Разработчик: inkle Ltd
Описание
Winner - IGF Excellence in Narrative award 2019
Nomination -BAFTA for Best British Game 2020
Story
Aliya Elasra is an archaeologist, exploring a strange region of space called the Nebula with her robot sidekick Six, hoping to uncover the secrets of the long-forgotten past. When a roboticist from the University of Iox goes missing, Aliya begins a trail of discoveries that will lead to the very edge of her world - and the ancient secret of Heaven's Vault.Gameplay
Heaven's Vault is not your usual linear adventure game. Progress through the game in any order you choose - the game's fully adaptive narrative remembers every choice you make, every discovery and every action you take, influencing what happens next. Meet a diverse cast of characters who remember everything you say, and who's attitude to you will change with how you act. Some are friendly, some are cautious, and some are out to trick you.Who will you trust? What will you find? What will you learn? What will you risk? What will you lose?
- Explore ancient sites, discover lost ruins
- Find artefacts and translate their strange hieroglyphics
- Sail an open-world of fast flowing space-rivers
- Piece together the history of the world and an entire ancient language
- Diverse cast of characters that remember everything you say
Translate Ancient Hieroglyphs
An entire ancient hieroglyphic language awaits to be deciphered. A puzzle mechanic with a twist: solutions are narratively significant and further the story - but the wrong translation might send you down the wrong track!Critically Acclaimed
"One of the most well-realized video game worlds ever, with your curiosity and personality molding your story through the Nebula" - USGamer
"Heaven’s Vault is both ambitious and beautiful. It conjures a world rich with life... I don’t hesitate to recommend Heaven’s Vault." - Game Informer
"Heaven's Vault is one of the most enthralling narrative-driven adventure games I've played" - Wired
Industry leading narrative engine
Powered by the ink engine, the narrative technology behind 80 Days, Sorcery!, NeoCab, Sable, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine and many more, Heaven's Vault is a dynamically constructed adventure game that responds to every move you make.Поддерживаемые языки: english
Системные требования
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
Mac
- OS: macOS 10.10 Yosemite or later
- Processor: SSE2 instruction set support
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Mac supporting OpenGL 3.3 or later
- Storage: 2 GB available space
Отзывы пользователей
Heaven Vault does something unique, while it has some clunky bits.
The translation mechanic in the heart of the game is bit frustrating, but in a good way. You need to guess things based on context and in order to get close to the real answer, you need to collect more sentences to have better clue what the word might actually be. The game does take away some of you agency as the main character with enough clues might tell that some wrong is definitely wrong or right.
Finding all the objects requires sailing around the world and finding texts in exploreable areas. One playthrough is not enough to translate everything. It's not enough to even to experience all the content.
Speaking of sailing, it might be the worst thing about the game. Interaction is quite minimal (though at least towards the end some of the routes are more complex).
As said in the beginning, Heavens Vault is exploring genre that still mostly unexplored, so it's definitely worth trying out.
A quite interesting narrative and translating the language over the course of the game is a very rewarding puzzle.
This game is designed to be played through more than once.
Also this game is designed to be hard for you to explore possible outcomes.
There are no manual save or any other in-game way to explore possible choices.
There are time-limited elements game do not warn you about.
There are time-gated elements, you are not allowed to progress until you spend time.
There are events limiting control over your character.
There is no distinction between random expo banter and dialogue with consequences.
I think devs has spent more time thinking of how to gate player then thinking of game's content.
The result of this design choice: 28% game completion and 16% new game+ starts.
Whole game is superficial and excruciatingly slow paced. Here example of translation puzzle (which are like 80% of the game btw):
There are well and npc nearby. The well has the inscription. Npc tells you that the inscription means "water".
If you spend a couple of hours taking notes, doing puzzles and gather enough words you could translate the inscription.
It says not merely "water", but "holy water from below rock"
Woo-hoo.
This game has some great ideas : i love translation mechanics and playing an archeologist in a sci-fi setting is really a good setup. However, the execution is really rough : interactions feel slow, the UI with the timeline/translations/map really could be better (no way to see ALL artifacts collected and deduce ourselves the origin points, so we just collect artifacts and go where the robot says to go). In sooo many interactions, it just feels like the game is intentionally making things difficult (having to wait 5min to give Huang another artefact, the moving platform at the end, the character refusing to go certain places that look important).
