found the flexible narrative structure to be really interesting, but the parts where it was lacking in agency stood out like a sore thumb. While the story gives you lots of choices, you often lack choices in areas where they aren't explicitly given to you. The biggest example of this is that you can't revisit areas you've already been to, unless you have a reason to. This was really frustrating as sometimes I would want to go back to check something, and sometimes I felt the game was pointing me to go someplace but I wasn't actually allowed to yet. Make sure you don't leave an area until you think you're done with it. I replayed the game a few times, trying to gather more information about the world through exploring story paths I missed. This was pretty fun, as I got to see how wildly different a playthrough could be - you're bound to have a unique experience from most others when you play this game, which is cool. However, going back to try and find anything specific is frustrating, as if you end up making the wrong choices in the story, you might miss what you were aiming for, not learning anything new. This was especially frustrating as there was one particular part of the story which seemed like it hinted at some sort of deeper linguistic puzzle, which really seemed cool to me, but I wasn't able to get back there. Unfortunately, even if you do get on the correct path to find this, it doesn't seem you're really intended to solve this puzzle, which is quite strange as the game seemed to mark it as extremely important storywise. Overall, I think playing through the game and trying the various translation aspects was fun, and it was neat to experience a dynamic story like this. However, be aware that while you can go back and replay the game to learn more about the world, it's hard to find anything specific by doing this, and it's often very slow to play through everything you already know for the few things that are new. (You can try setting the game speed to be higher using a tool like Cheat Engine, if that helps). Unfortunately, you probably won't be able to find the answers to all the questions you have due to the difficutly of covering every story path, and there's no super secret final puzzle or anything after playing through several times. But if you enjoy linguistic puzzles and think you'd enjoy a playthrough or two of the dynamic story, try it out.
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Last Updates| Steam data | 13 April 2025 15:16 |
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| Steam price | 14 April 2025 04:40 |
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