Heaven's Vault
Mar. 11th, 2021 09:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alias_sqbrA point and click puzzle game about being an archaeologist deciphering and learning an ancient language to understand the history of her fantasy-ish scifi world. A mix of uniquely fantastic and irritatingly flawed, but overall very much worth playing.
It's a branching narrative game that rewards replay but doesn't allow for multiple save files, so I strongly recommend buying it on Windows or Linux so you can manually create your own save files at major choices.
Here's some advice I wrote for new players
Accessibility: Someone with very slow response times could have trouble with the game, but I was fine. I was worried by complaints about an annoying ship-flying mechanic, but you have lots of warning before turns, and if you take too much of a wrong turn the game lets you rewind and try it again. It's just a lot of fiddly, repetitive map navigation, some of which can be fast forwarded on replays. Some conversation responses are timed, but so generously that they only ever timed out for me when I got distracted from the game and forgot to press pause. The screen flickers sometimes due to rendering bugs.
Content Notes: Robots have wheels and can't climb stairs, so throughout the game ramps are treated very explicitly as A Robot Thing in a way I found deeply annoying. There's a minor but hard to avoid plotline where you have to either buy or abandon a disabled slave. He can become free and happy but I still found it uncomfortable.
The language translation mechanic is super fun, dividing ancient inscriptions into words and piecing together the meaning is very satisfying, and the worldbuilding has fun Ancient Mysteries to untangle. And on replays the inscriptions get longer and more complex, giving you even more to untangle!
The point and click adventure game sections are mostly fun, wandering around strange landscapes looking for clues to the secret history etc. But sometimes the items can be easy to miss, and once you leave a place you often can't come back to explore more later (WHY) Conversations can't be fast forwarded through, and can often only be initiated and progressed by little prompts on the bottom of the screen I didn't always notice. In general, an immersive ~experience is often valued over ease of (re)play in a way that made me think longingly of Visual Novels. It was immersive...except for all the time I spent frustrated by the fiddliness.
The characters are well drawn (figuratively, I'm iffy on the actual art) and the main character Aliyah is especially fun. She's a bit of an anti-social troll who enjoys throwing herself into danger, which works well for a loner archaeologist sailing through space. But she's emotionally distant from everyone by nature, and doesn't really have any sort of character arc, which made everything feel a little muted, especially at the end, which is a bit abrupt.
The environmental storytelling is great. The narrative design is very clever, with the sort of subtle complexity you usually only see in text based games, and it was interesting replaying and taking a different approach to things. But some of the narrative choices are annoyingly unsubtle or unpleasant for no good reason, especially when they try and explore things like slavery or the protagonist's complex feelings about the poor city she grew up in. The setting is vaguely Middle Eastern, it's all a bit The Fall of Constantinople In Space, and this is mostly pretty well done, but the game was written by a white English dude who I suspect has never been poor and...yeah.
Aliyah's personality and the plot are a mixture of pre-defined and controlled by the player, and this sometimes worked like magic to fluidly follow my choices, and sometimes frustrated me: sometimes it felt like only one choice was in character so the others were just silly, while other times none of the choices matched the way I felt Aliyah should act. Also, there's no option to have her not be a least a bit of an asshole to robots, who are sentient beings treated like slaves, and while I can see why Aliyah would be like that it was an unpleasant character choice to be stuck with that didn't really go anywhere.
I'm really glad I played it twice. The basic plot is always the same, and by the end of my first playthrough I'd figured out the general shape of the world's history. But on my second playthrough I went through the narrative achievements I'd missed and experienced a bunch of fun "OH THAT'S WHAT HAPPENED" moments, and enjoyed seeing things play out in different ways.
It's a branching narrative game that rewards replay but doesn't allow for multiple save files, so I strongly recommend buying it on Windows or Linux so you can manually create your own save files at major choices.
Here's some advice I wrote for new players
Accessibility: Someone with very slow response times could have trouble with the game, but I was fine. I was worried by complaints about an annoying ship-flying mechanic, but you have lots of warning before turns, and if you take too much of a wrong turn the game lets you rewind and try it again. It's just a lot of fiddly, repetitive map navigation, some of which can be fast forwarded on replays. Some conversation responses are timed, but so generously that they only ever timed out for me when I got distracted from the game and forgot to press pause. The screen flickers sometimes due to rendering bugs.
Content Notes: Robots have wheels and can't climb stairs, so throughout the game ramps are treated very explicitly as A Robot Thing in a way I found deeply annoying. There's a minor but hard to avoid plotline where you have to either buy or abandon a disabled slave. He can become free and happy but I still found it uncomfortable.
The language translation mechanic is super fun, dividing ancient inscriptions into words and piecing together the meaning is very satisfying, and the worldbuilding has fun Ancient Mysteries to untangle. And on replays the inscriptions get longer and more complex, giving you even more to untangle!
The point and click adventure game sections are mostly fun, wandering around strange landscapes looking for clues to the secret history etc. But sometimes the items can be easy to miss, and once you leave a place you often can't come back to explore more later (WHY) Conversations can't be fast forwarded through, and can often only be initiated and progressed by little prompts on the bottom of the screen I didn't always notice. In general, an immersive ~experience is often valued over ease of (re)play in a way that made me think longingly of Visual Novels. It was immersive...except for all the time I spent frustrated by the fiddliness.
The characters are well drawn (figuratively, I'm iffy on the actual art) and the main character Aliyah is especially fun. She's a bit of an anti-social troll who enjoys throwing herself into danger, which works well for a loner archaeologist sailing through space. But she's emotionally distant from everyone by nature, and doesn't really have any sort of character arc, which made everything feel a little muted, especially at the end, which is a bit abrupt.
The environmental storytelling is great. The narrative design is very clever, with the sort of subtle complexity you usually only see in text based games, and it was interesting replaying and taking a different approach to things. But some of the narrative choices are annoyingly unsubtle or unpleasant for no good reason, especially when they try and explore things like slavery or the protagonist's complex feelings about the poor city she grew up in. The setting is vaguely Middle Eastern, it's all a bit The Fall of Constantinople In Space, and this is mostly pretty well done, but the game was written by a white English dude who I suspect has never been poor and...yeah.
Aliyah's personality and the plot are a mixture of pre-defined and controlled by the player, and this sometimes worked like magic to fluidly follow my choices, and sometimes frustrated me: sometimes it felt like only one choice was in character so the others were just silly, while other times none of the choices matched the way I felt Aliyah should act. Also, there's no option to have her not be a least a bit of an asshole to robots, who are sentient beings treated like slaves, and while I can see why Aliyah would be like that it was an unpleasant character choice to be stuck with that didn't really go anywhere.
I'm really glad I played it twice. The basic plot is always the same, and by the end of my first playthrough I'd figured out the general shape of the world's history. But on my second playthrough I went through the narrative achievements I'd missed and experienced a bunch of fun "OH THAT'S WHAT HAPPENED" moments, and enjoyed seeing things play out in different ways.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-11 04:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-03-12 03:47 am (UTC)Cool, I hope you enjoy it!