I know this game is supposed to be played in multiple playthroughs, and I'd love to dig through to figure out all of the story, but this is really too frustrating to do it all over again. Hopefully for future games, the game design will take into account more aspects of UX.
TLDR: The story and language make it worth it, despite some frustrating design choices.
Pros:
* The story. I didn't even know I enjoyed narrative games! But the "choose your own" adventure is done well and the mysteries (and the fact that you are solving them) makes it addictive.
* The language deciphering is so so fun. Once you get to a specific point in the game and you can just decipher page after page... oof! I spent hours until I finished them all.
* The game controls are simple and easy to learn - WASD to move, mouse to turn, 123 and QR for dialog. (I don't have the patience to learn complex controls anymore. HV lets you focus on the actual game.)
Cons:
* I get that it's a design choice, but I am not a fan of the character graphics. They feel out of place in the world.
* The amount of italics in the dialogs made me think it meant something! Nope, they just over emphasize everything.
* Traveling between moons is too long. (That said - the graphics are gorgeous and it was a smart idea to let you talk to the robot and get more lore while sailing.)
* You can't fast forward through anything. Good for immersion, but I just started my first NG+ and I really wish I could skip the dialogs I already know...
* The timeline is pointless. I thought it would help with deciphering the language or something, but nope, it's just for flavor. (The time would have been better spent on better character graphics.)
Clunky translation system (you're given the words)
Unecessary TellTale discussion system
Overloaded timeline system
2-framed walking animations
A game that had an insane amount of potential, but blocked by frustrating mechanics.
I dont want to give it a dislike - as I got the game for an extremely budget friendly price, the story is obviously well thought out, and the the scene and world building is gorgeous. Plus i love a game with language translation.
But the other mechanics were just painful. I wanted a slow, peaceful game but this game's mechanics were not only slow, but left me frustrated, especially as thorough completion-ist type of gamer.
The changes in your character moving by itself versus when you move the character is ...strange and creates an awkward flow in the gameplay. There were interactives , that were could easily get missed due to optional dialogue with your robot. The only way to ensure you don't miss interactives it to be at a complete standstill while the robot or you is talking. and then walk when no talking is happening.
Also. as a completionist- i have to say there seem to be a soft level of "choices matter" which i didn't initially see in the tags. I ran through one conversation in the beginning and then restarted the game and my "timeline" showed something different based on my dialogue selection. I didn't get far enough to know how important that would be , but feel people should know.
The dialogue flow is also so random and almost feels buggy. I don't know if it actually is, but sometimes I am talking to someone from like 30 yards away.
There were other smaller things that I personally don't get bothered by , but could imagine others may be bothered by - the walk cycle is slow, the boat/steering is slow, apparently you can soft lock yourself out of planets , if you let the robot tell you when to leave ( Personally, i didnt run into this because I am so adamant to search every nook and cranny before i click ANYTHING that says "lets leave")
Tried to restart the game after unintentionally making one too many choices I didn't realise would be permanent (go to moon to talk to person, leave moon by accident before talking to them, now I can't visit the moon again? come on) now the game doesn't start (Aliya and Six just stand around)
This game had a chokehold on my life and feels very dear to me.
It keeps the tension steady with a good mystery and the translation mechanics support this well. The style is gorgeous, game looks amazing. Walking is slow, not necessarily a bad thing when you get used to it, but the game makes up for this with wonderful (optional!) dialogue between the protagonist and robot. Sometimes this reveals a part of the mystery!
The language is quite fun to learn as it has a simple yet effective system that is not apparent right away. My favourite part of the game was actually going back to phrases I could not translate before and finding new meanings in them (sometimes I was quite off, they can lead you astray!) which actually reveal the story! It was a rather gratifying :O moment for me!
Too many loose ends, unsatisfying ending (with no prompt that you are about to hit a point of no return), locked out of revisiting moons if you leave... too many elements outweigh the pros of this game.
This is a very slow game, I do not typically agree with people when they call other games slow but this one is very very slow. I enjoyed understanding the language and the sparks of interesting history that you uncover throughout the story. But the major discoveries are too spaced out and the ending does not have a satisfying conclusion.
