Heaven’s Vault: extremely good, but I wanted it to be great, and it doesn’t quite get there. The first fifteen minutes feel like scraping your nails against painted drywall as you fight with the weird interface; then you learn to let it recede into the background; then you start to abuse it in an unsatisfyingly gamey way. The art isn’t quite there, the things that should be beautiful aren’t quite, the 2d-on-3d work with moving characters is just a bit too choppy and bland. As an archaeologist you spend all this time digging up artifacts but they’re almost never depicted, which seems a huge missed opportunity to reinforce art styles across the different eras you’re learning about. The music is nice but repetitive. The sailing minigame, as the only kinesthetic element of the game, is woefully underrealized and has no stakes (afaict you can’t crash or anything).
BUT. By halfway through, I was prepared to give Heaven’s Vault that most elusive of critical evaluations: more than the sum of its parts. It is explicitly a game of ARCHAEOLOGY, which is just about my favorite thing to do in games, from Riven to Outer Wilds. Figuring out how the past is layered on itself, creating a cultural prism through which you see history kaleidoscopically, trying to reverse-engineer it to bring each of its frames of color into focus… The writing is very good; people are complex and well-characterized with just a few words. In order to convince people to do what you want, you have to imagine their motivations 3-dimensionally and appeal to them correctly. And sometimes it just won’t work. People aren’t infinitely malleable. The main mechanic, which is finding scraps of ancient script and comparing them against each other to figure out translations, is incredibly solid. It always feels so satisfying to find a new inscription and puzzle out a new word. It feels deeply satisfying to start to decode the grammar on a symbological level and be able to understand new words immediately just by looking at them.
Eventually my conversation-with-the-designer neared completion and I started to really understand how the game wanted to be played on its own terms. Though it boasts a seemingly robust choices-and-consequences style of constant autosaving and dialogue and decisions you can’t take back, you can almost always get at whatever you want by alternative means. Deciding how to manage each of the “quests” (not demarcated as such in-game, but that’s what they are) with the main characters is more a matter of taste (or accident) than of affecting the endgame or your ability to progress. There’s this system of “optional” dialogue where you can respond to events with a Question or a Reply if you want, but don’t have to; but you quickly realize that it is almost always (except in a couple specific signposted instances which I enjoyed and appreciated) in your best interest to stand around and keep clicking on this optional dialogue until it is exhausted, because it almost always reveals a bit of additional detail or context that will become useful to your investigations. So it’s not really that optional, if you want to do what the game is designed for you to do, which is figure things out.
So in the midgame I was really feeling it but by the end my opinion had soured again a little bit down to that Very Good level. I was able to get “good ends” with most of the characters, and neutral ends with a couple others that I was fine with. The interface for dealing with new inscriptions (grabbing candidate words and using the left stick to drag them around and plop them in likely spots) got frustrating once the inscriptions got longer, and VERY frustrating once I knew the language better and could already tell how to separate out the words but had to put the wrong ones in on purpose so that the interface could mark out the wrong possibilities one at a time. Sometimes this meant plopping the same words five or six times in a row before it would finally let me proceed with translation.
There’s a seemingly big choice just before the endgame that I thought would lead to very interesting consequences but it turned out there was only one thing that you were required to do and its import was more or less immediately washed away by the ending. The ending itself was an extremely disappointing Deus Ex style “make 1 of 3 choices at the very end” thing that paid no regard to whatever work and decisions you had done in the entire game building up to it. That’s funny in a stupid game about Superman like Mass Effect but much less funny in this much more sophisticated and better written game. Plus the walls of the penultimate room, which is like the most amazing find of this archaeologist’s life, are COVERED in ancient script, and you have no prompt to read or translate it?? Baffling decisions here.
I checked a couple of guides afterward just to confirm that I did indeed find every dig site and deduce all of the broad historical currents in the game. There’s a new game+ option that apparently gives you longer inscriptions (oh joy) so that you confirm more vocabulary, but what for? I discovered everything I wanted and adequately resolved all the mysteries.
So yeah, 8/10, and if you doubled the art budget it’d be a 9; it’d take a lot more work and a sort of tectonic shift to move the deeper issues I have with the game over to something I thought was truly impeccable. But still, wonderful and a game basically everyone should play, or at least anyone with any interest in adventure games.
