Heaven's Vault

All the things I'm into. I don't feel this pandered to very often.

This is a strong yes but with a very significant caveat that my positive reception is almost entirely tied to the narrative elements with the gameplay mechanics mostly being neutral at best and active hindrances at worst. The setting is fascinating and I loved piecing the language and the history of the world together. Too much of the time, however, I felt like I was fighting the UI and blindly poking at things in an attempt to trigger the right conversation tree that will let me see a specific story/quest line and as of right now, there are still two achievements I have not managed to unlock because there must be some unobvious variables preventing my progress. Spoiler warning for details: [spoiler] 1. I've triggered the ransacking of Oroi's place but when I go to Tapi's store as the guides say to do, she is not there. Tapi kind of hints that he is helping her but will not say so outright even when I press him on it later in the conversation. Maybe his trust/friendship level is not high enough but that is not a mechanic the game explicitly mentions and as far as I know, there is no way to see my relationship level with anyone. I've given him 6 artifacts, I think, and I have triggered the interaction where he gives me an astrolabe and asks me to find the site it came from. I thought that would be enough for Oroi's plot line but maybe I need to actually find the site and tell him about it first? Something to try in my next loop, I guess. Edit, 7-5-26: Same save file. Went to Iox, explored the rivers for a bit, and then returned to Elboreth. This time when I went to Tapi's, he blocked me from entering and said I was not welcome but then Oroi called him off and I was able to speak to her. Obtained the Reunion achievement. 2. I also cannot trigger the sealing of the gates on Iox. In one run, I actually got the line from Six that he needs to inform Myari about the people who might be the cause of the Fall but despite travelling to other moons and returning to Iox several times after that and even speaking to Myari directly, I never received the message that the gates have been sealed and do not have the corresponding achievement. [/spoiler] The bottom line is that I do recommend this game to anyone interested in speculative fiction focused on history/language as long as they are comfortable with janky gameplay. If the premise sounds interesting but the gameplay sounds too janky, reading the novels might be a better option. I have not read them yet but from what I understand, volumes 1 and 2 cover the events of the game while volumes 3 and 4 deal with what happens after. Now that I think I have seen most of the lore the game has to offer, I do intend to read the books next and I will try to remember to come back and update this review after I am done. Update, 7-5-26: I have read all 4 novels. The first two novels do follow broadly the events of the game but they are not really an attempt to stich the different game paths into a cohesive narrative. Granted, it is possible that there are story paths I have not stumbled into and the novels follow what is supposed to be the golden path but they alter many events and the fates of several characters in ways that directly contradict how the same events were depicted in the game. The second duology depicts the events that follow the end of the game but honestly, they are kind of a rehash of the first duology. I am keeping this very vague to avoid spoilers, obviously, because the narrative is worth experiencing despite the gameplay but if the gameplay is a complete deal breaker, the novels are an ok way to learn more about the setting. Just keep in mind that the events and the people depicted in the novels do not exactly match their game counterparts. Some differ only in minor ways, others are entirely different. On a personal note, I also strongly dislike how the novels handled the Loop and Aliya's character arc. I would recommend the game over the novels but the recommendation is partially due to subjective personal preferences.

I like the language system, the music, and the story. It's a bit short (and I'd like a sequel), but I like replaying it. The language seems to change between playthroughs, which makes the replay even more interesting. The game mechanics seems clunky sometimes, but I kind of think it just adds to the game. If you miss a turn it's not a catastrophe, just restart the road or find a new path. It's somewhat creepy at times, but also peaceful.