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.
Fantastic exploration game that should not be missed
Heaven’s Vault is not like any other video game I’ve played, possibly ever in my life, and that makes it both incredibly alluring and incredibly daunting to review. Let it never be said, though, that I don’t try. If it’s novel in some strange, new way, you can bet it’s going to snag me like a fishing hook; whether it then reels me in, and possibly you by association, that’s what we’re here to see.
Imagine a heroine who doesn’t wield weapons. She doesn’t rappel down cliffs, and she doesn’t slay monsters. Yet she’s got attitude and an adventurous spirit. She braves personal harm in less than hospitable environments for her cause. And what is that cause, you’re asking?
The exciting world of archeology...
Let’s get this out in the open: our protagonist, Aliya Elasra, isn’t Lara Croft, and she’s not a lady Indiana Jones either. She is after artifacts from the past, but she does so at a walking pace, examining long forgotten sites with nothing but the help of her cosmic sailing vessel, her intuition, and her robot companion, Six. Interestingly, whether you play her as a fortune seeker or space scholar is up to you. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Right from the get-go, everything about this game radiates a sense of how different it is from its hand-drawn art direction to its gameplay. The main mechanic, as well as the story element that drives the narrative, is in deciphering an ancient language. The game frequently fades to a text translation mini-game in which Aliya attempts to use words she knows (or thinks she knows but isn’t sure of yet), as well as the context in which she finds inscriptions, to figure out new words. And in so doing, she pieces together more clues about the locations she visits and the things she finds.
There is a larger plot at work, as well. When the disappearance of a fellow university scholar starts Aliya on a course to retrace his discoveries and hopefully where he disappeared to, the plot quickly grows to something more ominous. Something to which the key to stopping may be locked in the past. And it’s up to you to dig it up.
What’s funny to me in hindsight is the concept of context. When I played the demo at PAX East back 2019, I had no idea how far into the game I was glimpsing. I approached the translations as a person completely guessing based on nothing but the onscreen word suggestions, what some symbols seemed to resemble, and Aliya’s immediate surroundings. That alone was enough to hook me, but it took on a whole new level of meaning as I played the game again at home. As it turns out, that scene was quite a ways into the game, and coming to that point again the game had now trained me to recognize several of the word elements and the types of words they were typically seen in (for example the pictographs for person, travel, and place), an insight I didn’t have on the PAX show floor.
This was a layer that was previous hidden to me, the idea that one could make better guesses at words based on more than just the context of where they were found. When translating a new word or phrase, the screen had always displayed some related words along the top of the screen, previously encountered combinations of glyphs that might maybe be related, but this was a new level of depth I didn’t realize was incorporated into the game.
This insight that took my ancient language skills to the next level was exhilarating! The realization that I could combine “above” with “light” to make “stars” but I could also combine it with “opposite” to make “below” (I should note that these words are my own designations for the symbols, as there are very few actual words formed by single glyphs).
The game is full of these little “aha” moments and is all the richer for them. When you’re complimented by another character on your first translation you might feel as if you’ve made nothing more than a lucky guess. But when you complete your first 4 word phrase, you’ll feel quite clever. When translations start relying on your recognition of how words start and finish in order to properly translate a sentence with no spaces, you will feel like an accomplished scholar. And the first time you panic over a phrase that fills the entire screen, or a word that’s at least 8 characters long, you will feel like a first-year student again. And yet, each time Aliya or Six confirms a word you’re using correctly your confidence grows, and you find yourself eagerly hunting out every scrap of paper, every inscription in stone or bronze, just for a chance to throw your brain at one more phrase.
That’s not to say that the game ever lets you lock yourself into a wrong translation. On occasion Aliya or Six will state their confidence in a word choice being used correctly, ensuring you’ll never be able to incorrectly swap it to something else, or they will express doubt, signaling you’ve been misusing a word for too long, forcing you to adjust it. At any time, you can pause the game and go into your history of translations or hop back to previous ones through the “related words” above one you’re currently working on, ensuring that you’re never more than a few inputs away from revising your notes.
