Heaven’s Vault Review

A researcher who wants to uncover the ancient past and her robot, Six, go on an adventure that takes them down a path that they didn’t expect. In Heaven’s Vault you play the part of Aliya Elasra, and you will be travelling all over the nebula uncovering artifacts and deciphering a long lost language. There are many characters to interact with and a story that you can attack from all sides. 

I’m going to be honest I thought I was going to play a game about a researcher who travels to places around Earth deciphering different ancient languages, but boy was I wrong. This game takes place in a fictitious universe where different moons house different cities, and few are brave enough to travel between them because they have to navigate through rivers suspended in space, and many of these rivers go to places that few if any have travelled to. You will be confronted with tons of partial inscriptions that you’ll have to decipher, and chances are you may translate them incorrectly. It is only through translating tons of inscriptions that you can hone in on the actual words that correspond to the characters used. 

This game is all about exploration and investigating every nook and cranny of this universe. There is a main storyline that is in place, but you can really take it on at your own pace. I will warn you that your choices and actions do affect the game, sometimes for the better, and sometimes it will “take the wind out of your sails”. I will admit that travelling from place to place is both soothing and nerve racking. There are going to be plenty of times where you’re going to take a fork in the river only to be informed that you missed your turn. At first I would immediately hit the retry button to get back on the correct path, but most of the streams go in a circle, eventually, and there’s a chance that you’ll discover something you may miss, if you stick strictly to the most direct path to a destination. There’s also the fact that the rivers have currents so it isn’t as if you can just pull a 180. 

This will probably not be the most exciting game for many gamers out there, but I have to admit that uncovering and deciphering the inscriptions kept me going. This mindset actually led me to continue the game after completing it because you can do a New Game+ where you retain your dictionary from your previous playthrough so that you can translate even more inscriptions. That’s right folks you are not going to be able to translate all of the artifacts that you find, well I’m sure if you just ignored the main story entirely you would eventually get there, but I believe most players will opt just to complete the game to see what the ending turns out to be.

I just really enjoyed this game. It had, for me, a very laid back pace. I got to explore and deviate from what I was originally setting out to do, and I really felt that many of my decisions actually had serious weight to them. I still go back to this game in small spurts just to fill out that dictionary a little bit more.