I have been getting into ink recently and thought that I would explore the games catalog. If you are unaware, ink is a text-based creation system, mostly oriented towards choose-your-own adventure style novels. It supports variables, branching, and other things all in plaintext. Heaven's Vault, by all accounts that I have heard, is an "incredible" game with "unlimited" replayability. Granted these are takes from the official ink discord, which is obviously biased, but it was enough for me to purchase the game. Unfortunately, everything here that is "game" is not well designed, certainly not enough to carry the "literature" that it pretends to be. The graphical style is fine. I always appreciate hand drawn art, even when its mixed with very awkward camera angles and poor animation. Occasionally character sprites will face the wrong ways, blink in and out of existence, etc., which seems easy to fix, but 7 years after release these issues still persist. The audio is half-nonexistent. Many areas will simply be mute, some narration is given voiced lines, while others are not. There is no consistency. The music is mostly ambient; so ambient in fact, that you will likely not notice it nine times out of ten. The actual gameplay is full of friction and will be confusing to almost any new player. It is not made obvious when you are able to actually control your character and when it is a 'cutscene'. Walking to specific spots will simply take the control away from you for a minute and automatically walk. Generally the only purpose of exploration is to reveal interaction nodes, which have no indication they exist until you are on top of them. Dialogue is ever-present, and it feels weird to complain about the existence of content, but it tends to be a burden: you are prompted with "Reply... " and "Reply?" frequently while traversing areas, which are obviously meaningless choices by themselves. I don't understand this design decision, presumably this is to add replayability to NG+, but that assumes every player memorizes each choice they have made in each ambient dialogue and to me makes no sense. Just have the characters *say* something. Dialogue is written in ALL CAPS and the dialogue bubbles will move around the screen while you're trying to read them as the camera rotates and characters move. ALL CAPS text is difficult to read at length, that's why books are not written this way. This has been proven time and time again by scientific studies, including one from Harvard. I really don't understand why in the 21st century we still have this happening, especially with a team so focused on the writing aspect of their game. The translation mechanic is well done. You are given the opportunity to guess at word meanings, which may or may not be revealed as correct when you discover them again. This does not open branching paths in the story as far as I can tell, a mistranslation cannot lead you down a different story path, but it is simply a fun mini puzzle with a single solution. The last part of the game loop is the sailing, which is why I gave up on this game and won't be revisiting it. While the nebula design itself is serviceable and even pretty in some parts, the gameplay is just "move left" or "move right" to change paths. If you miss a path, you get a prompt: "You missed the turn! Press X to restart" and you just do it again. These sequences are slow, awkward, throw the "Reply" prompts at you while you're trying to sail, and last way, way too long - plus, you can't skip them even after you've done them once (there is a 3rd party mod that completely removes them, I hear). The world-building seems to be well done, but the entire point of the game is to unravel the world building, and I don't have the patience for it. The first few hours of the game were not compelling enough and had enough mistakes that I feel it would be a waste of my time to continue. Unfortunately, as the highest-rated ink game, this also makes me lose any hope that the others would be worth my time, too.

4/10 (personal score) 7/10 (objective score) Not a bad game, just not for me. This is not a puzzle game. It's got some puzzle elements, but it's really not that. It's a slow walking simulator crossed with a visual novel. Playing this game reminded me of watching those old cartoons, where all the images are just stills instead of being actually animated. There are some people who will LOVE that. I just wasn't one of them. Pros: * The art style, where the characters look like 2d drawings, is pretty neat. * Piecing together a foreign language is a really cool idea, and that part of it was pretty fun for the most part. * The music was great; chill, relaxing. Perfect for this kind of game. * The voice acting was great. No complaints there. Cons: * This game is mechanically slow. You walk slow. Every time you find new pcs of the unknown language, it plays this little cut-scene type thing, that was soooo tiresome by the end. Every time you change scenes, there's text that fades line by line onto the screen to tell you where you're headed, and it's unskippable. But the worst offender by far are the tedious sailing portions to new areas. Your boat crawls at a snails pace, and it was incredibly annoying (and frustratingly easy) to miss a turn. This annoyance was amplified by your robot companion telling you which way to turn too late to actually be helpful. * The story was only okay. It had some cool reveals, but I just wasn't engrossed most of the time. I never felt attached to any of the characters. * The dialogue options in this game are sometimes incredibly unclear. I chose an option several times that I thought was a good option, and the character goes off talking about something I didn't want to say, usually causing my robot friend to get angry or sad, when I intended to do just the opposite. I also had several times (including the final, climactic decision in the game) where I chose the wrong thing by accident, just because I clicked the wrong button. Which is my own fault, but it really soured the experience for me, because there's no way to undo it or revert to a previous save. * There were several frustrating moments where I was attempting to decipher a bit of text, and I got it wrong. When this happens, the game removes one of the options from the pool of available words and lets you try again. But there was a bug where the available options would flow off the screen, and there was no way to fix it without exiting out. The problem is it pulls you out of the deciphering interface, which ended the deciphering session right then and there. This was incredibly annoying, but it didn't happen very often. If you like walking simulators or visual novels, you might ADORE this game. And there are some cool story beats here. I had bits of fun with this, but it's not my cup of tea.

This game brings up conflicting feelings. On the one hand I love tha language puzzles, the world, the mistery. On the other hand there are some general and some specific problems that I have: For one, this game does not respect your time. I don't know if this is due to it being more of a console game or something, but you can really feel that movement, the pauses and certain choices are just painfully slow. Another thing (a personal irk) is that everyone is so hostile when communicating. I think only Huang is the only one mc has neutral/slightly positive interactions with. So overall the positives outweighed the negatives for me in the end, but there were several moments I seriously thought about dropping the game due to the negatives.