This is the kind of game best enjoyed with a relaxing cup of hot tea in the evening. Savor the intrigue, revel in the mystery. For some, the idea of there being no run button, that the entire game is at the speed of Aliya walking, might be a terrifying thought. In a way, it reminds me a lot of a recent triple-A title that was also criticized for being slow and forcing the player to play at its own pace: Red Dead Redemption 2. It was also a game I found that was best enjoyed if you let yourself get lost in its world and worried less about a fast travelling everywhere; and in the places such things really count, Heaven’s Vault does include fast travel to locations you’ve already visited, though you’ll need to fly new routes manually the first time. If you can’t stop to smell the flowers while Aliya copies the latest inscription into her journal, this probably isn’t the game for you.
There’s also the concern that the game progressively saves as you play. Like an ironman mode, there is no reloading your game if you botch a particular dialogue or exploration section. This will result in you missing things your first time through the game, and whether you have the patience to sit through an entire second playthrough is up to you (knowing that if you miss something accidentally again you’re out of luck). I’ve become more than a little frustrated at certain side areas of the game knowing that I could have done them better but being 12+ hours into the game and unwilling to start everything over. Your mileage may vary, so you’d do well to visualize your future self messing up a section and seeing how it makes you feel.
That being said, if you’re still at least a little curious reading through all those concerns, I think you’ll do just fine giving Heaven’s Vault a try. Curiosity is the right state of mind to approach this title with. There’s plenty on offer in terms of character, story, and total hours of gameplay. The lore is rich and the world feels like the characters have lived in it for much longer than the span of me picking up a controller. This fresh take on the adventure game genre is something I haven’t really seen before, so if you consider yourself either a fan of old adventure games or are just looking for something interesting and different, you should pick this game up. I guarantee you’ve never played anything quite like it and you’ll be glad you did.
Verdict: 8/10
Absolutely loved the game. Was looking for more conlang games after playing Chants of Senaar and the language is wonderfully constructed and I love how the symbols and grammar fit together. And I could sail the rivers all day, the Nebula is beautiful.
This game is lowkey one of the best reading/mystery games I've ever played, and the fact that the game is so continuous (ifykyk) makes this perfect to play day after day, and yet also take a break and come back to. Refreshing, like a river.
I played through twice, once for story and then again to pick up any achievements I missed. Honestly my biggest issue with the game was there is no sprint. El moves with the quickness of a glacier and it never gets any better. Other than that, I really enjoyed it. I found myself leaning forward in my chair a few times when deciphering things later in the game going 'oooohhh if that means this then the story behind it might mean...' and so on. I really enjoyed the world building and still have a few questions about things. And it does have replay value- my first playthrough I poked into every recess and deciphered all I could. The second, I was just trying to rush through and it actually makes a difference how you perceive the world if you aren't getting all the sideline information. The art was very nice and I really enjoyed the music. Check it out!
Loved this game! The translation puzzles were interesting, the world was fascinating and had so much more depth than I expected, and the way you could interact with people and change their lives was really cool!
I would die for Six, I love it so much*
(Give him the voice of Sazed from Mistborn auible books. you'll thank me)
What a beautiful game. I've invested so many hours into it and have gotten more enjoyment out of the game than what I paid for. I'm enchanted by the engaging language-deciphering process, as well as the fascinating universe where we explore. Leaving this review is the end of my loop, and I can't wait for the next chapter of games from Inkle.
PEAK
Visually striking and with an unusual mood: calm yet eerie. The game had several other unusual elements: the timeline, the sense of history, the incomplete understanding of what really happened. I enjoyed the exploration. My only quibble was that it could be difficult to navigate turns in the river.
A nice game, with a great story, interesting locations and fantastic translation mechanic. I didn't like the endings, I felt like I was given a choice between a bad ending and a worse one, but - oh well.
A deeply intriguing game uncovering ancient mysteries and figuring out a lost language. There are alternate paths I could have taken and things I didn't learn such that I hope to play it again some day.
Дополнительная информация
| Разработчик | inkle Ltd |
| Платформы | Windows |
| Ограничение возраста | Нет |
| Дата релиза | 22.11.2024 |
| Metacritic | 76 |
| Отзывы пользователей | 87% положительных (1422) |