Heaven's Vault

Heaven’s Vault is a science fiction adventure game in which you decipher an ancient language in order to understand the past. The main character is an archaeologist, sailing around a nebula in search of artifacts from a long-lost civilization and working out the meanings of the glyphs scattered among the ruins. The language-learning mechanics are complemented by a rich plot, intricate worldbuilding, and an innovative approach to game dialogues.

The world of Heaven’s Vault is a spacefaring civilization with a Middle Eastern-inspired aesthetic. This civilization is descended from an ancient empire that fell hundreds of years ago, taking most of its history and its technology with it—including its language. Your character, Aliya, is hired by a university’s archaeology department to search for the ruins of this empire, learn its language, and piece together what ultimately happened to it.

The ciphering mechanics in the game are designed to emulate the learning of a foreign language without too much difficulty or grind. When translating fragments of ancient text, you’re provided with a small set of English words, and you’re asked to match each set of glyphs with one of these words. Inspired by Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs, the glyphs present associative behavior: combining the symbols for “new” and “person” will tell you how to write “child”.

Heaven’s Vault won’t validate your translation of a word at the very first attempt. You’ll need to confirm the translation of each word in two different contexts for the game to approve the match and add it to your dictionary. The word banks are rather small, so it’s perfectly possible to complete the game by trial and error. However, the language is robustly designed, so linguistics-inclined players should still find plenty of depth in figuring out root words and inflections. And once you’ve completed your playthrough, you can keep your dictionary and enter a New Game+ mode, which contains more detailed, harder versions of the texts to translate.

Despite the interplanetary setting, the game is as much driven by fantasy as it is by science fiction. Aliya travels from moon to moon by navigating cosmic rivers of aether on a small wooden sky-ship, and she’s assigned a part-holographic robot sidekick by the university. The sailing sequences are frequent and slow-paced; you can skip them, but then you forgo the chance to find optional artifacts floating in space. Still, the cloudy pastels of the nebula are beautiful and impressive, as are the cities and worn desert ruins on the moons. While the environments are 3D, the characters themselves are 2D, with a wide range of hand-drawn poses shown from every angle.

The cast of characters is quite large, and their relationships with Aliya are influenced by the dialogue choices you make. This system is powered by Ink, the studio’s popular branching narrative tool, which enables complex yet seamless choices. These conversations take place with no gameplay interruption, and combined with the nonlinear plot progression, the dialogues feel dynamic and meaningful. The story is so rich that it was eventually released as a two-volume novel. The world of Heaven’s Vault is not just derelict ruins—it’s bustling with activity, and the final mystery you unlock has implications for both past and future.

This description was written by Gwen C. Katz and edited by Oriane Tury.